Carl Heastie has made it clear that access and affordability to higher education will be top priorities during his tenure as Speaker of New York State Assembly. In a recent statement, Heastie lamented the disparities in educational opportunity between the haves and have-nots, saying “It is unfortunate that in one of the most progressive states in the nation, and individual’s path to success is still decided by how much education they can afford, if any at all. ”
To combat this issue, Heastie would pass the New York State DREAM Act (A4311-2015) - a bill that would create “..a New York Dream Fund Commission which shall be committed to advancing the educational opportunities of the children of immigrants. ” In essence, this fund would provide financial aid for the children of illegal immigrants to attend a SUNY, CUNY, or community college at little to no cost to them.
This is not the first time the DREAM Act has been proposed, and just as in the past, it is encountering opposition by the Republican lead Senate.
This opposition to the bill stems largely from the fact that tax payer money would be used to benefit those who pay no taxes. The most common argument is as follows:
I work hard at my job, I pay my taxes, and I can barely make ends meet. Why should I pay for somebody who is here ILLEGALLY to get a free education, while my law-abiding children must take out massive loans to receive the same education?
This argument is ubiquitous. The uniformity of this sentiment, independent of party talking points, suggests a visceral aversion towards those who achieve the same successes we do, while playing with a different set of rules. It is the same antipathy a hiker who reaches a summit on foot would feel towards those sporting bumper stickers announcing “I drove to the summit of Mt. Washington!”
The reason this bill faces so much opposition is because it runs contrary to our sense of Distributive Justice!
The famous sociologist George C. Homans explains both interrelated concepts with a lengthy, yet descriptive metaphor (the following passage is an excerpt from “Social Behavior as Exchange” written by Homans in 1958, lightly edited for clarity and brevity):
“Suppose that there are two subgroups, working close together in a factory, the job of one being somewhat different from that of the other. And suppose that the members of the first complain and say: ‘We are making the same pay as they are. We ought to get just a couple of dollars a week more to show that our work is more responsible.’ When you ask them what they mean by ‘more responsible’ they say that, if they do their work wrong, more damage can result, and so they are under more pressure to take care. Something like this is a common feature of industrial behavior. It is at the heart of disputes not over absolute wages, but over wage differentials – indeed, at the heart of disputes over rewards other than wages.
“…We may say that wages and responsibility give status in the group, in the sense that a man who takes high responsibility and gets high wages is admired, other things equal. Then, if the members of one group score higher on responsibility than do members of another, there is felt need on the part of the first to score higher on pay too. There is a pressure, which shows itself in complaints, to bring the status factors…into line with one another. If they are in line, a condition of status congruence is said to exist.
“In my example, I have considered only responsibility and pay, but these may be enough, for they represent the two kinds of thing that come into the problem. Pay is clearly a reward; responsibility may be looked on…as a cost…. Then the proposition about status congruence becomes this: if the costs of the members of one group are higher than those of another, distributive justice requires that their rewards should be higher too. But the thing works both ways: If the rewards are higher, the costs should be higher too….To put it in terms of profit: …the rewards and costs of two persons or members of two groups may be different, yet profits of the two – the excess of reward over cost – should tend to equality.”
We can now apply Homans’ description of both phenomena to understand opposition to the NYS DREAM Act:
The two primary groups involved are tax-paying citizens of New York, and illegal immigrants (both parents and children). The former pays a greater cost in the form of taxes, for which they are rewarded with the opportunity to send their children to a quality state school for relatively cheap in-state tuition (an average saving of ________ per year compared to out of state students). If the DREAM Act were passed, it would extend to the latter group an even greater reward in the opportunity attending in-state schools tuition free, with no concomitant escalation in cost. This differentiation of costs and rewards creates a status incongruence between the two groups.
In a highly polarized political climate, it is easy to attack ad hominem those with whom you disagree - to characterize the opponents of the bill as racist and selfish, or its proponents as socialists with a spending problem. A familiarity with status congruence and distributive justice allows us to disentangle race and party politics from this issue, and lays bare the underlying conflict of status incongruence. This sociological perspective focuses the debate on the substantive policy issues rather than racial attitudes and thus allows for a more effective, more inclusive government.
