And in classrooms, in the dining hall and on the playground, the non-Asian students and their immigrant classmates mingle easily, holding hands, arguing with and teasing one another, seemingly unaware of their racial difference.
Mr. Pfeiffer gives the example of another case of school torture in Lower Saxony a couple of years ago in which mostly German-born boys were beaten up on their birthdays by mostly immigrant classmates.
At Stuyvesant High School, a competitive math-and-science school in Manhattan with a high proportion of first-generation immigrants, my classmates and I would get up every morning to wage battle over a hundredth of a percentile on our grade-point average; my new friends were fighting over so many basis points on their Bloomberg monitors.
They had known each other since the early eighties, when, as recent immigrants, they were classmates at the Wharton School of Business, in Philadelphia.
A native student who has no immigrants in the class obtains up to 15 points more than a student who has half of her classmates from immigrant origin.
The death toll from the Friday disco bombing rose to 20 today, when another victim died, and two 15-year-old girls who had been killed were eulogized in poignant funeral services by their classmates and immigrant relatives.
Many of her classmates were immigrants, decades older, who had endured horrors in faraway places.
Their classmates were other young immigrants who, to varying degrees, were feeling the same sense of dislocation.
Maryland prosecutors announced Friday that they planned to drop charges against two immigrant teens accused of sexually assaulting a classmate in a high school bathroom stall after the case drew outrage from the White House and news outlets across the country.
Mr. Cruz went to high school and made new friends, but as an illegal immigrant, he felt a distance between himself and his classmates.
Nikita Rozenblyum, 17, an immigrant from Belarus who attends Stuyvesant High School and with his classmates was five blocks away when the World Trade Center was attacked, placed sixth for a mathematical study of the properties of knots in non-Euclidean space.
