Dreaming of an education: the immigrant rights movement gears up to pass legalization for undocumented students this year, but the bill has its pitfalls.

Unnoh, an undocumented student who did not want to give her last name, reached senior year of high school before she realized her predicament. She had immigrated legally with her parents from Sierra Leone at age six, but their family's visas expired and they never naturalized. Unnoh grew up as American as the next kid, she thought, until the day her illegal status began to matter.

"I realized I can't work, I can't drive. What can you do if you can't work? If you have no transportation? That limits where you can go, literally and figuratively," she said.

She had been accepted to several four-year colleges, but her family could not afford the $28,000 a year fee for international students. Tuition for in-state students was less than half of that, but Unnoh was not eligible without documentation, nor could she accept state scholarships. Watching her friends go off to college while her future stalled "was beyond depressing, beyond sad."

Unnoh was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown at age 18. Now 21, she has managed to finish two years of community college and transfer to a four-year university in New Jersey, where she studies public policy. Still suffering from health problems, she hesitates to think about what she'll do when school, with its student health insurance, ends and she has to find work without papers.

"Just the fact that I'm becoming educated is enough in itself," she sighed, adding, "These students like me have been raised as Americans, all they lack is the legal documents. I hope people will understand the pain I feel being rejected by a country I've been raised in, by people that I consider myself a part of."

Under current immigration laws, undocumented students have little means to adjust their own legal status and no access to the state and federal higher education benefits offered to their native-born peers. Without financial aid or in-state tuition, financing a college education is almost impossible for these students. In 2002 California and Texas passed in-state tuition bills, and similar efforts are now underway in more than 20 other states.

Meanwhile, a national campaign is mobilizing for the federal DREAM Act, introduced in July 2003 and expected to make its way through Congress this summer. Along with its counterpart in the House (the Student Adjustment Act), DREAM would pave a road to legalization for undocumented students who meet certain requirements as well as allowing them to pay in-state tuition.

"If anybody thinks there can be comprehensive immigration reform without passing the DREAM Act first, they're fooling themselves," says Josh Bernstein of the National Immigration Law Center. "If you want to have comprehensive immigration reform, you've got to have acts like DREAM pass to open up the space, to create a coalition."

But since making it to the Senate Judiciary Committee, DREAM has been tacked with several amendments that undermine its original potential for undocumented students.

One provision, introduced by Senators Diane Feinstein (D-California) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), requires students under DREAM to register with SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System), the "homeland security" initiative to track foreign students which rolled out in 2003.

The original bill was drafted to provide a green card to undocumented students who fulfilled a number of requirements within a six-year period. They had to either graduate from a two-year college or complete two years of a four-year program, serve two years in the military, or volunteer a certain amount of time in community service. During the Senate Judiciary Committee mark-up, the community service option got chopped from the bill--a change which concerns many immigrant advocates because, especially without access to federal Pell grants, "it will be an incentive to draw students into the military instead," according to Claudia Gomez of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

The national United We Dream campaign, which includes more than 80 immigrant and student organizations around the country, is pushing hard this spring to both change the amendments and apply broad-based pressure on the White House and Congress for the bill's passage.

"To overcome the inertia there is a national effort to sign thousands of petitions to Bush, to get him engaged. Once he even winks at it or hints it or sign languages it, then the congressional leaders will take that signal and move it forward," said Jose Quinonez of the Center for Community Change.

The campaign plans to deliver 65,000 petitions--representing the number of undocumented students who graduate from high schools each year--on April 20.

"The main concerns for us are the legislative strategy we have in terms of addressing some of these amendments to improve the bill rather than go through the way it is," Gomez said. "If it doesn't move by late spring, early summer, it will get stuck."

Part of the current strategy involves emphasizing DREAM as an education bill. An education frame also worked well during the campaign to pass in-state tuition in California, according to Maria Blanco of the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights.

"As a result of casting it as an ed bill, it broadened the approach of who we could get to support it," Blanco said. "The issue of education and equal opportunity for kids is still a powerful one, still has a resonance. It feels like an unfair fight to pick on young people trying to get an education."

However, the amendments to DREAM have created some tensions for the campaign. "The D.C. folks are saying DREAM Act students would be difficult to track, but that doesn't deal with the problem that SEVIS causes. And student groups are arguing for the elimination of SEVIS," Gomez said.

Yet the amendments have also revived the mobilization at the base, according to Jane Chung of National Korean American Service and Education Consortium. The process has matured students' understanding of immigration politics, she added.

"Many of the students realize it's a hard walk to get this passed, and they're more motivated now," Chung said. "They are broadening their minds on what immigrant rights really mean, what movement they're really part of. It's not just a road to get their green card."

If they've realized that it will be a long struggle to immigration reform, undocumented students also know they have little time to lose. As they graduate from high school, they are finding that colleges are out of their means, that they cannot receive federal loans or Pell grants, that private charities also refuse them scholarship, and moreover, they will never be able to hold jobs that pay them slightly more than the minimum wage. When they graduate they realize that the rest of their lives may be spent in the permanent shadow of poverty.

"My main objective was to go to medical school. But I couldn't afford the tuition for undergrad anymore. Even to go to medical school, you have to be a legal resident," said Ricardo Leyva, a former student at UC San Diego who has since moved to Tijuana.

Leyva remains active with Coalition of Student Advocates in San Diego, which he founded along with his friend Abdul Aboushadi, an Egyptian undocumented student. On April 17, they marched to present petitions at the federal building in down-town San Diego.

"The movement feeds people into the arena of immigrant rights. It crosses nationality lines, and students are seeing themselves not just as youth of color, or Haitian or Mexican, but immigrants," Gomez said. "A rights-based framework is developing, and all these young leaders are bringing a new dimension to the immigrant rights movement."

Tram Nguyen is editor of ColorLines. Volkan Unsal is a student at Columbia University.