Geez, that’s a sensationalistic story subject, isn’t it?
Anyway, I spent part of this morning procrastinating…er, catching up on what’s been happening in the outside world over the past few days, and came across this story (subscriber link) in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a 21-year-old classics major at Princeton University, has risen from a childhood in homeless shelters and blighted apartments to maintain a 3.9 grade-point average. He has won prize after prize, often taking twice the typical course load. One faculty member, writing a recommendation, predicted “he will be one of the best classicists to emerge in his generation.”
Mr. Padilla stands out at Princeton for another reason: He’s an illegal immigrant. And two weeks ago, he did something few people in his shoes ever do. He turned himself in.
Mr. Padilla recently won a two-year scholarship to Oxford University in the United Kingdom. But according to longstanding immigration law, if he leaves, he can’t return to the U.S. — his home since the age of 4 — for at least 10 years.
The story goes on to explain Dan-el’s situation. His family came to the U.S. on a visa due to health complications arising from his mother’s pregnancy and diabetes. After his younger brother was born, he needed additional medical treatment, and the family tried to extend its visas…and apparently they fell through the cracks. Father went back to the Dominican Republic to look for work, but mom and the kids stayed in the states to maintain access to medical care for the younger son.
Dan-el grew up homeless or living in slums, but thrived by becoming immersed in books. With help from a mentor who encountered him reading a book on Napoleon while in a shelter, he first got into a private school in New York, and then in to Princeton.
Now that he’s wrapping up his degree, he’s facing a challenge — he can’t go to grad school because of his status not permitting him to work. If he leaves to study at Oxford, he will likely be prevented from returning to visit his mother and brother for 10 years. He could marry a citizen and gain normalized status that way, but the WSJ article makes him out as an honest kind of guy who won’t participate in a sham marriage.
(The article doesn’t mention the possibility that his mother and brother could leave the country too, and avoid the 10-year-separation issue….but somehow I suspect that would also not be viewed as a viable option.)
So, he’s turned himself in to Immigration, and is undergoing the legal process to have his old tourist visa reinstated as a student visa, due to extenuating circumstances.
I’ve written previously that I am a fan of the idea of addressing the illegal immigration issue with the three-pronged approach of locking down security on the border, normalizing the status of undocumented folks in the country already, and creating a more normalized process to satisfy demand for labor and interest for folks to immigrate to meet that demand.
However, when talking about general ideas…its sometimes easy to loose sight of the stories of some of the folks that such ideas would affect. That makes the Journal article a pretty good read.