Setting the Agenda: The Dream Act

The DREAM Act has been a top priority for Democratic lawmakers and immigrant advocates in New York for several years, but it has repeatedly failed to gain traction. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who professes his support, has not expended the political capital needed to pass it. Republicans in the state Senate oppose the legislation, and the fact that they just secured an outright majority poses an even bigger hurdle to its passage in the 2015 session.

But backers still insist that the DREAM Act is more than a pipe dream.

Supporters of the bill, which would allow some young undocumented immigrants to qualify for financial aid to attend college in New York, are once again pushing for Cuomo to include it in his executive budget proposal, which could ease its passage.

“The Dream Act is very, very important for us—one of many topics we really need to move forward and press the governor and ensure that this is a top priority for us and happens this year,” Democratic Assemblyman Francisco Moya, a lead sponsor of the measure, said during a City & State TV interview in November. “It’s a matter of having the governor, who’s campaigned very, very hard on this issue, to say, ‘Look, if you really want to see this done, we should now be having the discussion of how much money you’re going to put in the executive budget, and do it as an executive budget item as opposed to a legislative item.’ ”

Moya and other supporters argue that the costs are relatively small— an estimated $25 million a year—and that the investment in a college education for more young New Yorkers would help the state’s economy in the long run.

To qualify, students would have to have earned a high school diploma or a GED in the past five years and apply for legal residency as soon as they are eligible. It would build on a 2002 state law granting in-state tuition rates to undocumented immigrants by making them newly eligible for funding from the state’s Tuition Assistance Program (TAP).

A 2013 report from state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli estimated that 8,300 undocumented undergraduate students were enrolled in public colleges or universities in the state. According to the report, passage of the legislation would add $20 million in additional TAP costs if all the undocumented undergraduates at the City University of New York and the State University of New York were allowed to get financial aid.

Last year, despite pledging his support, Cuomo declined to include the DREAM Act in his budget proposal. Excluding it from the budget and keeping it as a stand-alone measure this year could again spell its demise. The bill has strong support in the Assembly but has stalled in the state Senate, where it was narrowly defeated on a 30–29 vote this past March, just short of the 32 votes needed for passage.

Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos said recently that his conference is “not doing the DREAM Act,” and with even more Republicans in the chamber this year, it is unclear where the votes would come from to pass it. The party in the past signaled its openness to a “Dream Fund” that would rely on private funding for financial aid instead of taxpayer dollars, but Democrats have dismissed that as too limited as a stand-alone measure.

State Sen. Jose Peralta, the lead Senate sponsor, said that despite the Democratic losses at the polls this fall, there are still at least 30 senators who support the DREAM Act, with the election of Jesse Hamilton to a vacant seat in Brooklyn and Marc Panepinto’s defeat of Republican state Sen. Mark Grisanti canceling out the losses by Democratic state Sens. Cecilia Tkaczyk and Terry Gipson. (State Sen. Ted O’Brien, a third incumbent Democrat who lost his seat, voted against the bill.) If at least two Republican senators— such as Phil Boyle and Kemp Hannon, who conspicuously missed the 2014 vote—were to cross the aisle, there would be enough support to get to the 32 votes needed.

“We were counting on a couple of Republican votes last year that didn’t materialize,” Peralta said. “But then again, this is an off-election year, and Republicans are going to probably look at this as an opportunity, if this were to come to the floor.”

And of course, there’s always a chance that the DREAM Act could slip through in a flurry of late-session deal-making, but it is unclear what Democrats could offer in a trade.

For now, the top priority for supporters is getting it in the governor’s budget proposal.

“The conversation is not about convincing the senators,” Moya said. “The conversation is about getting the $25 million in the budget.”