As of July 1 next year, just weeks before the start of a new school year, illegal immigrants will be eligible to receive state-funded financial aid in California. The new opportunity has been coined the California Dream Act — Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors — also known as Assembly Bill 131. Acting with unmatched time management abilities, Gov. Jerry Brown waited until the last minute to sign the bill, which was proposed by Assemblyman Gil Cedillo of Los Angeles earlier this year.
Requirements to reap the benefits of the act are simple: Applicants must have attended a California high school for at least three years, graduated from said high school or have received a GED diploma and must show proof they are either actively seeking citizenship or will seek it once they are eligible to do so.
Those seem like some ridiculously easy and unfair requirements compared to the standards needed to be filled by applicants who are already U.S. citizens living in California. Cal Grant — the program the new Dream Act would make undocumented immigrants eligible for — requires traditional applicants to first prove, through the Free Application for Student Aid system, that they are “independent.”
Independent students can be 25 years of age or older, a parent of a child who receives at least half of his or her income, or married. If the student is not considered independent, they must file using their parent’s tax information and come from a poverty-level home based on income. That requirement alone makes a very large portion of financial aid applicants ineligible right off the bat.
The Cal Grant issuance is split into two sections — Cal Grant A and Cal Grant B. Most applicants will receive only one of the sections based on the difference in eligibility requirements. Part A is based entirely on grade point average and financial need, whereas part B considers GPA, the highest level of school completed by the applicant’s parents and marital status. Unmarried applicants will not receive part B, and students with average or less-than-average grades will not receive either portion.
A “Competitive Cal Grant” is money available to students with exceptional need or otherwise special circumstances. These grants will only be available to Dream Act applicants if there is additional funding available after the grants have been awarded.
The other program the Dream Act will make available to non-citizen applicants living in California is the Board of Governors Fee Waiver. The fee waiver allows students of low-income backgrounds to pay little or no money for enrollment in community college, waives health and other service fees and decreases the cost of parking permits. The waiver is based solely on financial necessity, and few other requirements need to be met.
In general, the act is unfair to citizens. Because of the lesser eligibility requirements imposed upon the undocumented applicants, they will be able to garner more funding in a quicker, easier manner with less paperwork to process than resident students. According to the California Department of Finance, about 2,500 students are projected to receive Cal Grants totaling $14.5 million, averaging $5,800 per student. While our state government is struggling to balance a budget, the governor adds more debt to the list. We cannot afford to extend these comforts to people not paying into the funds they are receiving or hoping to receive.
Like simple parenting, rewarding a child for poor behavior is counterproductive. Similarly, rewarding illegal immigrants for successfully defying the system is hardly fair to anyone. I am by no means against immigration, but the “illegal” part of the immigration gives absolutely no means for compensation. Having eager and willing people wanting to come to our free and beautiful country is an honor, but issuing government money from taxpayer dollars to accommodate someone who chose not to immigrate legally is disgraceful. Perhaps allowing additional financial funding to successfully immigrated persons as a reward for coming here with legitimate papers and going through the necessary steps to become a U.S. citizen would be more fair.
Education is vital to anyone’s future. Paying to educate people who cannot work because they do not have a social security number and therefore cannot pay taxes is a backward system with no real benefit. I personally would be more inclined to assist a person openly willing to come to America the “right way” than I would to assist someone who cheated the system long enough to have completed high school without documentation.
GOP Assemblyman Tim Donnelly has a similar view. Donnelly had previously vowed to file a referendum prior to the act being passed, and with a total of 505,000 signatures (5 percent of last year’s gubernatorial votes), the bill could be frozen before being implemented. Donnelly has only 90 days to collect the signatures, but practically before the ink dried from Brown’s signature hitting the bill, he already had 5,000 volunteers ready to collect the community’s John Hancock’s.
“Brown chose to fund illegals’ dreams over funding our schools, pub safety & veterans,” Donnelly tweeted just days after the bill was signed.
Whether the Dream Act is implemented next year or not, in the end someone is going to be left unhappy. But who should be the priority; American citizens or illegal immigrants?
