Dear Future President,
Many immigrants are thought of as wetbacks, gangster, Mojado, and Beaner. These terms only encourage prejudice, hatred, and division for immigrants. This system of oppression can be noticed more within our school systems. Many immigrant students have to deal with many racial slurs and that helps to create many limitations for them. These limitations are also due to financial issues and legal status.
Much of the time immigrant students do not want to further their education as others look down upon as dumb or ignorant. Experiencing this oppression first hand when I was younger, I can relate to what these students have to go through. Coming from a different country and learning a totally different language is not the easiest thing to do. For example, teachers often look at immigrant students as slackers for sometimes not doing their homework, but instead don’t take the time to realize what obstacles they have to face. This lack of encourage by peers discourages immigrant students to want to further their education. According to the Huffington Post, most of hispanic population is roughly 14.5 million that is about 38 percent of the population, but 11 percent of Latino adults have received a bachelor’s degree, compared to 48 percent of Asians and 39 percent of whites. Not only are these students not getting the right education, but the Huffington Post reports that Latinos are lacking their ethnic counterparts in terms of having the classes they need to be eligible for college. This is not do to that fact Hispanics are lazy and don’t want to succeed, but instead the school system has made it harder for them to successful. Many teacher are just not informed about how immigrant students might be limited. For example, does the teacher ever take time to think that maybe a reason a student wasn’t able to do a online homework assignment wasn’t because they were lazy, but they simply didn’t have access to the internet.
Instead of looking down upon immigrant students, teachers and others should be encouraging them to succeed in life. For examples, they should be informed more about theses struggles that immigrant students have to go through, so they don’t assume that every latino is just a lazy, gangster, or even a wetback. Another solution to help these students is creating resources center specifically designed to help guide them in the right direction.