Dreamers deferred.

• Author: Luzer, Daniel
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE - Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

"... such District (not exceeding ten Miles Square) ... [shall] become the Seat of the Government of the United States" THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES

The Obama administration is trying to help immigrant students brought here illegally as kids get into college. GOP-controlled states have other ideas.

Moises Serrano is twenty-three years old. He came to the United States from Mexico with his migrant laborer parents when he was eighteen months old. He speaks English without an accent and graduated at the top of his high school class in 2007. He has big plans for his life: he wants to attend the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to study journalism. To get there, he's more than happy to start out at a less-expensive community college.

But he's also undocumented. That means, according to North Carolina law, that to attend public college he must pay out-of-state tuition rates that would cost him eight times more than if he were considered a resident. Even at a community college, that works out to $700 to $800 a class, which he says is "just unaffordable." And so Serrano, who graduated from high school with a 3.8 grade point average, works at a clothing store in a mall in Winston-Salem.

Serrano is exactly the kind of young person--hardworking, full of promise--that immigration reform advocates had in mind when, a decade ago, they began lobbying for the passage of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for undocumented young people who went to college or served in the military (also known as "DREAMers"). But in 2010, in a dramatic vote, the DREAM Act failed, largely due to the changing views of many former supporters in the Republican Party, like Arizona Senator John McCain, who were facing reelection.

Two years later, President Barack Obama, frustrated with the GOP and eager to win the Latino vote for his reelection, took matters into his own hands. Using his executive power, he instructed the federal government to allow law-abiding young people who arrived illegally in the United States before their sixteenth birthday to apply for permits that protect them from being deported for two years, with a renewal option at the end of that period. This new program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, was a stopgap, a way of helping an especially sympathetic group of undocumented immigrants until Congress could pass comprehensive immigration reform...