It’s another sob story from the ultra-lib San Francisco Chronicle, that has never met a freeloader illegal alien it didn’t like. It ignores the fact that any university slot taken by an illegal alien is one not available for a deserving American student who didn’t break the law.
Let’s examine the Chron’s misplaced sympathy…
Undocumented student scrambles for money, San Francisco Chronicle, October 7, 2010How about getting a J-O-B to earn money for expenses like food? Oh, wait, as an illegal alien, Alejandro can’t work legally. (That includes after graduation as well.)Like most UC Berkeley students, Alejandro Jimenez takes a full load of four courses. But he arranges his schedule as if he were taking a fifth.
He spends the extra time hunting for money.
”It’s incredibly stressful,” said Jimenez, a junior with a double major in anthropology and ethnic studies.
”It’s semester by semester. Day by day. A lot of my food, I get from the food bank. You’ve got to be creative. You’ve got to meet your needs in unconventional ways.”
Not that his majors of anthropology and ethnic studies will make him a desirable job candidate for a normal business.
Jimenez’s needs include about $19,000 a year for tuition, fees, health insurance, housing and books. Toss in food and other basics, and the cost of school approaches his mother’s yearly salary as a teaching assistant in San Jose: $24,000.Getting kicked out of two schools in Los Angeles does not sound like he was misbehaving with harmless kiddie hijinks.Other students might turn for help to the federal Pell Grant or the state’s Cal Grant, or get a job. But without a Social Security card or residence papers, Jimenez qualifies for none of that.
He is among an untold number of college students who at some point slipped into the United States unseen by border guards. Jimenez did it when he was 8 years old.
The boy from Mexico City and his 10-year-old brother posed as the children of a couple visiting the United States in 1995. In reality, the couple were smugglers specializing in the illegal transport of children. Jimenez’s mother, long divorced, awaited them in Los Angeles.
Jimenez grew up in gang-riddled areas of Los Angeles and then San Jose. He didn’t join a gang, but did get kicked out of two high schools for sassing, tagging and cutting.
But he also did his homework.Funny that scam-boy would refer to the concept of justice regarding his situation of attending an elite public university as a lawbreaking foreigner.”My mom always told us that was our only job,” he said. ”Going to school and doing well.”
It’s the directive behind the American dream, repeated at countless dinner tables over countless generations, blind to immigration status.
Yet for Jimenez, the message took years to sink in. He was lucky to get a D in guitar class at De Anza Community College in Cupertino.
Bored, he fled back to Los Angeles. When a friend took him to shows and football games at UCLA, Jimenez was shocked to meet brainy students who were also undocumented.
”I was like, I gotta get in here!” he said.
He returned to De Anza, and this time earned straight A’s.
Both UCLA and UC Berkeley accepted him, and a $5,000 scholarship tipped the balance to Cal. A graduate had offered it to a deserving undocumented student, and Jimenez won.
Gradually, he became aware that students like him were cached in top-tier universities across the country studying to become doctors, lawyers or, like him, a professor. The university collects no figures, but Jimenez believes a few hundred undocumented students are at Berkeley alone.
Today, he spends 40 minutes a day, four days a week hunting for scholarships online.
”My mom made a tremendous sacrifice to come to this country and make sure we had the best education possible,” he said. ”Going to the University of California, in my eyes, does justice to that.”
Below, Alejandro Jimenez has a poster of Che in his dorm room. Why isn’t he attending the University of Havana if he admires Cuban Marxism so much?
