Tilghman supports DREAM Act

Unlike Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust and former University provost and current Penn president Amy Gutmann, Tilghman has not formally endorsed the legislation. Faust and Gutmann both expressed their support for the act in letters to federal lawmakers after they were approached by students on their campuses.

Tilghman said that, before being interviewed by the ‘Prince’, no individual student or student organization had asked her whether she supports the legislation.

Citing the precedent set by Princeton’s former presidents, Tilghman said she does not normally make endorsements.

“I get all kinds of requests to sign on to statements, to sign on to petitions, to endorse various initiatives, and my policy tends to be pretty restrictive about lending the name of the University to a variety of initiatives,” Tilghman said, adding that before she were to make an endorsement, she would need to be persuaded that its subject was “within the direct purview of the University.”

“I have to be persuaded that by signing on, you increase the probability that some good that you’ve identified comes to the University,” she said.

While students at Harvard and Penn had rallies in support of the DREAM Act and petitioned their presidents to support it, there has been no such groundswell at Princeton, Tilghman said. She explained that the lack of vocal support for the act on Princeton’s campus could be due to a number of factors, including the preeminence of the recession and health-care policy debates in the national consciousness and preoccupation with issues that more directly impact Princetonians, such as the job market.

“I think it is the nature of being a student, being on a campus like ours, which is a very close-knit, residential community, that the issues that probably are foremost on students’ minds right now are issues for which they have some direct experience,” Tilghman said. “Most of the international students who arrive here arrive on student visas. They have legal status in the country. My guess is this isn’t their first and foremost issue.”

Members of international groups on campus said they support the act but do not plan to press Tilghman for her endorsement. Yifeng Wang ’11, president of the International Consortium, an “umbrella organization” that he said seeks to foster collaboration among campus international groups, said the act “might not concern the international community on campus.”

Though Wang personally supports the act, he said he didn’t “necessarily think that the students should push [Tilghman] to give a public statement to endorse the act,” citing concern over whether such an endorsement might represent the University community as more united on the issue than is the case.

Members of Latino groups on campus also said they had no immediate plans to approach Tilghman, though they support the act.

“We have talked about [the act],” Norma Lopez ’11, president of the Chicano Caucus, said. “The Caucus has endorsed it in the past, and we’ve continued endorsing it, but it’s not something that we have been active [about] on campus. It has been more of a Chicano Caucus discussion over study breaks.”

Members of the Chicano Caucus said the group, whose agenda is set by the current interests of its members, had been more active on the issue last year.

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“We had a petition-signing last spring, where a number of University students signed a petition, and we sent it to a local representative. We had a pretty good turnout,” Chicano Caucus vice president Destiny Ortega ’12 said.

Tilghman said that, as a Canadian immigrant, she is “particularly sensitive to the role that immigrants have played in this country over its entire history.”

The quandaries faced by the children of illegal immigrants became particularly salient for both Tilghman and the University in 2006, when The Wall Street Journal published a story detailing the struggles that Dan-el Padilla ’06, that year’s Latin salutatorian, faced as an illegal immigrant without a clear path to citizenship.

Padilla’s mother brought him to the United States from the Dominican Republic when he was 4 years old. Despite growing up in homeless shelters in New York City, he showed great academic promise and attended the prestigious Collegiate School. Though Princeton offered Padilla a “supremely generous” financial package, he explained in an e-mail that even at the University, his immigration status caused him trouble.

“The consequences of being undocumented are all-pervasive. I learned very quickly that not even the [Princeton] bubble could insulate me from them,” Padilla said.

As an undocumented student, he could not apply for federal loans or participate in work-study or paid research. Padilla studied on scholarship at Oxford after graduation, at risk of being blocked re-entry to the United States.

Padilla, now in the United States on an F-1 student visa, is a first-year Ph.D. student in Classics at Stanford. In the summer of 2006, he and other undocumented students visited members of Congress to support the DREAM Act. Though Padilla has “kept a fairly low profile” since then, he said that it would change with the publication of his upcoming memoir, a book which he hopes will show the importance of the act.

“The DREAM Act is not simply a kind of indulgent ‘amnesty’ but instead a significant, meaningful and above all just investment in the futures of an enormously talented group of students who have the hunger and motivation to make a lasting contribution to American society,” he said.