It could have been an electrifyingly theatrical moment at last night’s meeting of the Culver City Democratic Club when member Hank Shapiro asked for the floor.
Seated in the front row with his wife, Mim, the widely known Blair Hills activist, Mr. Shapiro had announced moments earlier that, within days, they would be celebrating the 64th anniversary of their 1946 wedding.
The news carried a pleasant, indisputably sedentary tone. Presumably that would be his final verbal appearance of the evening.
And Now for the Program
Shortly, the featured speaker, Cyndi Bendezu, project director of UCLA’s downtown Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, specializing in undocumented young people, was introduced. Without pausing, and she deftly dove into the No.1 subject animating Americans, immigration and undocumented immigrants.
In part because until recently she was one of them, the Peruvian-born Ms. Bendezu spoke with extraordinary mastery and eloquent passion on an insoluble conundrum facing thousands of college-age students:
Even though they have lived in this country virtually all of their lives, they are unable to obtain rudimentary paper certification of their status as Americans — read: the requisite Social Security cards — because the family members who brought them here as infants were and are undocumented.
(The key term in the above sentence is “virtually.” This means the frustrated young people in question were not born here but, rather, arrived with relatives at a tiny age or an age before they had a choice. Ms. Bendezu, for example, was 4 years old when she escaped Lima, with her mother. Fearful of political torture, they escaped to America, where her father awaited them.)
Social Security cards, as every young person in modern America realizes, represent the gateway document to obtaining the groundwork paper 99 percent of residents take for granted, starting with a driver’s license.
Without a Social Security card, however, students/prospective students also are ineligible, Ms. Bendezu noted, for any of the fiscal accoutrements that have become a standard part of many students’ portfolio.
Even though America is their only form of identity as home, she said, they are not valid residents in the view of the government.
“I have seen students with perfect GPAs who are dropping their plans for college,” she said, “because they are undocumented. They can’t qualify for a Social Security card, and all the necessary papers that it would bring. Worse, they cannot even get real jobs (because a Social Security card is a condition of hiring). What are they to do?”
Using the pronouns “we” and “they” almost interchangeably, Ms. Benedezu, who works daily with undocumented students, said:
“We are human, too, citizens of this country in every way, except on paper.”
Further, they feel hamstrung without an alternative, noting that you cannot walk into the nearest CVS store and order a Social Security card.
The adroit Ms. Bendezu, who is in her mid-20s, is preparing for graduate school where she will study education policy. She sounded very much like the victimized thousands of her peers whose resumé resembles hers.
Los Angeles is the only home she has known, South Gate to be precise. “I would feel like a foreigner in the country where I was born,” Ms. Bendezu said.
She said that the marooned flood of undocumented peers of hers, and their families, hope that pending federal legislation known as the Dream Act — which she emphasized is merely a first sep — will begin to liberate and legitimize many of the undocumented school-age young people.
Potentially one of the few slender threads to citizenship, the Dream Act holds that young persons who have come to America by the age of 16 may be placed on a citizenship track by entering either college or the military.
But Ms. Bendezu fretted.
“College or military? That does not provide many options,” she said. “What about the many who want to enter the trades? What is their choice?”
A Critic’s Turn
Returning to the aforementioned Mr. Shapiro, during the question-and-answer portion, he left his seat and stood near the table where Ms. Benedezu was speaking.
He had no intention of being other than candid — after prefacing his remarks.
“First, I respect what you are doing and where you are,” said Mr. Shaprio, implying that a thundercloud was about to strike.
“I tell you that,” he said gently, “because the next part of my speech is not complimentary.”
Mr. Shapiro spoke without guile or drama.
“I have just been raised, I have been trained, I have lived my life saying that illegal immigrants are illegal, and we shouldn’t give them any benefits. They didn’t apply to enter our country. Therefore, they just walked across the border. And so that part of me is still there, that illegal immigrants are illegal.
“Yet, I respect you. You’ve got training and you are doing some very fine things (at the labor center) with undocumented persons. I have very mixed feelings about people who come here illegally.”
A scene that could have turned explosive was immediately defused by the adroit, calm Ms.Bendezu.
“I totally understand where you are coming from,” she said, convincingly, and turned to the next question, which was friendly.
