I was a stand-in, but my tears were as salty as a real mother’s, my heart as full of pride and love, when the name “Janina Sofia Rodriguez” was called out to receive a degree from City University in the Theater at Madison Square Garden last week.

Janina’s real mom, and her dad and sister and brother, are living from day to day, at home in Venezuela. Here in New York, Janina supports herself and sends them enough to make ends meet, most of the time. Without her help, they might be homeless.

In the U.S., Janina has become an entrepreneur, as well as an honor student. When I retired in 2002, she took over the pre-school enrichment program that I had built over 12 years. With determination and a gifted ability to relate to young children, her program has flourished. She thinks I gave her something valuable, but she doesn’t realize that she gave me a little bit of immortality when she adopted my “Treehouse” and made it her own.

When she finishes her studies (she is now enrolled at Hunter College for her Bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Education) she will be deported to Venezuela where she will be lucky to be employed at all. This, we are told, will make our country safer and stronger.

When asked, more than half the graduates of Borough of Manhattan Community College raised their hands to signify they were the first in their family to have attended college. Many of them are recent immigrants. These are the people who hope to staff our businesses, teach our children, take care of our parents and ourselves as we age. They would fix our computers, work at our television stations, and at least one of them hopes to go on to a degree in comparative literature and teach at the college level herself one day.

The class valedictorian at Friday’s ceremony was Anastasiya Purlo, a Russian émigré, who had to learn to navigate a foreign culture, as well as a new bureaucracy, without the benefit of family support, in order to achieve her goals. Like Janina, she was also graduating without the benefit of a mother’s embrace. Her family stayed behind in Russia when Anastasiya emigrated.

Whether the Immigration and Naturalization Service will take her 4.0-grade-point average into account when considering her application for citizenship is doubtful. Anyway, these days it takes thousands of dollars just to get turned down. But our country will be safer and stronger without people like Anastasiya and Janina, I am told.

Next week I’ll attend my own daughter’s graduation, from eighth grade. Hers is the class that was welcomed to middle school by the destruction of the World Trade Center nearby. When the school was taken over for use as an emergency command center, the entire student body was shipped uptown for the first five months of sixth grade.

Their yearbook theme is “superheroes” and in it they are each depicted as their own self-imagined superhero. It is a fitting theme for these young veterans of the first war of the 21st century. Although many of them have stable homes, middle-class family incomes, and the birthright of American citizenship, they will need all the heroism they can muster for the future. They already met their first test, in September, 2001, when their sense of permanence was forever altered.

In my daughter’s class, there are first-generation Americans and children from Iran and Israel, India and Japan. Citizens or not, they are all as American as my daughter, having spent most of their formative years in the U.S. I wonder what will they think of their adopted country if they are no longer wanted when their studies are done? I wonder how we will be safer and stronger when we turn them out?