Livin' La Vida Robot!

Four Phoenix teenagers won the national underwater-bot competition hosted at UC Santa Barbara last year. The story of how and why is, on the personal side, very interesting. The thing I can't get away from, that is touched on briefly at the end of the piece, is the fact that all four are Mexican illegals.

Lorenzo the mechanic, Cristian the resident 'genius', Oscar the leader and tether-man Luis all attend(ed) Carl Hayden Community High School in West Phoenix. It's a 50-50 toss up as to whether Oscar and Lorenzo who have already graduated and Cristian and Luis behind them will ever attend college in the US as a result of their undocumented status:

They hope to see all four kids go to college before they quit teaching, which means they're likely to keep working for a long time. Since the teenagers are undocumented, they don't qualify for federal loans. And though they've lived in Arizona for an average of 11 years, they would still have to pay out-of-state tuition, which can be as much as three times the in-state cost. They can't afford it.

This story brought me back to President Bush's near-forgotten immigration reform plan. My understanding of the President's idea, while admittedly limited, was that he desires a way to incorporate people hiding below the surface into the US economy via something similar to the European worker visa. And what does this have to do with the likes of Lorenzo, Cristian, Oscar and Luis?

Well, these four illegal immigrants won this competition besting the likes of a 12-person MIT team with 6 ocean-engineering students, 4 mechanical engineers, 2 computer science guys and sponsors. That's a lot of human capital packed into four young Mexican teenagers. The question is, and there is no way to quantify this near-adequately, but how much human capital are we not utilizing by locking people out of the system?

There's no easy answer to the question.