THE CLASSIC
May/June 2016
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TOWNSEND HARRIS HIGH SCHOOL AT QUEENS COLLEGE
THE CLASSIC THE CLASSIC
May/June 2016 - Volume 32 No. 7
THE RED paint is peeling. The brakes are out of
order. But until he buys himself a Raleigh mountain bike in college years later, the ‘80s Schwinn is sixteen-year-old Rafal Olechowski’s most viable mode of transportation. “It wasn’t as if I could get myself a driver’s license,” he says. Assistant Principal of Humanities Mr. Olechowski has been a legal citizen of the United States for most of his adult life, but his late adolescent years are largely
shadowed by the restrictions he experienced as an undocumented teenager. Immigrating from the small town of Sierpc, Poland just shy of his sixteenth birthday, Mr. Olechowski moved to Rego Park with his sister and her husband, attending Forest Hills High School as a ninth grade ESL student, a year behind peers his age. “I lived [each] day not knowing what would happen [the next]... I was filled with constant anxiety about being found out. I’d wake up in the middle of the night disoriented, in my head going through all the places I could pos-
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sibly be—Queens? Poland? A detention center? Without papers, I could get arrested at any moment.” The National Immigration Law Center defines undocumented citizens as foreign nationals who “enter the U.S. without inspection, fraudulent documents, or legally as nonimmigrants who violate the terms of their statuses by letting their Visas expire.” Mr. Olechowski entered school as a foreign student (F-1), which meant that his student Visa expired after a year. After the twelve-month period elapsed, he remained; his legal residency did not.
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