Carmina
Immigrant Students Kept Waiting
On Wednesday the Senate voted to kill debate of the Dream Act on the Senate floor. The Dream Act would grant provisional legal status to undocumented high school students and enable them to attend college.
Quentin Taran-tantrum on Philippine Airlines
Apparently, renowned filmmaker Quentin Tarantino hasn't got anything better to do with his time than harass unassuming Philippine Airlines' flight attendants. The New York Post reports that the director, who has a reputation for public brawls, caused a scene on a flight from the Philippines to LAX last week. Supposedly, Quentin had an injured back, was sitting in a wheelchair, and was downright cranky. According to the Post, he didn't want to sit in his first class seat but wanted to sit on the floor or in a flight attendant's seat instead. When his demands were rebuffed, he made a poor stewardess cry. A Philippine politician flying business class had to actually get up and tell Quentin to calm himself down. So far the Philippine government hasn't taken any steps to ban Tarantino from ever entering the Philippines like they did to Claire Danes,… but don't expect to any Tarantino flicks to be shown on any Philippine Airlines flights in the near future.
Many Dreams of Higher Education Deferred
Image from Korean Resource Center
In the recent debate over immigration reform there was a lot of talk about the need for humane legislation for immigrant workers and families, but not enough discussion about how immigration reform would benefit undocumented students.
Immigrant students who are undocumented face big time barriers to higher education. The LA Times reported that every year, 50,000-60,000 undocumented students graduate from high school after having lived in this country for at least five years. And that’s just the reported number! Forty percent of those undocumented students live in California.
There are a whole lot of Asian students that are undocumented too, but you wouldn’t know from how the media has focused most of its attention on Latino immigrants. According to the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium Asians make up over 1 million undocumented immigrants. One out of five Korean Americans are undocumented.