Activists across the country rallied on Tuesday in a day of support for the Dream Act, the long-languishing bill that would open a path to legalization for young people and may finally come up for a vote in the next several days.
And even though the votes of most of the New York congressional delegation are no longer in doubt — nearly all seem poised to support the bill — civic leaders, immigration advocates and students in New York City contributed their voices to the national rallying cry.
At a midday press conference at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, representatives from the business, advocacy, educational, religious and public sectors urged Congress to pass the bill, which would offer legal status to illegal immigrant students who were brought to the United States as children.
The speakers repeatedly cited the economic imperatives of the bill’s passage — to the city as well as the country.
“In today’s global economy, we simply cannot afford to chase homegrown talent out of our country,” said Fatima Shama, the city’s commissioner of immigrant affairs.
Kathryn Wylde, chief of the Partnership for New York City, a coalition of the city’s 200 top executives, said that New York business leaders were “100 percent behind passage” of the bill.
“The Dream Act is so critical to our economic future,” she said.
Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in an interview that the diverse, bipartisan New York alliance that has formed in support of the Dream Act could stand as an example for the rest of the country in the debate surrounding comprehensive immigration reform.
“I feel like we’re modeling the kind of coalition that we need on the national level, the kind of trust and working relationships that we have among different sectors that are commonly perceived to have conflicting interests,” she said.
Elsewhere in New York, activists were working phone banks and swamping Congressional offices in New York and Washington, D.C. with appeals to pass the bill.
New York’s two senators and all but a handful of its House representatives have signaled their intent to support the bill. So New York activists were focusing their phone lobby efforts on the few Congressional delegates who had not clearly indicated their intent.
In another action scheduled for Tuesday, groups of young immigrants planned to rally at subway stations along the No. 7 train line during rush hour.