Still Pushing for DREAM
WASHINGTON -- The timing couldn’t have been much better for a group of scholars and administrators advocating for a pipeline to legal status for undocumented college students to meet here.
Less than a week ago, Arizona’s governor signed into law a controversial measure taking aim at illegal immigrants, drawing ire from President Obama and some members of Congress. This week, news reports have suggested that Congressional Democrats are pushing ahead to take up immigration reform legislation, which would most likely include measures aimed at putting students who spend at least two years in college on a path to permanent residency.
It was with this sense that such change might finally be in the offing, after close to a decade of false starts, that the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good, based at the University of Michigan, and the Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance convened for “Challenges and Opportunities: Future Pathways Towards Immigration and Higher Education,” a three-day conference designed to build support for policies aimed at helping college students who are also undocumented residents of the United States.
Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, said that expanding and ensuring access for immigrants is a key part of his organization’s “big goal,” for 60 percent of Americans to have degrees or credentials by 2025. “We will certainly fail to reach that big goal if we don’t see these students as essential to our efforts,” he said.
“Education empowers immigrants, and we must ensure that that power is turned on,” he said. “Economic growth is reliant on influxes of