Artifact Reflection 5

Hi, all.

Watch The Dream is Now.  It's a documentary.  It's on Netflix.  It's only thirty minutes long.  It's very important.

It's also very frustrating.

The Dream is Now follows a group of youthful immigrants as they try and fail to achieve citizenship and their respective dreams.  And after watching it, I have a request - a completely genuine request, believe me.  Could someone please explain to me why we don't want to grant people citizenship?  I ask this question constantly, but no one's ever been able to give me a straight answer.  If these people were citizens, they would pay taxes.  They would go to college.  They would become successful, would be doctors and lawyers and psychologists and teachers and social workers and politicians and they'd join the armed forces and they'd do important, valuable things.  Yes, they'd take up jobs, but they'd do amazing things with those jobs, just as well as - and sometimes even better than - a natural-born citizen ever could, because these people have the drive to achieve their dreams.

And don't tell me our population would rise, because it's already risen.  They're already here.  I just want to know why the kids who know perfect English and take all the hard classes and graduate high school on high honor roll and want to be damn rocket scientists can't just go ahead and do that because no one would give the a social security number.

I hadn't realized it was this bad.

This really bothers me, if you couldn't already tell.  In The Distance Between Us, Reyna doesn't have this problem because she gets a Green Card.  But these people can't; they're as good a proof as any that we need a better system.

Anyway, that's my fifth and final artifact reflection.  I hope you enjoyed it.  Grumble grumble grumble....

-Allie H-S

P.S: School starts tomorrow and the nerves are breaking me apart.  I have never been this anxious before, but apparently all my friends are feeling it, too.  I don't even have a specific thing I'm stressing over.  It's not because I'm going to a new school, like everyone suggests; I've moved up in schools twice before, and I was totally fine.  I think it's just because the last two years of school sucked, honestly.  Treasure Mountain causes lots of social issues - the administration seems to think this is because of bullying, but I've never directly encountered that.  I've only encountered angst and depression and exhaustion.  I mostly blame the building.