UK Guardian: Fixing this US immigration policy folly (in support of the Dream Act)

[pampango]

José Godínez-Samperio, top of his class at law school, yet barred
from practising in Florida – because of his immigration status.

José Godínez-Samperio graduated top of his class at the Florida State college of law. He's charming, clever, industrious – an all-American kid. But unlike the 2000 or so other newly-minted lawyers who passed the Florida bar exam in 2011, he has not been granted a license to practice. José Godínez-Samperio is undocumented.

His mother and father brought him to the US in 1996. They entered legally on a tourist visa, then overstayed, settling outside Tampa. They had been professional people back in Mexico, a dentist and a veterinarian, but that didn't mean they earned enough to feed their family. Godínez-Samperio says his parents were "escaping economic disaster". He was nine years old.

Godínez-Samperio learned English in a year and became an honors student, an Eagle Scout, valedictorian of his high school and winner of a scholarship to study anthropology at university. Unlike his colleagues, who liked to kick back with a few beers at the local dive, he spent weekends reading.

You would think (hope, even) that though it's an election year, the untenable position in which talented young people such as Vargas, Garcia and Godínez-Samperio find themselves might spur a grown-up conversation ...

Alas, you would be disappointed. The right continues to raise the Spanish-speaking spectre of "an invasion force from Mexico that'll take over the country", as one radio demagogue put it, never mind that illegal immigration has been in decline for the last couple of years, and deportations in the Obama administration have increased. Trumped-up fears of brown hordes taking our jobs and indoctrinating our children in the revolutionary ways of Emiliano Zapata, Hugo Chávez and Che Guevara are bread and butter to the Republican party, especially its Tea Party tendency.

Arizona shut down its multicultural education program on the grounds that it was insufficiently celebratory of white Anglophone greatness; Arizona, Georgia and Alabama passed despotic new immigration laws. In Georgia, vegetables rot in the fields for want of farmworkers to pick them. And in Alabama, the police have bravely contributed to the crackdown on an undesirable alien when visiting the Mercedes-Benz plant outside Tuscaloosa.

To rump nativists, César Vargas, Sergio Garcia, and José Godínez-Samperio aren't American, either. Nor are they courageous young people you'd think the nation would be glad to claim. William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, fussed to National Public Radio that in trying to obtain his law license, Godínez-Samperio is just another "illegal immigrant" getting "in Americans' faces all over the place, saying, 'I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, and you're not going to stop me' – much like the Dream Act amnesty kids in the streets blocking traffic."

Damn those visa-less teens, lobbying to stay in the only country they've ever known!

Rubio's Tea Party supporters insist that if you're undocumented, you're in violation of American law and should, as Romney says, "self-deport". But sometimes, the law is truly an ass. The United States has a long history of lousy laws, from ... the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which said that helping slaves escape was the same as transporting stolen property to the toxic plethora of Jim Crow legislation. Rosa Parks broke the law when she refused to sit in the back of that Montgomery bus in 1955. Sometimes, you have to break the law to make better law. Illegal isn't always immoral.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/22/fixing-immigration-policy-folly