Here's an unintentionally ironic one - the New
Yorker has run a profile of
a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, describing the hanky-filled
moment when President Trump ended the executive order-based program and passed
the matter back to Congress. In the midst of this supposed purpose, theNew
Yorker slyly, incidentally, tried to showcase the young man as a
model American, passing him off as not a product of the down-and-out culture,
which is where most DREAMers emerge from, but as an overachiever more typical
of the upper classes, and like the same upper classes, is now just selflessly
trying to 'give back' to his community. What we're supposed to take from that
is that allDREAMers are similarly overachieving.
The
reality about DACA recipients in the statistics tells a different story: DACA
recipients in fact lag behind the general population as underachievers with
higher-than-average college
dropout rates (which incidentally is often a sign of non-merit-based
affirmative action privileges).
The
young man featured in the profile casually discloses how his illegal status as
a Honduran in Tennessee had brought him a Google ambassadorship, a
congressional internship, and teaching posts, plus free college
tuition. In addition, he just happened to have the cash to apply to 27
colleges. Hardscrabble he was not.
Never
mind that the list of fancy elite opportunities he's had thrown at him came at
the expense of some American citizen. Do most legal Americans get free rides
through college, emerging without a dime in debt, as he did because he was
illegal? Do most legal Americans have the cash to apply to 27 colleges, or have
the wherewithal to get their fees waived? Do most Americans get congressional
internships or Google ambassadorships? Not exactly.
No,
you have to be an illegal to get these things. And it's telling that his
'contributions' to society were pretty much showered honors, not the hard work
of building a better mousetrap, which is something that could give him the cash
to apply for legal residence as millions of law-abiding immigrants do. For him,
it was much easier than that: he got his laurels by pleasing the powers that
be. And that calls attention to the agenda of corporate America and the
Washington swamp, to put a showcase DREAMER up on a pedestal in the hopes of
portraying all DACA recipients as similarly overachieving, and thus, forcing
President Trump or Congress into restoring the program. The establishment wants
and needs someone exotic to honor such as this young man, much as the rich of
Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic loved the exoticism of the Black Panthers and feted
them at cocktail parties.
From
the young man's point of view, being an illegal has got to beat getting legal
any day of the week.
