Antimigrant critics should meet with my remarkable students from LA Hey

By Glen Sachs, special for Calmatters

This comment was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

“Where are the others?” As about 400 high school graduates stood behind us, ready to go to the pitch last week, teachers were exploring the crowd with disappointment, as we realized that some families were missing.

It is not difficult to understand why.

Approximately a quarter of all students In Los Angeles, Unified School District has no legal status. The learning body in our school consists almost entirely of immigrants, many of them do not have citizenship or have parents and relatives who are not documented.

Out, School Police patrol to guard Against the potential raid of immigration and customs application. There were rumors that a school about four miles would be directed. The day earlier, district officers decided that this year the graduation would be aired on Zoom.

For many parents, immigrants are the day of graduation, the culmination of decades of victim, and many have caught the threat of ice raid and have come anyway. Others, perhaps wisely, decided to look from home.

They deserved better.

While President Trump He says he defends Los Angeles from “foreign invasion”, the only invasion we see is the one he leads. Unfortunately, many Americans cheer him up and force him immigrants, Angelos and Californians. I may be naive, but I believe that if they could see these families and their struggles closely, they would change their views.

At my school, we do not see a dystopia of violators of the law and freelwood. We see a often heroic generation of immigrant parents who work hard to secure their children while sending money for money to family members in their local countries. We see students who (usually) are a pleasure to teach, and parents who are grateful to the teachers.

When I looked at the names in the graduation program, there were so many stories that I would like to hear: as a student in my grade of the Government of the AP, who has been working on the weekends for the business of his family from a young age, but made it a UCLA of scholarships; The girl who has been confronted with homelessness this year; The boy with training problems that was moving through my AP class thanks to such an obsessive effort that his friends would annoy him. He received “A” that some of the students plow it did not.

Many students have excruciating, horrific stories about how they got here – stories that are almost never voluntary.

Like the girl growing up in an apartment complex in San Salvador, where, after the girls turned a certain age, they were obliged to become a “girlfriend” of a member of any gang controlled this area. They came for her when she was 14, but she was ready, shooting a gang member, and then got out of the country. She migrates through Guatemala and Mexico, desperate to find her father in Los Angeles.

She told me this story on the night of a teacher as the tears struck in their father’s eyes. She touches watching their loving, long-standing argument-she wants her to run and eventually take over the small business she has built, but she instead wants to become an artist.

To this day, she does not know if the gang member has shot or died.

At the graduation ceremony, our director asked all who would join the armed forces to stand up and be recognized. These bright, hardworking young people are a wind for the military. If middle -class were born, most would have gone to college. Instead, they are often registered, most often in Marines, for the economic opportunity-the so-called “economic project”. Also, one of the benefits of participation is that they can help family members Correct your immigration statusS

A student in Salvadoran who came to this country less than four years ago, knowing that little English managed to get “A” in my class AP. Sometimes he came before school to seek help by splitting through the latest immigration document he received. Usually, whatever I read did not provide much encouragement.

He won admission to a school at the University of California, where he will study biomedical engineering. Perhaps one day it will help to develop a medicine that will benefit some of the people who do not want it here.

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.