Below is a video created by Lena Kahn, a Muslim filmmaker who presented her current film about Muslims in the US called “The Tiger Hunter” at the Las Cruces Film Festival yesterday. One might say this YouTube contributes to arguments why universal education is a great policy to continue in the US, among other timely considerations.
Lena Khan graduated summa cum laude and received undergraduate degrees at the University of California, Los Angeles in political science and history, after which she went on to graduate from the prestigious UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.
We live in a period where US ideals are threatened, such as what the Statue of Liberty stands for regarding immigration, or that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Both the P, and VP of PSA are the grandkids of immigrants, who were, at one point in the process, just one more alien hoping to get through to US citizenship.
Various immigrant groups have been attacked over the course of American history, from Chinese to Italians to Irish to Polish etc. It was thought that stereotypes of those groups applied to everyone in the group, whereas, it was then, as now, only a tiny minority of, say, mafiosos.
The American ideals extend to the public schools, where universal education is considered a right of all Americans. Are kids American if their parents are US Citizens though Muslims formerly from certain Muslim majority countries? Yes, no doubt. What if their parents are undocumented, but they were born in the US. Yes again, such children are lawful American citizens and qualify for universal education.
But what if kids came to the US with undocumented parents, and what of the undocumented parents themselves? Presumably any security questions can be reasonably addressed, and after they are, those who have lived peaceful and productive lives here, and their children, can be accommodated with some legal status that allows them to continue in the US.
Presumably, in addition some future pathway for those could be carved out to US citizenship. Such would match what has been, since our country’s founding, the ideal we strive to live up to, whatever challenges it sometimes presents.
This is Lena Kahn.
