Here is today’s editorial from The Cranbury Press and The Princeton Packet:
The send-’em-back-where-they-came-from crowd has a new poster child this week: Princeton University salutatorian Dan-el Padilla Peralta.
Back in April, The Wall Street Journal broke the story that Mr. Padilla, a classics scholar with a 3.9 grade-point average, was facing a dilemma. As the recipient of the university’s prestigious Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship, he had the opportunity to continue his studies at Oxford University in the fall. If he took advantage of this opportunity, however, Mr. Padilla would not be allowed to return to the United States for at least 10 years.
If, on the other hand, he decided to turn Oxford down, Mr. Padilla had no prospects for employment or graduate work in this country. He could not work legally, and no Ph.D. program that requires teaching could support his studies.
Mr. Padilla is what people sympathetic to his circumstances call an undocumented alien. To everyone else, he is, simply, an illegal immigrant. Mr. Padilla’s case drew a fair amount of interest following publication of the Journal article. The Daily Princetonian ran a detailed feature story. U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, whose district includes Princeton, got involved, as did Sens. Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer from New York, where Mr. Padilla grew up. But there was little they could do; Mr. Padilla’s mother, who brought 4-year-old Dan-el with her when she arrived from the Dominican Republic seeking medical treatment for a complicated pregnancy in 1989, had plainly broken the law when she overstayed her visa. Her son, for all his academic success, was in this country illegally.
With this week’s Commencement, Mr. Padilla’s story reached the mainstream media — and the reaction has been depressingly predictable. On TV news channels, on Web logs, on right-wing talk radio, the verdict is in: It doesn’t matter whether he was 4 or 40 when he came here. It doesn’t matter if he could turn out to be the next Einstein. An illegal immigrant is an illegal immigrant — no ifs, and or buts — and he should be deported immediately.
And that’s not the worst of it. He must have lied about his citizenship to get into Princeton. He must have taken the place of a real, honest-to-goodness American citizen when he was accepted. He must have benefited from affirmative action, and his education must have been supported by our tax dollars. The university must have violated the law when it failed to report him to immigration officials.
That none of these accusations happens to be true does not stanch the flow of invective coming from angry xenophobes whose idea of immigration reform is building a wall and throwing everyone who got here, sub rosa, before it was built — regardless of their current circumstances or the conditions under which they arrived — back over it.
The pervasiveness of this attitude is perhaps best described in Mr. Padilla’s own words, in an article he wrote for the Princeton Alumni Weekly:
“The national immigration debate is not merely something I watch on television; it is personal. I had been wary of disclosing the details of my status problem to my friends, in part because I have seen that the words ‘illegal immigrant’ tend to arouse a visceral reaction in people. I have had several conversations over the last four years with students who are vehemently opposed to illegal immigrants — who see them, at best, as an onerous weight on American citizens or perverse riffraff who deserve their place on the margins of society and should be deported as soon as possible.”
We know of no one whose life story does more to shatter this stereotype than Dan-el Padilla Peralta.
The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Hank Kalet 