Hope for America:
That a group of individuals without voting rights or political representation, across disparate nationalities, could demonstrate the power of American-style civic engagement calls for reflection, given much hand-wringing over the question of whether native-born Americans have become disengaged. Here’s where DREAMers may have something to teach us. While critics charge that the undocumented flout our legal system and thus are unworthy of becoming Americans, these youth respond that they sample the proudest of our own civil rights movement traditions: civil disobedience of unjust laws. Perhaps these DREAMers can finally get the DREAM Act through our Congress. Perhaps they can persuade our journalists to drop the label “illegal” from their stories. And perhaps they can even teach us to be Americans again.