Qurshidah Binti Numl Amin, who graduated from high school a few weeks ago in Denver, is not your typical grad.
She came to Denver in 2012 when she was 19. Before that, she had lived most of her life as a refugee with her family in Malaysia after fleeing Burma.
Refugee life was hard. She and her siblings weren’t allowed to go to school and rarely went outside. “A whole year might go by before we could go out of the house,” she said.
But her father’s life was even harder, she’ll tell you. He was a Burmese refugee tortured by the ruling government in Kachin state for his religious beliefs. Qurshidah explains how her father’s persecutors would heat large metal objects and then burn him with them. Despite living in Burma for generations, the family fled to Malaysia and eventually the United States.
Qurshidah arrived in the U.S. assuming she wouldn’t be able to graduate from high school, since she had no formal schooling and was older than most high school graduates.
But then she found New America School, a public charter school in Thornton, Lakewood and Aurora serving a unique student population: immigrants, English-language learners, and older students, among other underserved populations.
Earlier this month, Qurshidah earned her high school diploma with a 3.9 GPA and a 98 percent daily attendance record. She wants to be a heart doctor, and will begin classes at the Community College of Denver in August.
While our public school system works for a wide swath of students, it’s not always great at watching out for kids like Qurshidah. Too often, our most vulnerable students — English-language learners, immigrants, poor kids, teenage parents, students with behavioral problems and learning disabilities — fall through the cracks.
I saw this first-hand when I was on the State Board of Education in the early 2000s. Beyond being unfair and unjust, these deficiencies with our public school system also make no economic sense. Our students are the best investment we can make for our country and our future economic prosperity. It’s in our best interest to ensure they’re receiving the best education possible and maximizing their potential.
That’s why I created the New America School — to fill the cracks in our public education system. Over the past decade, the network of charter schools has provided a much-needed lifeline to students like Qurshidah, growing from two campuses serving 427 students to five campuses across two states serving nearly 2,000 students.
While Qurshidah was fortunate to secure refugee status, it’s no surprise that many of the other students we serve don’t have legal status. They’re young and hard-working and want to create a better life for themselves, but by high school, it becomes abundantly clear that being in this country without papers is a constant exercise in fear and anxiety, afraid that at any moment they might be torn away from their family and sent back to a country they barely know. We see these tragedies happen on a near daily basis.
Thankfully, in the absence of congressional action that could permanently remedy the situation, President Obama stepped in. His Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known more widely as DACA, turned three years old last week. And, like the New America School, it’s provided a welcome lifeline to hundreds of thousands of DREAMers across the country — 665,000 to be exact.
In Colorado alone, roughly 17,000 young DREAMers have applied to this program, representing nearly 75 percent of the population that’s eligible for DACA.
Unfortunately, that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the total undocumented population living within our borders, estimated at 11 million. It’s like trying to nurse a gaping wound with a Band-Aid.
Only Congress can treat the gaping wound that is our broken immigration system. Only Congress can pass legislation that will secure our borders, streamline our guest worker system, keep families together, enforce our laws, and create a fair path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented individuals currently residing here.
We’ve made several attempts. Last Congress, the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill with 68 votes. We introduced a similar measure in the House, but it met a slow death by a handful of recalcitrant Republicans opposed to any and all attempts to fix our broken immigration system.
Luckily, we have history on our side, whose arc, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, is long but bends toward justice. While our country’s history hasn’t always reflected our values or our principles, we eventually get there. And I’m confident that with this battle, as with others, we’ll reach a time and place where we can embody those principles that our country was built upon and finally live up to our founding vision as a nation of immigrants.
U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, a Democrat, represents Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District.
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