When Oscar Vazquez was 12, his mother smuggled him across the border from Mexico into the US. Vazquez quickly displayed a talent for building things, and in high school he led a group of teenage engineers to a national underwater robotics championship, beating MIT along the way ("La Vida Robot," issue 13.04). Last year, after Vazquez graduated from Arizona State University with "special and unique" honors in mechanical engineering, he asked the federal government to pardon his illegal entry. His request was rejected, and he was barred from entering the US for 10 years. It didn't matter that Vazquez had married an American woman, had an American daughter, and wanted to put his top-notch engineering skills to work in his adopted country.
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