Immigration Law

VIRGINIA OFFICIALLY MAKES CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS SECOND CLASS CITIZENS

By Greg Siskind

So much for the Equal Protection Clause in the US Constitution. And basic decency. American-born, US citizen children who have spent ever day of their lives in Virginia are not going to be eligible for resident tuition at state universities if they cannot prove their parents are in the US legally. Not kidding.

When I was a young lawyer, I had a case involving a young Kuwaiti-born student who was in the US when the first Gulf War started. He was born in Kuwait. His parents were born in Kuwait. His grandparents moved to Kuwait in the late 1940s from their native Palestine. But they never were able to become Kuwaiti citizens because they were Palestinian and during the Gulf War, the young student, like all other ethnic-Palestinian Kuwaitis, was barred from returning to Kuwait. He became an exile and while we succeeded in getting him asylum status in the US, he ended up having a nervous breakdown due to the stress of having to deal with never being able to go home. That's what we DON'T ever want to happen in this country. Punishing the children for the sins of the parents is un-American (and probably illegal).

Full post as published by Greg Siskind's Blog on March 16, 2008 (boomark / email).