UCLA Law Grad is a DREAMer

Hector Tobar writes in the LA Times:

Ever since he was 8 years old, Luis Perez has dedicated his life to becoming an American.

In grade school, days after his arrival from Mexico, he studied hard to master English — it quickly displaced Spanish as his dominant language.

As a teenager he woke up every morning at 5:30 a.m. for a long bus trip across the San Fernando Valley, away from a neighborhood with a bad gang problem, to a high school where being a studious young man didn’t make him a social outcast.

When he eventually made it to college, it was the U.S. Constitution that grabbed hold of him, especially the Bill of Rights. And this year, his study of American institutions culminated with his graduation from UCLA School of Law.

Today, at age 29, Luis Perez has the right to call himself a juris doctor. But he can’t yet call himself an American. In fact, because he’s an undocumented immigrant, it will take an act of Congress to change that. But that hasn’t stopped him from trying.

“People used to tell me, ‘Why go to college if you can’t get a real job when you graduate,'” he said. With no right to work for a large company or law firm, it seemed that only jobs in construction and or yardwork awaited him, no matter how educated he was.

“If I had listened to those people, I wouldn’t have done anything with my life,” he told me.

Perez is the first undocumented immigrant to graduate from UCLA’s law school. He’s taking the bar exam in January. “I’m spending my Christmas with the books,” he told me.

If he passes that test, with its questions about contracts, property, torts, criminal law and many other topics, Perez will have completed a most unlikely journey.

His story is at once inspiring and also maddening, because it’s a reminder of just how broken our immigration system is. Among other things, its failed policies have given us hundreds of thousands of people like Perez who are Americans, culturally speaking, but who don’t have the legal right to live here. Read more…

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