Acting when no one else will
In response to Wednesday’s staff editorial, “Immigration Education,” I agree 100 percent “this state should be a leader in legislation helping immigrant families afford and obtain education.” The key word here is “immigrant” and not “illegal immigrant.” We’re talking about immigrants who come here legally: those who wait in line for their chance to obtain green cards, visas and permanent residency, pay their taxes, etc. Approximately 1 million people immigrate to the United States legally every year, with the largest group coming from Mexico. How would it be fair to the immigrants who come here legally if our nation rewarded “illegals” who came here by breaking the law? How would you feel if you had been waiting for a long time in a line, and a person just cut in front of you?
Is the Arizona law stretching the boundaries of legality? Possibly. Will it lead to racial profiling? Unfortunately, that is likely. But Arizona was forced to act because the federal government seems entirely ineffective in dealing with the problem of illegal immigration. Comprehensive immigration reform will never come when Republicans and Democrats seem afraid of offending the potential “Hispanic vote” or when companies benefit from exploiting cheap labor.
In the best sense, the Arizona law is merely a state government exercising its authority in an attempt to stem the waves of illegal immigrants violating its territorial sovereignty due to the federal government’s unwillingness to act. Even in the worst sense, this law is still no more than doing the right thing in the wrong way.
Lu Chang | junior | government and politics
Much ado about something
“Such welcome and unwelcome things at once, / ‘Tis hard to reconcile.” Macduff’s proclamation in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth echoed my reaction to the news of possible closing of Campus Drive to traffic this summer. I’ve been teaching here since 1974 (Shakespeareans are ageless), and closing Campus Drive has been talked about, even planned, for most of that time. The joke used to be that it would be closed when the university president could find a way to get from his house on the west side of the campus to his office on the east side without using Campus Drive. It is something that should have happened 20 years ago.
But it is impossible not to suspect that this sudden interest in closing Campus Drive is directly related to the university’s fight against routing the Purple Line through the center of the campus, where it would be most used. Our “green” campus is fighting against the greenest long-term solution to some of our traffic and energy problems, just as a previous administration — led by university then-President Wilson Elkins — equally shortsightedly fought a Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority proposal to put a Green Line stop on the campus. I was at a University Senate Executive Committee meeting a couple of years ago at which I watched a senior administrator leap at an offhand comment from a faculty member about the possible effects of the electromagnetism of light-rail trains on some sensitive research experiments. It was clear to me the goal of finding any additional reason to challenge the proposed Purple Line route through the campus was what was driving the sudden and late-discovered interest in sensitive equipment. At least research could be thrown in the way of the Purple Line. “And unwelcome things.”
I predict that if the university’s position on the Purple Line prevails, by 2030 the university will be looked upon as having made yet another huge mistake. Mass transit is and has to be the way of the future. By the time the Purple Line is built — if it ever is — any major institution not close to some form of mass transit is going to be disadvantaged. So much for our oft-boasted strategic advantage of being close to the nation’s capital. Twenty-five years ago, closing Campus Drive to all but emergency and delivery vehicles might have been a good step. But this is 2010, and things have changed. If the administration closes Campus Drive this summer as an experiment, it should be with the goal of learning what other changes it is going to make to smooth things when the Purple Line is built right in the center of Campus Drive. The administration’s position is, to me at least, “hard to reconcile.”
Maynard Mack | English professor
