His 5-year-old sister, not to be outdone, dug inside her bag and produced a purple Tootsie Pop. "I got a sucker," she said, smiling.
I had just met two rather savvy U.S. citizens, both children having been born on American soil to undocumented parents. They have every right of any American, including, eventually, the right to vote.
We met last Saturday, at a wildly successful event organized by the Utah Office of Hispanic Affairs. The Latino Community Education Fair was the first time the state agency, with help from several community partners, had offered information on educational opportunities in one central place for Latinos living along the Wasatch Front.
On an unseasonably warm day, when they might have been worshipping the blue sky outside, hundreds of people showed up at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in West Valley City. It took only an hour for the overflow parking lot to fill. Inside, participants gathered information from Utah colleges and universities, technical institutes, ESL and literacy programs. Workshops offered tips for non-English speaking parents in navigating the school system on behalf of their children.
One young mother, Delphina Florez of West Valley City, told me through a translator she came "for information to help my children. I want to help them in school."
And isn't that the one, solid, unifying bond among all loving parents, ethnic markers be hanged: That our children have a better world than we did. Everywhere I looked, parents were proving that sentiment. Picking up brochures, sitting through workshops, they want their children to succeed.
Somehow, though, thought for that next generation slipped right past the Legislature. In their rush to do something - anything - to address illegal immigration in Utah, Republican lawmakers rallied behind a spate of ugly bills to hamper undocumented immigrants' access to driver licenses. Instead, they will be issued a color-coded card with the words "FOR DRIVING PRIVILEGES ONLY - NOT VALID FOR IDENTIFICATION."
Mind you, none of it was to ease racial profiling, or to reinforce a whole tier of second-class citizens we are happy to have scrub our toilets and bus our tables so long as they don't try to open a bank account or sneak past an election judge.
A recent state audit turned up 383 people thought to be undocumented who had registered to vote last year, and 14 actually voted, said the bill's House sponsor, Rep. Becky Lockhart, R-Provo. Fine. Her party's efforts will, maybe, keep a few hundred illegals from slipping their noses under the tent.
But our GOP lawmakers (no Democrats voted in favor), motivated as they often are to fix quickly and let someone else worry about tomorrow, messed up. It seems they haven't quite figured out the state's greatest wedge issue. Not Mormon vs. non-Mormon. Not gay vs. straight. Not even roads against schools.
It's the growing power of the Latino population, stupid. Already, people with brown skin make up between 25 and 30 percent of Salt Lake City's population, and those numbers are pushing beyond the capital city limits.
It isn't the undocumented workers driving to their lousy minimum wage jobs our dear Legislature needs to fret about. It's their children - huge numbers of them born in this country. Someday, as children always do, they will grow up. They will look around at how the first tier treated their parents, scratching out a living below.
And they will vote. It's their right, and it's their tomorrow.
hmullen@sltrib.com
