Maya Brandon | A time to DREAM big and make action

Picture yourself, when you filled out your application to Penn. Maybe you thought you wouldn’t get in, but at least you knew you would attend college.

That’s not a reality for 65,000 students in the country. As children of illegal immigrants brought to the states by their parents, they’ve grown up on the same diet of trans-fat-filled snack foods and cheesy pop culture as you. Maybe they were on the debate team or the cheerleading squad with you. But now that they’re college-aged, their undocumented status — they don’t have a Social Security card — means that, many times, they can’t attend an American institution of higher education.

At an event last Tuesday night hosted by MEChA, a Mexican-American student group, David Bennion, a Nationalities Service Center attorney, brought this issue home by speaking to an audience of mostly Penn students about something that’s become a ray of hope for these students: the aptly named DREAM Act.

If passed, the bipartisan DREAM Act would make citizenship possible by tying the attainment of a Green card to the completion of a degree. “Many of them [DREAM Act-eligible students] would be model citizens, given the chance, but the government is intent on deporting them regardless of their contributions to their families and communities — even those who came to this country as infants,” Bennion said.

Walter Lara was only three years old when he came here. Twenty years later he had to pay for his parents’ actions: He was jailed and scheduled to be deported. His friend, Maria Lacayo, a 2005 Penn graduate and current community-service advisor, was able to get his deportation postponed.

This wasn’t the first time Lara had a setback because of his immigration status. When applying to college, the University of Central Florida wouldn’t take the high-honors student because of his immigration status. He attended community college instead.

Many undocumented students opt for community college too, typically for financial reasons. While 10 states grant undocumented students in-state tuition, the rest (including Pennsylvania) don’t, and these students are ineligible for federal financial aid. Try paying full sticker price, then.

At Penn, students’ legal statuses aren’t a financial issue. According to Bill Schilling, director of Student Financial Services, “When we make our decisions, we know citizen status [international or not], but we don’t know anything beyond that.”

And while College sophomore and MEChA member Claudia Henriquez notes that the “Penn campus is not really focused on the DREAM Act,” the issue has caught on at peer institutions. Brown president Ruth Simmons, Stanford president John Hennessy and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust have endorsed the Act. According to Harvard senior Melissa Tran, president of Harvard’s Act on a Dream Chapter, members of the club brought undocumented Harvard students to meet with Faust throughout fall 2008. Unsatisfied with the results of the discussions, the club hosted Immigration Awareness Week, raising awareness of the issue all across the Cambridge campus. Eventually, a petition started by the club received enough attention that Faust endorsed the DREAM Act.

I hate to admit it, but even though this weekend Harvard showed us that they don’t have the right stuff to beat Quakers on the football field, they’re running loops around us with their DREAM Act-ivism.

After Tuesday’s meeting, though, I started to think that there’s still time for a comeback. Bennion advised, “The more local that you get, the more effective that you can be.”

So … it’ll mean convincing the rest of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation to co-sponsor the Act, linking up with our pro-immigrant mayor, and yeah, starting right here on campus and having a few heart to hearts with Amy. This is an issue that has a solution that we can all work toward. It’s time to start.

Maya Brandon is a College freshman from West Windsor, NJ. Her e-mail address is brandon@dailypennsylvanian.com

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