Beyond FREEDOM: DREAM Act in the News

We return to Tolerance.org for an original article, “Students Push for DREAM Act.” Discrimination against immigrants is nothing new in this country, but in the past at least immigrants could hope to better their lives through the new opportunities they found here. Undocumented immigrants in the 21st century, though, face a whole new version of discrimination. While they’re welcome to live here and scrape by doing menial labor, once they set their sites on college, they’d better be ready and willing to pay up front. And if and when they graduate, they have a whole new set of barriers to overcome in their quests for gainful employment.

The DREAM Act would allow individual states to offer in-state tuition to undocumented students. It also would include a provision allowing these students to become permanent legal residents upon graduation or after serving a certain number of years in the military. With such legal status, these residents would then be more likely to find work with major employers.

The DREAM Act sounds like a reasonable step toward inviting people who’ve lived in the U.S. for most of their lives and attended schools here for many years to become fully vested citizens in the country they love. I’m aware of the criticisms and the commonly held notions that suggest “illegal aliens” are here to take advantage of our generosity and abuse the system, and I disagree. More than 60,000 undocumented students graduate from high schools in the U.S. every year. Surely more than a few feel the same way about their limited choices for continued education as the author of the article, “Undocumented and Stuck in Community College.” This article is posted on New American Media, yet another resource I’ll be revisiting for future posts.