Support the DREAM Act – Give Students an Equal Opportunity to Succeed

by DreamActivist

Published January 12, 2009 @ 07:19AM PT

[Editor's note: This is a guest post by Dream ACTivist. It's a pleasure to feature this post to support a worthy cause: the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act or, writ short, the DREAM Act. Dave Bennion has endorsed the act on the Change.org Immigration blog, and has featured several must-read posts by guest-blogger "undocumenteds" telling their stories as well; you can see them all here. -- Clay.]

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"Because what happens at home, you bring to your life at school, and you can't separate that…"

Current U.S. immigration laws currently seek to deport award-winning young student artists like Meynardo Garcia, keep aspiring artists like Moreno in the closet, render teenagers with perfectly 'legal' parents stateless, and close the doors of opportunity to countless others right after high school simply because these students don't have a 9-digit number and a Green card. They were brought to the United States by their parents without proper legal channels and have grown up American, want to go to college and contribute to society but are unable to do so due to legal status. The only way for most of them to adjust their status—get in line—is through the DREAM Act.

The problems caused by lack of legal status do not start after high school but from a young age. Undocumented students often worry about their parents being deported, their inability to go to college often hampers their academic achievements in school. In fact, without a foreseeable future, many undocumented immigrant youth are more susceptible to drop out of school before finishing high school. If there are no opportunities for a child after high school, how does one expect that child to be motivated to continue their education? Once they realize that all doors and windows of opportunity are closed to them, undocumented students find themselves stuck in neutral: unable to move forward of their own volition and too often reminded of the past that created the situation.

In an unreleased study of the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, high school dropout rates for California (a state that provides in-state tuition to undocumented students in college) and North Carolina (a state that bans undocumented students from attending college) were compared and the numbers hardly surprising: high school graduation rates for immigrant students, especially Latinos, had increased in California despite cutbacks in education whereas the reverse was true in North Carolina. Clearly, providing opportunities for higher education is one way of ensuring that we do not create a permanent underclass of uneducated immigrant youth in our country.

Harsh punitive immigration laws that do not address the broken immigration system are damaging to the educational environment of both documented and undocumented youth. In the climate of fear promoted by ICE raids and the 287(g) program where local enforcement starts carrying out federal immigration law, immigrant families often withdraw their children from school. One prominent example is the Postville raids last year when certain immigrant students were reported missing from schools because their parents had been detained or deported.

The DREAM Act is a small step towards acknowledging the aspirations and achievements of students without legal status in this country. It hinges on the fact that undocumented youth are not to blame for the alleged transgressions of their parents and should not be denied the right to attend colleges. Moreover, it does not involved handouts or financial aid—simply an opportunity for youth to adjust their residency.

We have invested in these students from K-12. Let us reap our investment by at least giving these students the right to legalize and contribute to the only home they know. To squander this potential would be a great waste indeed.

Please take a minute to vote for the DREAM Act and give these teens a chance.

[Editor's note: The DREAM Act, as of this posting, is currently in 11th Place and needs 45 more votes to be part of the final 10 ideas presented at our Ideas for Change event in Washington, DC. Click below to add your vote, if you're so moved.]

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Dream ACTivist: an MA-educated undocumented LGBT student and blogger working for our D.R.E.A.Ms  Add me as a friend to get updates on more DREAM-Act alerts and actions or see our twitter at http://twitter.com/DREAMAct.  Feel free to get in touch with me directly - admin@dreamactivist.org.

Image by Moreno, an undocumented DREAM Activist.