In late December, when most of us were at home with our families sharing in the post-holiday glow, Maria and Ester Ramirez had to leave the United States and return to Mexico after living here for almost a year.

The two sisters and their younger siblings attended Durham schools. Their father was a construction worker, their mother a homemaker. The family left to avoid deportation after a plea to extend their legal stay in the United States was denied.

Many folks at the University are unaware of the growing Hispanic community in the Triangle area. These immigrants come to the United States to work and to find a better quality of life than is available to them in Latin America.

Those in Durham are not migrants; they are urban dwellers, committed to hard work and education for their children. They are a curious mix of documented and undocumented immigrants, with varying nations of origin.

In many cases American construction and landscaping firms recruit in Mexico and its neighboring countries, luring young Latino men with the promise of higher wages and better living conditions.

Several University facilities, including the glossy new Sanford Institute of Public Policy, have been built by the hands of Hispanic construction crews. In east Durham, the wives and children of these young workers struggle to create healthy lives in this land of the free. It is a close knit community.

These families, much like our own immigrant forebears, do not have an easy road. The Latino population in North Carolina is a relatively new phenomenon, having exploded in only the last three to five years, and the state lags far behind Texas, Florida and California in its response to Spanish-speaking residents.

Social services such as health care, food stamps and emergency assistance are almost impossible for Spanish speakers to access--forms are available only in English, and Durham county provides no translators.

Latino families lucky enough to stumble upon the Hispanic Center on Liberty Street may find a Spanish-speaking volunteer who is willing to translate for them in government offices, but that assistance is by no means adequate for their needs.

School is a nightmare for the children. Most have been here a year or less and cannot understand the English that is spoken by their teachers and classmates. There is an English as a Second Language(ESL) program in the Durham Public Schools, but it is minimal. In most cases, teachers do not speak Spanish and have no way of gauging how much of the material these students are comprehending. Frustrated, the Latino students huddle together in the hallways between classes, speaking rapid Spanish as the school officials wonder why they don't try harder to assimilate.

Recently, both state and national politicians have proposed solutions to this problem, ranging from ignoring Hispanic immigrants to deporting them. California voters passed Proposition 187 in November--if this law were to survive the test of the courts, it would prohibit undocumented immigrants from participating in government-funded programs. This means that many pregnant immigrant women could not receive health care, and many immigrant children could not attend public school.

In his State of the Union address last Tuesday night, President Clinton proposed a federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants, stating that even a "nation of immigrants" could not tolerate abuse of immigration law.

What has happened to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses"? In elementary school we were taught to believe that America was a land of opportunity, a country founded as a haven for the persecuted and sustained as a refuge for people of other continents, languages, and cultures.

When my great-grandfather came to this country to escape the tyranny of the Russian tsar in 1914, he wrote that in America, he was free. Free to live, free to get an education, free to pursue his dreams. In 1914, what he said was true. But in 1995, does a bright, young, hard-working individual from another country still have a chance at fulfilling the American dream?

Neither I, nor others who sympathize with the plight of freshly-arrived Latinos in this country, would advocate unlimited acceptance of new immigrants to the United States. But immigration must be limited before people arrive in the United States, not after they are already here holding jobs and attending school.

Denying services to undocumented individuals only exacerbates the problem, creating an underclass without the means to educate themselves or keep themselves healthy. And deportation, uprooting families who in many cases were brought here by American businesses, is nothing less than inhumane.

Maria and Ester Ramirez studied hard, trying to learn English and adapt to life in the United States. Their family came in hopes of economic stability that they could not find at home. They should not have been forced to leave.

Melynn Glusman, Trinity '94, is a University employee.