On the first day of President Obama’s new immigration rules for DREAM Act-eligible young people, the nation’s largest teacher’s union is preparing educators to help students who earn a reprieve work their way to permanent residency through schooling.
“What an opportunity this is in this day and age of such divides and bickering back and forth. This is about American ideals, it’s a bipartisan issue. You don’t find many of those,” Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association told TPM. “And for us, the reason it’s so important is because what we’re talking about all of these new Americans and American immigrants, what we’re talking about is an opportunity for education.”
On Wednesday night, Van Roekel will lead a town hall meeting with Hispanic activist groups and NEA members to educate them about how to help DREAM-eligible children of illegal immigrants now eligible to temporarily stay in the country apply for their new status. As the school year begins, the NEA will host a legal clinic with the American Immigration Lawyers Association to “provide legal assistance to DREAM students, their families, and community members in taking advantage of President Obama’s Deferred Action announcement.”
The Republican Party, including Mitt Romney, has strongly objected to the Democratic version of the DREAM Act. (Some tepidly supported Sen. Marco Rubio’s watered-down version of the law, but Rubio abandoned the plan after Obama made his move.) The idea behind the law, allowing children raised in the U.S. as Americans by illegal immigrant parents who brought them here, enjoys broad public support. Romney’s continued promise to veto the version of the DREAM Act approved by the House in 2010 and kicked around Washington for years, along with Romney’s embrace of anti-immigration hardliners, has contributed to his terrible poll numbers with Hispanic voters, immigration advocates say.
The NEA, which endorsed Obama’s reelection bid last year, is fully behind the president’s push for a DREAM Act, as well as his move to circumvent Congress to help it get off the ground. For Van Roekel, helping the DREAMers get their new benefits is a no-brainer.
“We know that it’s going to go right through the classrooms of America,” he said. “We do not want to punish these kids who have done nothing wrong … The idea that we ought to help them deliver the promise of American education and to follow their dreams.”
