Since we have to post one of our stories on the blog and tell about our reporting process, I decided to use the state government story I turned in today. It's about the Dream Act. Here it is:
Eric Rodriguez is 22-years-old, and has spent the past three years working various jobs to save enough money to attend a community college. He would have liked to go the University of Minnesota after graduating from high school, but he did not have the money to do that.
That is because Rodriguez, despite living in Minnesota for more than ten years, has to pay out-of-state tuition at Minnesota state schools because he was brought to the United States by his parents without documentation. Rodriguez thinks that is unfair.
“I think it’s unfair because I’ve been here for ten years and can’t get in-state-tuition, but a kid from Iowa only has to live here for a year,� Rodriguez said, referring to the current state requirements for in-state-tuition.
But those requirements might change soon.
Three years after it was first proposed in the legislature, in-state tuition for children of illegal immigrants might become a reality.
The so-called Dream Act would provide in-state tuition rates to children of illegal immigrants who have attended at least three years of high school in Minnesota and are willing to sign an affidavit promising to work toward citizenship. The bill was first proposed by Sen. Sandy Pappas in 2005 after students from Abraham Lincoln High School in St. Paul who were in the same predicament as Rodriguez asked her to help.
“These kids told me, ‘This is Minnesota, this is America, the land of opportunity and education is key,’� Pappas said.
The DFL-controlled Senate passed the bill the last two years, but the Republican-controlled House refused to vote on it. This year, the bill passed through the committee process with relative ease, making it to the Senate floor within two months of its introduction. Before it could be voted on, though, it was attached to the Senate’s Omnibus Higher Education bill, which the Senate passed on March 22 in a 63-2 vote.
The biggest difference this year is that the DFL controls the majority of the House as well. It appears that after three years, the Dream Act is likely to go to Governor Pawlenty, who has vowed to veto the bill.
Mariano Espinoza, Executive Director of the Immigrant Freedom Network, credits the increased support to a three-year campaign to lobby legislators and educate the public.
“It takes years, sometimes, to build the support for a bill, but now we have big support,� Espinoza said.
Part of the strategy, he said has been to enlist support from students like Rodriguez who would be affected by the bill involved. Many students met with their legislators to lobby for the bill and several testified before Senate committees.
“We are trying to get students to be principle actors in this process,� Espinoza said. Once legislators saw the students’ faces and heard their stories, Pappas said, they were ready to support the bill.
“The most important thing in getting support for the Dream Act has been letting legislators hear how this issue is affecting people,� Pappas said.
Despite the efforts of activists like Espinoza and Rodriguez, and the overwhelming support of the legislature, Pawlenty has promised to veto the Dream Act because it amounts to rewarding illegal immigrants. Because the bill is now a part of the omnibus higher education bill, that would mean vetoing all higher education spending and policy passed by the legislature this year. Pawlenty has indicated that he is willing to do just that.
“It looks like the Governor is planning to veto the entire omnibus bill unless we can come up with some sort of deal with him,� Pappas said.
But Espinoza believes that Pawlenty will be unable to stop the bill from becoming law this year, with strong DFL majorities in the Senate and the House.
“We have the votes in the Senate (to override a veto) and we are close in the House,� Espinoza said.
Pappas is not as confident. She said that although the votes on the bill have been overwhelming majority, many Republican legislators appear to be unwilling to vote to override the veto of a Republican governor.
If the Dream Act does not become law this year, Pappas said she will continue to push for it next year. Making the bill a law is the first step in changing the environment for immigrants in Minnesota, she said.
“We still have a problem with attitudes towards immigrants,� Pappas said.
The Dream Act, she said, could have a symbolic impact on immigrant communities, tying them to their communities.
For Rodriguez though, the Dream Act becoming a law would have more a more practical effect.
“If it passes this year, I’ll change my plans and go to the ‘U of M,’� Rodriguez said.
So here's the story of me writing the story. I decided to write the article because I remembered the bill from last year, when I worked in the Senate. I remembered it doing well in the Senate but then dying. Then I saw that it was getting press this year and decided to talk to Sen. Pappas about it. That was an ordeal in itself, as her office couldn't get me linked up with her for over a week. Fortunately, they were very nice and gave me a rundown of where the bill was and some of the history so I had a starting point. More importantly, they gave me the phone number of Mariano Espinoza, the director of the Immigrant Freedom Network and told me he was a big player in the debate. I had a bit of a hard time getting ahold of Mariano, and once I did, we sort of talked in short conversations before he finally gave me some time. He was an invaluable source though, because he really knew the issue and was heavily involved in the process. He also gave me the name of someone to call to get the names of students impacted by the bill. That person's name was Juan, a volunteer at the Network. It took a few minutes of talking to him before I realized he wasn't a student, at which point he gave me some names and numbers. We talked for a bit and he told me he would call the students and let them know they could talk to me. I think that was really helpful because when I talked to Eric Rodriguez, he was comfortable talking to me. That interview went really well and gave me a good anecdote for the lead. It also gave me a better idea of how students were involved in the lobbying process, which became a big part of my story. On the same day I got Juan's number, Sen. Pappas's office offered me some time with the Senator, so I went down to the Capitol and got to pull her off the Senate floor, which made me feel very important. She was extremely open and helpful, which I didn't really expect since she is a politician. After talking to her and Eric, I pretty much had everybody I needed. I tried to talk to someone from the Governor's office, but they didn't return calls, and one woman even told me not to expect to hear from them. She did say that it was fair to expect that the Governor would veto the bill and that he did not support it. Finally, I also attempted to get ahold of a leader of the Minnesotans for Immigration Reduction group, but he never returned email (his phone number was not listed). One major obstacle to finding opposition to the bill is that there is almost none. In the Senate, all committee votes on it were unanimous and the House has yet to take the bill up. Sen. Pappas said that only one group spoke against it in hearings, and that was the Immigration Reduction Group. I enjoyed writing the story because I thought it was an interesting look at the process of building support for a bill, which isn't often covered. It was the most challenging story to get sources on this semester, but the sources I did get were very interesting and helpful.
In writing the story, I had fewer challenges than in other stories like the crime and court story. I think that is largely because of the people I talked to. I dealt with far less complex language than in those stories because the people I talked to are used to making their words understandable to the general public. What was difficult in writing the story was going back and forth between voices. I was using three different sources, and they all had plenty to say about all that I wrote about. It was difficult to weave their quotes together without making it confusing to the reader. A good example of this was when I returned to Rodriguez in the last paragraph. I wanted to connect the end to the beginning, but that's not easy after not having him in the story after the lead. To solve this problem, I made sure that his quote at the end referred to what he had talked about earlier- his desire to go to the U. I wish I had done a little better at weaving Espinoza and Pappas's quotes together in the middle of the article.
I think that if I had been writing this story for a website, I could have linked to audio of Rodriguez talking about the Dream Act. It would have been valuable to hear a young man with an accent talking about how the bill would affect him. He was very well-spoken and it would have been a good way to make the story more multi-media. I could also have posted audio of Pappas telling the full story of the students coming to her to ask for help with the issue. That was an interesting story that I couldn't print in its entirety for space reasons. Photos of all my sources would have also helped add a visual element.