From DREAM to Reality: Advocacy, Coalition Building, and Political Pressure in the Recent Past

On September 5, 2012, Benita Veliz rose to address the Democratic National Convention in prime time. Her speech marked a watershed in American history: the first time an undocumented immigrant had ever addressed a political convention. Telling the nation “I’ve had to live almost my entire life knowing I could be deported just because of the way I came here,” Veliz spoke to the fears of an entire generation of young people known as DREAMers who came to the country at an early age, and who live in the U.S. without legal status. Such a speech, and such a public display of undocumented status would have been unthinkable just over a decade before, when the Senate first introduced the DREAM Act, to grant these youth a path to legal status and the American DREAM.

In the 11 years between introduction of the DREAM Act and Veliz’s speech, public and elite views of undocumented status changed dramatically. On the one hand, anti-immigrant activism and conservative groups like the Tea Party stymied any attempt at immigration reform, which culminated in the failure of the DREAM Act to pass Congress in the fall of 2010. On the other hand, the DREAMers themselves began to organize, holding public demonstrations and sit-ins, and learning from other rights movements like that of the LGBT community, to “come out” publicly as undocumented. Their advocacy became a central pressure on the Obama Administration, and was among the main drivers behind the deferred action program to give temporary relief to these young people.

This paper will examine the history of DREAMer advocacy since the new millennium, putting their successes and failures in the context of the history of social movements in the United States, as well as discussing how advocacy and coalition building ultimately shapes policy outcomes.