A Child Asks: 'Why Do They Hunt Us?'

Hector was an 11-year-old boy with the hardened demeanor of a man three times his age, and a deep scar six inches long on his cheek. He showed up mid-semester in my middle school classroom, revealing little about himself or where he'd come from.
As a language arts teacher, I tried to match all my students to books they would find interesting. One day I offered Hector a book called, "El Lino," about a Mexican family's journey north across the border. "No thanks, I lived it," he said calmly, taking a book on soccer instead.
On parent teacher conference day, there was another strange clue: He showed up in the care of an elderly gringo, a man who spoke to Hector with gentle affection, but toward whom Hector showed no familial intimacy. I watched Hector, yearning to understand. As a student he was smart, perceptive and hard-working. An imposing presence with his scar and a muscular build, I saw that he played protector to his friends, a boy more likely to stop fights than start them.
Hector finally found his voice in my class on day during a discussion on the upcoming presidential election.
"Why do they hunt us?" he asked plainly.

Pain flooded me when I realized what he meant. I looked at him and the others, the immigrant children in my classroom. They looked back at me for an answer, as they had before when such serious questions had come up. Uneasy almost unanswerable questions like, "Why do people get addicted to drugs?" "Why do parents abandon their children?" and "Why do people kill themselves?"
I tried to explain, when I had no real explanation, why Americans wanting jobs for themselves didn't want an uncontrolled flow of Mexicans coming north, willing to work cheaper than they wanted to work themselves. I ventured into dangerous territory, trying to explain to my multi-cultural classroom of white, black, Hispanic and Asian students, that racism is often rooted in economic fear, fear that someone else will take what you want and need for your own family. These children all knew racism of one sort, and they all knew the fear of want, because poverty was the one thing they had in common. But I don't think they had ever put the two together.
I tell this story now because it frames for me the national debate on immigration. I will always see the debate from the point of view of these children, whose parents endured danger and hardship to bring them here for a better life. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Blyer v Doe that it was in the nation's collective interest that children once here, legally or not, be provided a public education.
It is this ruling that now causes public school systems in Kansas to strain under the costs of escalating enrollments driven upward almost exclusively by immigrant children. It is a legitimate problem for which I have no answer. And left unanswered, I fear it will continue to fuel racist anger toward immigrants who are seen as taking something from 'rightful' Americans.
We must do something, though I know not what.
I am only sure of this:
We must not hunt the children.
We will get back from them whatever we put in. Let us give them the best of America so they can become America's best, as countless immigrants have done before.