STUDENT IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT (SIM)

PRESS STATEMENT

For Immediate Release

Wednesday, Jan. 27^th, 2010

Contact: Jose Palma: (781) 244-3357

Deivid Ribeiro: (508) 292-5163

…And We the Youth Shall Lead Them

Boston, MA – Today, the Joint Committee on Higher Education is holding a hearing on [S. 603] the Equal Access to Higher Education bill that would make immigrant students who grew up in MA pay equal tuition rates as their classmates at MA public colleges, provided they graduated from a MA high school. The following is a statement from the Student Immigrant Movement (SIM):

We are immigrant and citizen students who call Massachusetts home.

The Higher Education Committee hearing is an opportunity for all involved to choose courage, acceptance, and forgiveness in the face of irrational fears and anger, so regardless of what the politicians do with theirs, we students united, will not pass up this opportunity.

We understand and forgive the politicians who vote out of fear of an angry mob. We remain undeterred. We stand up today, to give our testimony, and to bear witness despite the taunts and threats.

We risk getting torn away from our families because all across Massachusetts, our fellow students need us. Our younger brothers and sisters need us.

We have to stand because we represent that bright future for Massachusetts, the only future that lives up to Martin Luther King’s dream; a Commonwealth that will choose to celebrate our diversity than to punish the innocent, a Commonwealth that will value each person for the content of his or her character, not the accident of his or her birthplace.

The politicians may not know or care, but we are driven by the knowledge that there are young immigrant children growing up in almost every town in our state, who will be told by someone in power that their future is foreclosed because they were brought here from somewhere else.

In almost any town in MA today, there’s a girl who may be only 12 years old, and because of what the Education Committee decides today, someone will tell her that her future is foreclosed, that she will have no chance for higher education. She will be told by angry voices on the radio and in the papers that she is somehow less than her friends, less than her classmates. And she will have some choices. She may stop caring about studying, probably drop out at 16, or give up altogether, even contemplate suicide. Or she can choose to ignore what bullying voices say, what some politicians say, what some guidance counselor says, and choose instead to apply herself, choose to study hard, and choose to live with self-respect, driven by nothing but the hope that one day, she will have the opportunity to be treated equally, with dignity, with humanity - an opportunity to pursue her dreams just like her classmates.

We are the next generation and we choose to stand up for all the immigrant youth who need us, and for everyone in Massachusetts who is made to feel that they are somehow less than equal in this land of liberty.