alabama possible from the alabama poverty project

Isabel Rubio

Special to the Mobile Press Register

August 12, 2007

I don’t usually have the task of answering the phone at the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama, since I’m the only non-Spanish-speaker who works there. But for some reason, that task fell to me on a spring day in 2005.

I remember answering the phone and hearing the voice on the other end of the line that belonged to a kid, about 17 years old. His name, I learned, was Jos Luis and he would be graduating from a Shelby County high school that May.

The reason for his call was simple and powerful: He wanted to go to college.

As we talked, I learned that he had come to the United States as a child of 5, with his parents, who had been living in poverty in their native Mexico.

Like so many others, Jos Luis’ mother had taken work cleaning houses for affluent families while his father worked primarily in construction, taking odd jobs for low wages (and for which he often times was not even paid).

We didn’t discuss it, but I guessed his family’s reasons for immigrating included the reason Jos Luis was calling: simply an opportunity for a better way of life through education.

When I inquired about his grades, Jos Luis’s voice was full of accomplishment and pride when he said he was a good student, mostly A’s and B’s. Then, timidly, he admitted to his struggle in chemistry, in which he managed to earn a C.

He told me that he was eager to go to college because he wanted to become a computer engineer. His only hold-up was that he needed to get a Social Security number.

While I could hear his frustration as he spoke about this barrier, his words held no trace of an accent, yet he told me he was fluent in Spanish.

My heart was heavy as he confirmed the barrier that I already suspected existed. For a child like Jos Luis, the opportunity to attend college is slim, regardless of academic achievement.

College is unattainable unless the family can pay the high cost of out of state tuition. And where can a child like Jose Luis, without a Social Security number, find employment upon graduation?

Now that the debate on immigration has screeched to a halt, hung up on border security and what to do with the 12 million or more undocumented immigrants, we are overlooking the true casualties of this debate.

These are the millions of children, born abroad but raised in the United States, fluent in English and their native tongue, hungry for education and opportunity and to whom Mexico is a foreign country.

For those children who have worked hard to achieve academic excellence, overcoming language barriers and lack of parental involvement, the light of hope just got dimmer.

Buried within the hundreds of pages of the immigration legislation was the DREAM Act. If passed, this legislation would allow certain groups of immigrant children who have grown up bilingual and bicultural in America to achieve the American dream of a college education.

Those kids, who have studied hard and stayed out of trouble, would earn the opportunity to not only get a college degree, but become a citizen of this great nation which they call home.

As the executive director of the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama and as a board member with the Alabama Poverty Project, I am deeply troubled by the nearsightedness of our elected officials in not making this connection.

Currently, Alabama has a poverty rate of over 15 percent, with a rate of child poverty at almost 25 percent. We are likely to see that number steadily increase as barriers remain for those bright young adults who graduate from high school and are unable to enter college.

Unfortunately, these same young adults will be forced into low-paying jobs that only perpetuate the cycle of poverty their parents sought so hard to break.

Alabama and our nation are at a crossroads. With the immigration dialogue dead for at least another two years, we will lose the talent of thousands of young adults like Jos Luis by forcing them back into the underclass of our working poor, repeating, not breaking the cycle of poverty, after all the sacrifices made by their parents before them.

As a nation of immigrants with a proud heritage of hard work and self-improvement, we can all agree that this is a national tragedy.

Isabel Rubio is executive director of the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama and serves on the board of directors of the Alabama Poverty Project. Her e-mail address is irubio@hispanicinterest.org.