Riding a Dream to America

With bad news about gangs flooding over us like sewage at a picnic, it’s refreshing to hear a story about a kid who loves school, gets A’s, works part time to support himself and his family, and is dying to go to college. He’s smart, hip, ambitious and a credit to the human race. Then why, I ask you, are we busting our buns to keep him out of the country?

God knows, in a nation where 72% of our students think Bosnia-Herzegovina is a Russian ice skater we need all the bright young people we can get. But the guy I’m talking about is an illegal alien, see, and we can’t have those people running around making us look bad. So out he goes . . . if we catch him.

Call him Rico Valencia. I can’t use his real name because he’d be tracked down and deported on the grounds that he didn’t follow the proper procedure to get here in the first place. If we are anything at all in the good old U.S. of A., we are Proper Procedure. Send me your tired and poor, but make damned sure they fill out the necessary forms.

Rico sneaked into the country in 1989 after making his way up from Guerrero, deep in Mexico’s southwest corner. He had two aims: to further his education and to make enough money to help his parents, who remained in Mexico. Neither opportunity existed in Guerrero.

For a kid of 16 who didn’t speak a word of English, it was an ambitious undertaking. But Rico had a dream, and dreams are the bright stars that light our way to the future.

So he followed his star to L.A., moved in with relatives and enrolled in school.

They asked no questions when he signed up for the 10th grade. It was as simple as taking his place in a classroom and opening his mind to everything they wanted to teach him.

“I love learning,” he said the other day in flawless English. “I would go to school the rest of my life.”

We were in the living room of the house where he lives. He perched on the very edge of the couch, as though at any moment he might be forced to flee into the rain that lashed the windows. The tenuous nature of his existence was a suffocating presence in the room.

Rico learned English so quickly that many suspected he’d been speaking it all his life. In his first semester, he earned straight A’s. In his second semester, straight A’s. In his third, straight A’s. Teachers and counselors raved about him. A superior student, they said. College material.

Rico was shortly listed on the Honor Roll, racking up top grades even while working nights at a fast-food restaurant. When he was graduated last June “with high honors,” his counselor asked what he wanted to do.

It seemed any avenue was open to him. He had an almost perfect grade-point average, slipping into Bs only occasionally, and had graduated third in a class of 440 students.

He told his counselor he wanted to go to college, but admitted for the first time that he was in the country illegally. The counselor promised to help, but the promise, like sweet words in a whorehouse, were quickly forgotten. Rico was on his own again.

He returned to Mexico and applied for a visa to the United States. He was refused because he had violated U.S. law in the first place by entering illegally. An immigration agent told him the only way he’d ever get back into the U.S. was to sneak in again.

“It seemed the world was over for me,” he said as we sat in the living room. “Everyone told me to give up, but I knew if I stayed in Mexico my education would be over. I want a college degree, maybe even a Ph.D., but I will never get it working in Guerrero. How sad.”

Rico did what he had to do. He sneaked over the border again. Then he wrote the school district a letter begging for help in gaining legal status. He stated his case with simple eloquence, then added: “I feel worthless because I know that without an education I will be a nobody. I feel so helpless. . . .”

He lives now like prey at a watering hole, ever on the alert for the movement of a predator on the edge of the jungle . . . in this instance an immigration agent with the necessary forms that will deport him to Mexico.

I talked to immigration authorities later, who said it doesn’t have to be this way. Rico can apply for a student visa and probably be admitted legally. But he fears the word probably and is hesitant to return to Mexico. The border frightens him. Maybe it should.

At best, borders are false barriers to human progress, and the day will come when we will learn to live without them. Meanwhile, bright young people like Rico Valencia will continue to exist in a surreal world of light and shadow, honored for their intelligence but rejected for their birthplace.

How sad.