The story was about Eduardo Lujan-Olivas, a young, ‘undocumented’ student who lost a scholarship right before his classes at Arizona State University were about to start.

As a bilingual teacher, I can’t count how many Eduardos I have taught. These are the undocumented kids who came here as babies or toddlers, who grew up here attending our schools, and who now rest in a scary, legal limbo. Some of these students barely speak Spanish. They never “push 9 for Spanish” and they only go to Spanish-language TV to watch soccer.

Eduardo’s story deserves to be widely shared. ASU pulled his scholarship an hour before class. This a young man who has fought his way to the top during his years in school. He worked part-time to help support his family while waging that fight, too. ‘Dreamer’ crowdfunds tuition after school rescinds $20k scholarship on first day of classes | The Sacramento Bee (sacbee.com)

Our Eduardos live all over America. They include hard-working boys and girls who become medical assistants instead of nurses because they lack that critical social security number, as well as boys and girls who sometimes drop out of school because they do not believe they can succeed educationally or professionally without that number. While knowing no other country than the U.S., many kids are growing up without dreams because their parents, friends, family members, and even educators have shut those dreams down.

“You can’t be a nurse/teacher/police officer/etc. because you do not have a social,” they are told.

I am sympathetic to the many Americans who support enforcing our immigration laws. They are watching their country change around them and that change has happened at lightening speed. But we desperately need to create a rational path to citizenship for our Eduardos and their quasi-American counterparts. These kids and young adults only know America. If we sent them “home” in any spiritual sense, we would be sending them to places like Chicago, Philadelphia, Yakima, Laredo, San Jose, Oxnard, Albuquerque, Elgin, Phoenix, Providence, Allentown, Hartford, Newark, and Las Vegas, among countless other cities and burbs.

All politics aside, these children are America’s children. They are nobody else’s children. They value hard work. A number of their parents work two or more jobs to keep their households afloat. America’s undocumented children deserve a chance to contribute fully to the country they have always called home.

Eduhonesty: Eduardo managed to use crowd funding to raise the money for his education. Achievers achieve. But I thought I’d post this today because many changes have been coming at us quickly. We have left those borders porous for decades in order to get our melons picked and our burgers flipped. The children of the men and women who took advantage of our efforts to keep agricultural and factory costs down should not have to pay the price for policies that almost seem to have been designed to lure their parents across the border.*

We have created an underclass, a legion of second-class citizens in this country. For years now, we have been threatening to send them to places they don’t know, where sometimes they do not even speak the local language. They live under constant threat that their world will be swept out from under them, perhaps as the result of something as small as a traffic stop.

It’s easy to get lost in all the fixes this country needs: better wages, healthcare for all, and fairer funding for schools, among others. But those noncitizen children who are growing up here need help NOW.  Please, reader, consider putting the dreamers at the forefront of your political wish list. Remind the new administration of the old words: EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL.

*In my most cynical moments, I fear that maybe U.S. policies were designed for just that purpose — creating a useful group of indentured servants who could never buy their way free.