Two pieces of federal legislation that could usher in significant changes on some campuses, the DREAM Act and a repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, will be put to a vote Saturday.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and ROTC
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is likely to be repealed with four Republican senators (Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins) pledged to vote on the standalone bill.
A repeal of DADT could begin an ensuing repeal of the decades old ban on ROTC programs at a number of top U.S. universities. Four Ivy League schools — Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Brown — as well as a handful of other elite universities, like Stanford, do not currently have ROTC programs on campus.
Harvard president Drew Faust has said that upon the repeal of DADT, the school will “fully and formally” restore ROTC.
“I want to be the president of Harvard who sees the end of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ because I want to be able to take the steps to ensure that any and every Harvard student can make the honorable and admirable choice to commit him or herself to our nation’s defense,” Faust said at the event where Adm. Mike Mullen spoke.
Largely Vietnam-era policies at the outset, in recent years, DADT has become the centerpiece of the universities’ opposition to on-campus ROTC programs because it conflicts with many anti-discrimination university policies.
At Stanford, an on campus student debate is already raging. Despite non-committal statements on a potential return of ROTC, the Stanford administration has used discretionary spending to pay for ROTC student transportation to their regional programs at Santa Clara, San Jose State and Cal-Berkeley.
Columbia’s position is unchanged on the matter beyond a 2008 statement by President Lee Bollinger, which discusses DADT, but also financial resources and academic concerns. Columbia, however, recently had their first military flag ceremony in over 40 years on Veterans Day.
“It is by no means clear that the military services want to return,” said Allan Silver in September, a professor emeritus of sociology at Columbia. Silver was one of 20 professors who signed a petition to bring ROTC back to the school.
“They have budgetary problems, especially with the high cost of ROTC fellowships at Ivy institutions,” he said. “Some in the services nurse grudges from the Vietnam period and are culturally more comfortable elsewhere.”
DREAM Act
Although the DREAM Act passed last week in the House, the Senate is less likely to pass the bill, which would allow the children of illegal immigrants not born in this country a path to legal citizenship.
At the time it was scheduled for a vote last week, DREAM was likely to fail, without the necessary coalition of conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans.
Students across the country have been rallying recently in support of the DREAM Act with hunger strikes in San Antonio and student senate resolutions—but opponents of the legislation have been loud as well.
“I think this is a matter of national survival,” said William Gheen, President of ALI-PAC (Americans for Legal Immigration), an organization opposing the bill that would provide permanent residency to undocumented immigrants for attending an institution of higher education.
The DREAM Act would allow illegal aliens who were brought to the US before the age of 16 to apply for citizenship, on the condition that they attend college or serve in the military for at least two years. There are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. Estimates on how many would qualify for citizenship under the DREAM Act range from 1.3 to 2.1 million.
The Congressional Budget Office reported that the current version of the bill would reduce the deficit by $1.4 billion, assuming these students went on to get jobs and pay taxes.
The Center for Immigration Studies, however, has estimated DREAM would cost taxpayers $6.2 billion a year, based on a number of factors, but particularly the cost of higher education — a core element of the bill.
The latest version of the bill, the fifth, introduced a number of compromises in an attempt to win back support from centrists including barring illegal immigrants from receiving in-state tuition, dropping the eligibility from age 34 to age 29, and limiting the ability of DREAM applicants to sponsor family members’ legal immigration.
The bill’s struggles are a setback for the Obama administration, which has spent the past weeks expressing their support for the bill.
“It fits into the larger strategy of immigration enforcement,” said Sec. of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano in a conference call with journalists on Dec. 2, “as it will complement enforcement resources of removing dangerous criminals and help the Department of Homeland Security do its job enforcing laws.” Napolitano called DREAM a “priority for the administration.”
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