prompt: Briefly discuss a current global issue, indicating why you consider it important and what you suggest should be done to deal with it.
In the United States, a democratic country that boasts its ideals of equal opportunity, thousands of academically competent children are being denied enrollment to state universities each year because of their immigration status.
Luis Montenegro comes from the same impoverished Central American country as I do, he attended the same 8th grade summer engineering program at George Washington University I did and serves as a leader in my AP Environmental Science class. However unlike me, this upcoming fall his dream of pursuing higher education will come to a screeching halt. This is in part due to Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore's 2002 memorandum that urged the state's universities to force students to meet a certain immigration criteria to attend its educational institution, and Luis falls outside this category. Undoubtedly, he has the desire to learn and receive an education that will propel him into the highly competitive workforce of America, but circumstances outside his control will make his future uncertain.
Every year 65,000 undocumented high school students graduate, and some are unjustly barred from some state universities due to an earlier decision by their parents to migrate to this country to mitigate their lives. These students are left paying for a decision not just made by their parents, but by Congress as well. In 1996 Congress, in addition to implementing more austere punitive measures on undocumented persons in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, declared that states were disqualified from granting unlawful denizen "postsecondary education benefit" that they don't offer to U.S. citizens". Consequently low-income students who are allowed to enter universities, but who have parents who are undocumented, have to pay out-of-state tuitions. These higher tuitions present yet another deterrent to students who seek to gain degrees and establish their careers in this country.
I am a supporter of the proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act because I am aware of the power of education to many other immigrants like Luis and myself. The DREAM Act, as it is referred to, allows academically achieving high-school students who came to the Unites States as younger children a permanent-residency for a lapse of six years while they peruse a degree at a college or university. Such non-discriminatory access to higher education will allow children to realize their migratory purpose, to ameliorate their futures in this country of opportunity.
The opposition to this argument functions under the misconception that allowing illegal residents to enter the state universities whilst receiving in-state tuitions will make admissions more competitive and therefore detrimental to their own children's opportunities of entering the same universities. However, these undocumented children are seeking opportunities that will allow them to become full-functioning members of society and which will in turn; reward the community in terms of productivity and quality.
This upcoming fall I hope to attend Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service where I can receive an excellent diplomatic education to tackle on such discriminatory practices that immigrants must endure everyday. I want to take part in an immigration reform movement that would allow such people as Luis Montenegro to fulfill their dream unhindered, just as I have been allowed to.
However, unlike me, Luis will see his dream of pursuing higher education will come to a screeching halt.
This is great!! I agree with your position and hope that the admissions people will agree, too!! You are a good writer and you have a great topic here!
Don't end sentences with prepositions:
I want to take part in an immigration reform movement that would empower such people as Luis Montenegro to fulfill their dream unhindered, just as I have been empowered .
