What so many of us have come to know and love about Dreamers is that they are truly fearless when it comes to fighting for dignity and respect, especially when it comes to immigrant families. And they are not about to let this anti-immigrant regime hold them back from everything they’ve won so far:
Something surprising happened last month when officials at a little-known program that offers modest college scholarships to undocumented “Dreamers” looked at their application in-box: They were swamped.
In a time of political attacks on illegal immigrants — and raised uncertainty about the status of these Dreamers, who were brought into the U.S. as children — they were expecting just the opposite. “We had expected a chilling effect, with not as many students applying,” said Candy Marshall, president of THEDREAM.US.
Instead of the dip in applications they had expected for the 2017-18 school year, they saw a 40% bump. The hope at the program is that 1,000 of those Dreamers will receive scholarships, bringing the total number of enrolled Dreamers in this program to over 2,500.
“If anti-immigration hard liners thought the Dreamers were going to make it easy to get rid of them by having them ‘self-deport’ to a country they barely know,” notes USA Today, “it would appear they were wrong.”
Yup. “Despite the obstacles,” tweeted Sen. Dick Durbin, “DREAMers continue to thrive in college and beyond.” Here’s Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, which has 45 Dreamers enrolled through the scholarship program and has just accepted 35 more:
“They are a credit to their country,” said McGuire. “These kids grew up thinking they were American. They went to the public schools everyone else did, spoke English like everyone else. Not until their junior or senior year, when their peers were talking about going to college, did these kids hit brick walls.”
When Dreamers are just given the chance, they succeed. In fact, “the college success rate of Dreamers in this program far exceeds the national rate:”
94% of the first wave of Dreamers on these scholarships made it to their sophomore years, and 88% of the second wave. That’s compared to the national average of about 70% for all students — not just low-income, first-generation college students.
One of these Dreamers and scholarship recipients is Luis Ursua Briceno, who came to the U.S. at age 5 and kept his immigration status a secret from his classmates and teachers. “Although he was popular,” notes USA Today, “he never went to private high school parties,” knowing getting in trouble could expose him. “That’s the hardest thing about being a Dreamer,” he said. “No one knew.”
Ursua Brienco was the class salutatorian, which did him little good, given that he couldn’t accept any scholarships. Instead, he worked for a year to afford tuition to a distant community college. One day while watching Univision his mother heard about the scholarship program and encouraged him to apply. He got accepted and is now at Arizona State University in Phoenix studying biochemistry and hoping to be a pharmacist or doctor.
The scholarship program has drawn tens of millions of dollars in support from folks like Mark Zuckerberg and the former publisher of the Washington Post. If you’re a Dreamer interested in applying—or would just like to make a donation to the fund—go to www.thedream.us.