With comprehensive immigration reform stalled, it’s been a slow summer for immigration related news, so yesterday’s announcement that the DREAM Act will be part of the Defense Appropriations Bill to be voted on early next week by the senate is the equivalent of a minor earthquake.

This is likely the best (and only) hope of getting the DREAM Act enacted for a long time.  The Defense Appropriations Bill must be passed each year to continue funding for the military, and is fairly noncontroversial.  It’s one of those bills which almost always gets passed without much fuss from either side.  Therefore, it makes sense to piggy back the DREAM Act to it, in order to give it the best chance for passage. It is also plausibly related to military readiness because one of the ways in which a person may qualify under the DREAM Act is having honorably served in the U.S. military.

I’m cautiously optimistic at this turn of events.  It’s an election year, so crazy things can happen in Congress.  I’ve been monitoring the media chatter on this subject and I haven’t detected too much resistance about the DREAM Act, which is a good sign because that means it has not been overly politicized.  However, I do remember that in 2007, the senate voted down a similar amendment to that year’s Defense Appropriations Bill, so I’m not celebrating until both houses of Congress pass it and it’s been signed into law.