Active & passive support for DREAM activism
Read more about what active & passive support means, and read more about active & passive support for the 2006 immigration megamarches.
About DREAM activism
The DREAM Act is a conditional immigration bill that would let some undocumented young people who were brought to the US as children be eligible for permanent resident status through attending college or serving in the military, and would give undocumented young people access to student loans to be able to go to college.
DREAM stands for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors and the bill was proposed in its first form in 2001. The DREAM Act has been introduced in many version over the 16 years since then, but none have become law. The closest it ever got to becoming law was in 2010, when the House passed it but it came up 5 votes short of the 60 votes needed in the Senate.
Interwoven with the examples of active and passive support below is the story of how DREAM activists made that close encounter possible and how their activism eventually led Obama to pass DACA – Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals, a two-year renewable ‘deferral of deporation’ program for those who would be eligible to be DREAMers – in 2012.
Note: the data below relates to the period of DREAM activism between 2008 - 2012, specifically. Of course, with the Trump administration’s promises to repeal DACA and the ensuing outrage, there have been many protests and reactions to that – even a new proposal by Democratic lawmakers to pass the DREAM act and a proposal by others to pass a more restrictive version of it (as of 09/27/2017). One of the social movement organizations leading that fight has been Movimiento Cosecha, a Momentum-based organization.
Active support
Youth organizing on the DREAM Act started in the early 2000s, and United We Dream was founded in 2009 by local groups that banded together into a national network after the 2008 election (source).
Check out these maps of the sprouting up of groups doing DREAM-related activism work:
Here are a few key examples of how DREAMers organized events, rallies, and other forms of protest that grew active and passive support in 2010 (from Gettysburg Project):
Trail of Dreams (January 2010). 4 undocumented youth – Felipe Felipe Matos, Gaby Pacheco, Carlos Roa, Juan Rodriguez – walk 1500 miles from Miami to DC to raise awareness about DREAMers.
Coming Out of the Shadows: “Undocumented youth hold the first Coming Out of the Shadows public event on Chicago’s Federal Plaza, where young people lacking legal status declared themselves ‘undocumented and unafraid.’ During the rally, organizer Tania Unzueta, who had previously come out publicly as a lesbian, quoted from Harvey Milk in her remarks. Chicago’s was the first of a number of Coming Out of the Shadows events planned at the Minnesota convening in late 2009. Other similar events in New York, Los Angeles and Massachusetts were held a week later.” (Gettysburg Project).
Sit-ins - including at Senator McCain’s office in Tucson, AZ (May 2010): Four undocumented youth and one ally citizen were arrested at McCain’s office and more sit-ins followed in the summer of 2010 at Democratic senators’ offices.
Other tactics:
Rallies, marches in front of White House
Pray-ins, “study-ins” in congressional cafeterias, DREAM caroling, and more…
Electoral engagement
In interviews, political analyst Andres Ramirez said there was no evidence that DREAMers or DREAM Act movement were able to shift anything electorally. The movement was able to get earned media and engage people in the movement, but that there was no measurable change electorally.
Passive support
Polling
There is not a lot of polling out there that would give us a great look at how the public felt about the DREAM Act before and after the movement began – mostly because it seems that pollsters only started asking questions about it after the major waves of protest in 2010, rather than over the course of its going in-and-out of Congress over the earlier 2000s. Read more about the challenges of public opinion polling.
This poll from June 2010, after half a year of the Trail of DREAMs, sit-ins, and other shows of protest, shows just over 51% of Americans ‘strongly favoring’ the DREAM Act:
Later polling from December 2010 shows polling results after the DREAM Act had passed the House but before it failed in the Senate. 54% of Americans answered they would vote for the DREAM act if they could – divided on partisan lines (Gallup):
Finally, a series of polls from 2012-2013 show support for DACA after it was passed:
June 2012:
July 2012:
September 2012:
January 2013:
