Our nation is entering a new era of hope. The newly formed and growing mass youth political movement that is the engine of the Obama campaign seeks an America free of racial prejudice, discrimination, and every vestige of the New Jim Crow. For the first time, millions of young Latina/o, black, other minority, immigrant, and poor white students who have been denied equal educational opportunities and access to higher education feel like the lives they have been working so hard to attain might actually be possible to realize. The task of the new civil rights movement and every young person, who for the first time are taking the risk of dreaming about what their lives, communities, state and nation could become, is to use our collective power to make those dreams real.

This year, hundreds of thousands of gifted undocumented California students will be denied the opportunity to attend college. Undocumented students are discriminatorily denied access to state funded campus-based tuition aid. A mere stroke of the pen could right this wrong.

The California Dream Act, supported by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and every significant California educational institution and organization, now sits on Governor Schwarzenegger’s desk awaiting his signature. If signed into law, the California Dream Act would give undocumented students the same opportunity as every other California high school graduate to receive campus-based state tuition aid.

If enacted, the California Dream Act will establish the important principle that undocumented students can no longer be assigned to a second-class, inferior status and must be treated with respect and dignity, in every way as the peers and equals of every other student in California. The legal right that undocumented students have to receive the same public educational opportunities as everyone else would be closer to becoming real.

The families and communities of undocumented students contribute billions of tax dollars and incalculable hours of poorly paid labor that benefit the California economy. Giving their sons and daughters the right to benefit from state tuition aid programs is fair and just.

The passage and enactment of the California Dream Act this year would pave the way for a federal Dream Act to be passed and signed into law after the November elections.

Therefore, we the undersigned:

1. Support the enactment of the California Dream Act and a Federal Dream Act.

2. Stand on the principle that Latina/o, black, Asian, Arab, Native American, and white, immigrants with and without papers—we are all Californians.