Immigration and Education: Inextricably Linked

Toward the end of the semester, students can be seen rushing to find their lecturers and professors in the search for retakes and other campus challenges. Most of this activity doubles when graduation time draws near.

The students realize that after all the activity and the training and the relationships with peers, the laughter, the tears and the struggle, most of their lives are going to be run by what happens on those sheets of paper.

If they are part of the institution, they are gripped with the realization that they must submit to its requirements and processes in order to achieve their ends. They are after all getting educated.

In another setting just as intense although often not very regulated, some young business person struggles in the midday sun fabricating pieces of scrap metal into all sorts of products for a vibrant and youthful economy. In the place the instructor, he has a scruffy looking master under whose tutelage he has sat for the past three years doing all sorts of menial tasks and enduring verbal taunts until finally he is given access to his own small forge. He too as has graduate...he too has made it through the sieve. He too like the metal he is working on has come through the fire as gold.

They are both educated one through an institution the other more directly though mentoring. The former lives his life depending on the piece of paper to speak for him while the latter soldiers own, hands blistered by decades of experience.

They are both 'educated' in the full sense of the word although one may be more skilled in knowledge and the other in practice.

This is really what immigration is about too. It seems to have become more about paper work than ethic and 'Americanness'. If we can find a definition that suits the terms we will be halfway there.
In the olden days it seems to have been about the belief in self, and the rejection of absolute monarchism. It rested on the idea of freedom and self-governance. Now it is a fourteen year agreement based loosely on the love of one man for his Rachael but who must labor another seven with Leah.