Editorial:
This Christmas we celebrate the Birth of Christ and the joy of the holiday season, spending time with family and friends, the excitement of the children opening their presents, and this year we optimistically look forward to what appears to be a much better year than the years gone by.
At the same time our Christmas cheer has been tempered following the recent defeat, in the Senate, of the DREAM Act. For the Hispanic community this is a hard pill to swallow. The number one issue according to the Pew Research Institute is education. It is common knowledge that Hispanic children are at the bottom when it comes to education: in testing, in closing the achievement gap, in high school graduate, and in attaining a college degree.
For Hispanics education is the key to our growth and development as we prepare for the future.
In recent years we have seen our educational opportunities dwindle with the elimination of Affirmative Action that has made more difficult for students who are already facing difficult financial and social hurdles, just one more hurdle that they must overcome. The rising cost of going to college also eliminates some students from ever fulfilling their dream of a higher education. Lastly with the drastic budget cuts it is the schools in the minority neighborhoods that suffer the most from these cuts.
What makes this pill even harder to swallow is that it was the Democratic Party that killed this bill and we can start with President Obama.
Obama campaigned for President on the promise to make immigration one of his top priorities that he would address the first year in office. Not only did he not address the issue in his first year but oversaw deportations rising to highest levels ever with nearly 800,000 immigrants deported in his two year administration. This year in his State of the Union speech he all but ignored the immigrant community. And, when Rep. Charles A. Gonzalez (TX) introduced his version of the DREAM Act the Obama administration chose not to support it and instead waited until a later bill was introduced, we are assuming he did not want to make this an issue in the general election.
When the final bill was introduced in the Senate it was too late, the tone for the country had been set with Republicans trouncing the Democrats and 6 Democrats chose to vote against the bill. (A point of clarification, 5 voted against the bill, 1 abstained – the same as a no vote.) The bill lost by 5 votes.
For all intents any immigration reform is dead for the next two years. During this time it is incumbent upon the Hispanic community to continue building on the electoral blocks created so far. As it has been reported Hispanics saved the Democrats bacon in the last election and in California Democrats overwhelmingly supported the Party ticket. As we have often said change will come when we have the power of the vote in our hands. We are not there yet but we are getting closer to achieving this as long as we continue to register and vote.
For now those students who represent our best and brightest, they are neither American nor are they Mexican, in days gone by they would have called themselves Chicanos. Perhaps we, those with the power to vote, need to be more Chicano and less Hispanic!