Political Quotes

“the Presiding Officer is new to the Senate, and we are glad to have him. He will find in the course of his senatorial experience that occasionally good legislative ideas come from unexpected places. Occasionally they come from phone calls to your office, emails, and letters, where people tell their stories, and from those stories you see the need for a new law, a change in policy. That happened to me 13 years ago. A Korean-American mother called my office in Chicago with a problem. Her problem was that her daughter Tereza was about to graduate from high school and had an opportunity to go, on scholarship, to the Manhattan Conservatory of Music in New York. This was a poor family. Mom worked at a dry cleaners. They barely got by. But her daughter had an extraordinary musical talent. She was an accomplished pianist, even as a senior in high school, and this was her chance. As her daughter started to fill out the application form for the Manhattan Conservatory of Music, there was a box that asked her to identify her nationality, her citizenship. She turned to her mom and said: What should I put here? Her mother said: I'm not sure. You see, Tereza Lee was brought to the United States at the age of 2 on a visitor's visa. When the visa expired, her mom, her dad, and she stayed in the United States and did nothing else. Technically Tereza, having lived about 16 years in this country, was just another undocumented kid.…”