10 - Voice and Power in the Immigrant Rights Movement  pp. 225-245

Voice and Power in the Immigrant Rights Movement

By Walter J. Nicholls

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On May 17, 2010 four undocumented students and one citizen ally occupied the Arizona office of Senator John McCain. This action was followed by a flurry of occupations, hunger strikes, demonstrations, and marches around the country. The undocumented student activists, or DREAMers as they were known, were seeking support for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act), which would provide undocumented college students the legal right to stay in the country. These events were the culmination of a ten-year struggle to pass this bill. While the DREAM Act failed to muster enough votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, this intensive period marked the emergence of undocumented students as an important component of the immigrant rights movement. The DREAMers captured the inherent injustice of the country’s immigration policy and made changing it a matter of serious public debate. Not only were the president of the United States and the Senate majority leader directly responding to the DREAMers’ arguments, but so too were their most important adversaries. Whereas undocumented students had very little public presence ten years earlier, they had now come to assume a dominant role in the country’s immigrant rights debate. The student activists had achieved an extraordinary voice in the public sphere.

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