2 Honored for Essays on Importance of Immigrants
The American Immigration Lawyer Assn. will honor two Los Angeles elementary school students today for their prize-winning essays on the importance of immigration to America.
Anthony Quintanilla and Melburn Trapp, both 10, will receive $200 and $100, respectively, from the lawyers’ group at an evening ceremony at the Sheraton Grande Hotel downtown. The students, both from Alta Loma Elementary School in the Mid-City area, were the local winners in the nationwide contest.
“Immigrants are important because we can learn many things from them,” Anthony wrote in his essay.
“We get to try a variety of food and we can learn different languages,” Melburn said in an interview.
The purpose of the contest “is to create awareness of the benefits of immigration for the United States economy and society at large,” said Alice Yardum-Hunter, an immigration attorney and one of the contest organizers. “All too often we forget that people like Bob Hope, Elizabeth Arden, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, and E.I. du Pont were all immigrants to the United States.”
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