A Lesson in Courage

On February 14, roughly 250 students from around New Mexico arrived in Santa Fe, the state’s capital. The students were undocumented immigrants. They have less political power than almost any other group in America. They cannot vote. Their parents cannot vote. Most of them don’t even have neighbors or relatives who can vote. In attempting to assert their right to higher education, the students were risking harassment or even deportation. But they came to Santa Fe to tell the state’s legislators their stories and to ask for a chance to earn a college education.

This week, the students won.

In 1996, Congress passed legislation limiting the benefits that states can offer to undocumented immigrants. Congress said that states could no longer offer them in-state tuition rates. For New Mexico’s undocumented immigrants, this meant the cost of higher education had just risen by as much as 400 percent. Immigrants also lost access to scholarships that are available to all New Mexico students who maintain a certain GPA. Working immigrant families found themselves priced out of the market. Their children, who had broken no law, now had no opportunity to get a college education. The rhetoric at the time was that immigrants were leeching off America. But these students weren’t asking for a handout or a chance to “steal” an American job. They wanted an education.

A few years ago, a New Mexico immigrant rights group named Somos Un Pueblo Unido started hearing complaints. The organization prides itself on being responsive, and its members were concerned about the lack of educational opportunities in New Mexico. Students reported getting harassed during midterms at the local community college because they were unable to produce a social security number.

Students graduating from high school learned that they would not have access to the essentially free education that many of their classmates would receive thanks to scholarships. Students were being told that college wasn’t an option because their parents came from another country. Not surprisingly, they were pissed.

Somos started to organize forums where elected officials were invited to hear the stories of immigrant students. It used its relationships with other community groups and the media to pressure elected officials into paying attention. And when officials began to listen, they changed their minds. Pretty soon, Somos had found legislators to introduce legislation that would address their concerns. That’s when they planned their “Immigrant Student Lobby Day.”

There are plenty of reasons Lobby Day could have failed. Students from southern New Mexico were not able to attend because the Immigration and Naturalization Service has a checkpoint on the road to Santa Fe, and students were worried that they might be deported on their way to the statehouse. Some parents, worried about deportation, did not let their children participate in Lobby Day.

But when Lobby Day rolled around, something happened. The best illustration of what happened that day is the story of Roswell Senator Rod Adair. Adair is known as a conservative Republican. Just days before Lobby Day, Adair voted against the immigrant education bill in committee. But after meeting with a group of students from his area, Adair switched his vote. Adair told the Albuquerque Journal, immediately after Lobby Day, “My own constituents convinced me.”

Some Harvard students seem to enjoy having the deck stacked against them. They go out of the way to prove that the other side is too damned rich or strong or unethical. Or they complain that the electorate is too uninformed or uninterested or just plain mean. In both cases they act like it’s us versus them, like some mysterious body (the government or the corporations or the idiot voters) has all the power and we, with all our moral righteousness, just can’t get through.

A few days ago, Noam Chomsky spoke to one of my classes. For those who don’t know him, Noam Chomsky is to foreign policy what Howard Zinn is to U.S. history: an anti-establishment academic who enjoys widespread popularity outside of the Ivory Tower. Chomsky makes some valid criticisms of American policy, but his speech illustrated what is wrong with a certain strand of campus radicalism. In his speech, Chomsky claimed the majority of Americans are to the left of both political parties, the media, and academia. Their preferences are not reflected in public policy decisions because America is a “business run” country; the people’s opinion just doesn’t matter all that much. According to Chomsky, the system was set up to disenfranchise the public, and it continues to dictate public policy despite the efforts of the electorate.

Chomsky’s claim is echoed in the rhetoric of many students. Students complain that “the system” is responsible for the sorry state of our nation. Most people in this country would lose their lunch if they could hear Harvard students bitching about how little power they have, but most days I can listen to this kind of complaining with my lunch safely in my stomach. What struck me when I heard about the Immigrant Student Lobby Day is how wrong we are when we complain about our powerlessness. Every Harvard student has more political power than any of the 250 students who faced deportation to get a higher education. Yet they won. They won without the right to vote. They won without money to donate. They won without famous spokespeople or elite consultants.

There are plenty of reasons to complain about politics, and the radical critics of American government have good points. Money talks. Some politicians are corrupt; some are stupid; some are insane. But the cynics are wrong. “The system” does respond when we speak. If we work hard and work smart we can make change. Money talks because we don’t. Corrupt politicians stay in office because we vote for them. As Harvard students, we represent an elite with more power than most citizens will ever have. We’re not being kept down by the system; we are the system. If 250 undocumented immigrants can fight the status quo and win, so can we.

Sam M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.