DREAM ACT STATISTICS FROM MPI

FROM THE NATIONAL IMMIGRATION LAW CENTER
DREAM ACT STATISTICS FROM MPI


The following backgrounder by the Migration Policy Institute provides the most complete statistics available about who would benefit from the DREAM Act. The full report is available here.
New Estimates of Unauthorized Youth Eligible for Legal Status under the DREAM Act1
This backgrounder by the Migration Policy Institute discusses the major features of the DREAM Act and provides MPI's estimates of the number of young unauthorized persons likely to be eligible for immigration relief if the DREAM Act were to become law.
Highlights
The DREAM Act, incorporated into the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 (S.2611), offers unauthorized youth a path to conditional legal status if they arrived in the United States before age 16, have been in the country for five continuous years, and have graduated from high school or obtained a GED. Conditional legal residents who attend college or join the military within the six years of their conditional status will become eligible for permanent legal status in a "bargain" that is unprecedented in the history of US immigration policy because legal status has never before been conditioned on young adults' educational and military choices.
The law's enactment would immediately make 360,000 unauthorized high school graduates aged 18 to 24 eligible for conditional legal status. We estimate that of the 360,000 young people aged 18 to 24 immediately eligible for the conditional status under the DREAM Act; about 50,000 are currently enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States and thus are likely to be eligible for adjustment to permanent status. We also estimate that for a variety of reasons about 10 percent of conditional legal residents (or 31,000 persons) would not convert from conditional to permanent legal status. Thus, if the act is signed into law in 2006, about 279,000 unauthorized youth would be newly eligible persons for college enrollment or the US military.
We also estimate that about 715,000 unauthorized youth between ages 5 and 17 would become eligible for conditional and then permanent legal status under the proposed legislation sometime in the future.
With comprehensive immigration reform legislation deferred, the framers might consider expanding the number of pathways to permanent status to include such vocationally oriented programs as Job Corps, Department of Labor-certified apprenticeships, and selected non-degree programs offered by proprietary post-secondary schools. These programs could help meet economic demands for non-college educated but technically trained labor.