Political Quotes

“Mr. President, it was about 10 years ago that I received a call to my office in Chicago from a Korean-American mother who was concerned about her daughter. Her daughter had been brought to the United States at the age of 2, had grown up in the United States, all her brothers and sisters were born here as well, and her daughter had been accepted on a music scholarship. Turns out she was an extraordinarily talented concert pianist. She was graduating from high school and had been accepted at Juilliard School of Music and Manhattan Observatory School of Music, and in filling out the application, there was a question about her daughter's citizenship. Since she brought her daughter here on a visitor's visa at the age of 2 and never filed any papers, she wanted to know her daughter's status. It turns out her daughter's status was very clear. She was undocumented, and the law was also very clear; that this 18-year-old girl who had lived here for 16 years was told she had to leave America. There was no recourse. She was not even being sent back to Korea because her family transited from Korea to Brazil to the United States. They wanted to ship her to Brazil, a country she was not even aware of with a language she did not speak, Portuguese. In that situation, her mother said: What can we do? I checked with the law, and it turned out there was no place to turn. Her daughter was without a country. That is when I introduced the DREAM Act.…”