As president of Goshen College, for reasons of faith, conscience and experience, I feel compelled to write in support of the Dream Act. The Times-Union published a story on March 2 in which State Treasurer and U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock was quoted as criticizing U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar for supporting the Dream Act, a bill repeatedly introduced in Congress to provide conditional permanent residency and a legal pathway to citizenship for certain, select, undocumented students.
I know that many Hoosiers support the Dream Act. Like Sen. Lugar, I believe that the young people who would benefit from the Dream Act represent the best of our youth in Indiana and the United States. These young people have succeeded in their studies and have attended and are attending colleges and universities in Indiana and all across this country. They are contributing their talent and are loyal to this country, and most lead exemplary lives.
One such student I knew, graduated with honors from high school, served as a tutor to young children for his whole high school and college life, speaks two languages fluently, and learned a third while double-majoring in physics and mathematics in college. He helped out at home, attended church faithfully and served in various leadership roles on his college campus. He has stayed out of trouble, lived a model life in every way, knows no other home than that of the United States, and is surely a future scientist, astronaut or teacher who would be an outstanding citizen, if only he could. Other young people, just like him, may not even have known that they, through no fault or choice of their own, were not U.S. citizens, believing in the American dream only to discover it is a dream denied. These young people did nothing wrong in action or intent, so the unfair language of "amnesty" does not fit their situation.
I encourage reconsideration of the Dream Act by all who believe that education is the key to a thriving, vibrant country and believe in the highest ideals of a country whose founders declared, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." I also encourage supporting the Dream Act's common-sense approach of finding pathways of hope through the murky waters of immigration reform.
