NAOC > Legislation > DREAM Backgrounder

The Legislation The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act is bipartisan legislation that would permit high school graduates who were brought to the U.S. as children and have lived here for at least five years to apply for temporary legal status. Once approved, these students would be able to make their status permanent by attending college or serving in the military for at least two years. The DREAM Act would also eliminate a federal provision that discourages states from providing in-state tuition to immigrant students.

First introduced in 2001, the DREAM Act was sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Richard Durbin (D-IL) in the 108th Congress (S. 1545). In the House, a similar bill, H.R. 1684 was introduced by Representatives Chris Cannon (R-UT), Howard Berman (D-CA), and Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA). In the 108th Congress, both bills won wide bipartisan support, and the DREAM Act was the only immigration reform proposal reported to the Senate floor. They will both be re-introduced early this year.

The DREAM Act would transform the lives of the affected students and allow the Department of Homeland Security to more appropriately focus its overtaxed enforcement resources. It would also pay fiscal and economic dividends by eliminating severe barriers that keep many talented immigrant youth from completing their education.

It is narrowly tailored in that it would apply only to individuals who have grown up here, can show that they have stayed out of trouble, and have met the universal requirements for high school graduation. About 65,000 such students graduate from high school each year. They include honor roll students, star athletes, talented artists, homecoming queens, and aspiring teachers, doctors, and U.S. soldiers. Many did not even learn of their undocumented status until they applied for college, their first job, or a drivers license.

Under current law, these high school graduates are trapped by circumstances they had no hand in creating. Their immigration status imposes unique barriers to higher education and renders them unable to work legally. They are forced to live under the constant threat of deportation from their homes to foreign countries they can barely recall. In fact, if and when they are caught by immigration authorities, the law makes no distinction between them and those who entered recently as adults. Immigration judges are not permitted to give any consideration whatsoever to their character, their accomplishments, or the desperate pleas for relief by their classmates, teachers, pastors, and others who watched them grow up.

The DREAM Act would address this flaw by providing a mechanism by which these long-time resident students can gradually achieve permanent legal status and eventual citizenship. By enacting the DREAM Act, Congress would legally recognize what is de facto true: these young people belong here. This has become their home.

In addition to injecting a measure of humanity and common sense into our immigration system, the DREAM Act would benefit all of us as taxpayers because it would encourage immigrant youth to remain in school and permit them to plan for a better future. The average college graduate earns about a million dollars more over his or her lifetime than the average high school drop out. As a result, DREAM Act beneficiaries would pay much more taxes over the course of their lifetimes, and cost government less in criminal justice and social services.

Last year, Congress failed to act, and another class of outstanding, law-abiding high school students graduated with no prospects for relief. Some will be removed this year from their homes and sent to countries that are foreign to them. Many others will simply disappear into the underground economy, their aptitude wasted. We must not allow this year?s graduates to face the same fate.