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Peter Schrag: Graduation ’08: A few thoughts for the season
By Peter Schrag - pschrag@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B9Sacramento Bee
According to much conventional wisdom, the nation this spring has been graduating a lost generation – products of schools and colleges that send young men and women off who can't read or do simple math or know the basics of American history. Many, it assumes, couldn't care less about the future of their country...
...look at the list of the 40 high school seniors who were finalists in the highly regarded 2008 Intel Science Talent Search. Each is a student of multiple interests, achievements and talents: championship tennis, debating, the mathematics of origami, robotics, music composition, Carnatic music, Ukrainian cuisine, tutoring Mandarin, gold medal pianist, designer of educational logic games, fundraising for child victims of AIDS in Ghana...
Nearly half appear to be either immigrants or children of recent immigrants: Shivani Sud, Ashok Chandran, Timothy Zuchi Chang, Alexis Marie Mychajliw, Yihe Dong, Herman Gudjonson, Olivia Hu, Alexander Chi-Jan Huang, Clifford Byungho Kim, Chun-Kai Kao, Benjamin Brice Lu, Avanthi Raghavan, Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh, Ayon Sen, Artem Serganov, Hamsa Sridhar, Xiaoyun Yin, Qiaochu Yuan, Xiaomeng Zeng...
More sad still is the story from Fresno earlier this month about 17-year-old Arthur Mkoyan, whose 4-point-plus grade-point average made him the valedictorian at Bullard High School, but who, after 15 years in this country, faces deportation to his native Armenia.
Mkoyan (whose case also is discussed in an editorial on the facing page) was brought here by his parents, who were caught on the wrong side of the Armenian independence movement as the Soviet Union was breaking up. But their pleas for asylum were rejected and this spring their time runs out. Young Mkoyan doesn't know Armenia, speaks very little of the language and has no desire to live there.
Mkoyan is one of the emblems – there are thousands of others – of a self-defeating immigration policy that prefers to deport talented young people at a time when the nation faces a desperate need of skilled workers to replace the millions of baby boomers who are about to retire.
Although Mkoyan, who was accepted to the University of California, Davis, wasn't an academic superstar like the 40 Intel finalists, he had a bright future, both for himself and for the country where he's grown up and been educated. But the stupidity of current immigration law put him into a cruel, senseless situation not of his own making.
Passage of the federal Dream Act last year, which would have put thousands of young men and women on the path to legal status, would probably have allowed him to stay here. But the act was blocked in Congress by immigration absolutists who'd rather punish children for the sins of their parents than cash in on the talent and ambition they represent.
The act, said its opponents, would have taken opportunities from Americans. But any look at the projections for the need for skilled workers in the coming decades and the shortage of able people to fill them will tell you that's baloney...
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