The Free Press, Mankato, MN

News Ticker

Editorials

February 27, 2008

Our View: Immigration not the issue in bus crash

It was an unfortunate contribution to an already awful tragedy when it was revealed that the driver of a vehicle that slammed into a school bus, resulting in the deaths of four children, is an apparent illegal alien.

Added to the grief was anger, fanning an already divisive immigration debate.

Daily since the Feb. 19 accident that happened near the small hamlet of Cottonwood, more information about the 24-year-old woman is learned. An illegal immigrant identified Monday as a Guatemalan, she goes by a false name, and she does not have a valid driver’s license. On Tuesday, it was learned she’d been pulled over on the same highway a month before the accident and her boyfriend, who was driving, was ticketed for driving without a license.

The revelations add more issues to the story, an unwelcome intrusion into the life of a community.

In a town the size of Cottonwood, where everyone knows everyone, it had to be unsettling to grieve for the children and their families while the attention of a nation focused upon them. In the aftermath, residents there were forced to grapple with being asked questions by the media while trying helplessly to make sense of a senseless tragedy. To some, it may have felt as if the children — Reed Stevens, 12, Emilee Olson, 9, and brothers Jesse, and Hunter Javens, ages 13 and 9 respectively — had been transformed into statistics instead of promising young people denied their futures.

Sadly, that is the way it does appear, at times, in a world where news events happen so quickly that most of us have so little time to reflect on them in the personal, human way we all would like to.

As for the woman in the center of the storm, she is now a reference point for those who argue she represents a more compelling argument for the state to seek a more aggressive solution to the illegal immigration problem. The bus incident does serve to remind us that undocumented aliens pose a variety of risks. How many drive without licenses? How do we measure the impact on communities as illegals resort, essentially, to living underground — avoiding contact with authorities, mistrusting them and many of their neighbors to hide their illegal status?

Most do their best to fit in and become valued members of the towns they live in. But as some among them avoid the responsibilities of citizenship (continually aware that they are not, after all, citizens), how do they increase the chance that an incident of the type that occurred near Cottonwood last week, can occur?

These are hard issues to quantify.

Perhaps we should refrain from even attempting to tie the bus-van accident to immigration issues at all. There are enough bad drivers in this state for us to know that they come in all shapes, sizes, nationalities, legal status and levels of sobriety. Bad driving is no respecter of persons, on either the giving or receiving end — as we were reminded again last week.

Text Only | Photo Reprints
Editorials