Facebook mastermind Mark Zuckerberg donated $5 million to thedream.us, a college scholarship fund for undocumented young immigrants.
He posted this message on, well, Facebook:
Hundreds of thousands of young immigrants are part of our communities and attend school legally in the United States. Many of them moved to America early in their lives and can’t remember living anywhere else. They want to remain in the country they love and be a part of America’s future. But without documentation, it’s often a struggle to get a college education, and they don’t have access to any kind of federal aid.
America was founded as a nation of immigrants. We ought to welcome smart and hardworking young people from every nation, and to help everyone in our society achieve their full potential. If we help more young immigrants climb the ladder to new opportunities, then our country will make greater progress.
The investment Priscilla and I are making will go towards creating college scholarship programs for more than 400 young immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area over the next five years. TheDream.US is a national scholarship program that has done amazing work under the leadership of Don Graham and others, and we’ve previously invested in their work. But we also wanted to help extend their efforts in the Bay Area as part of our ongoing efforts to support social and economic programs in our local community. Over the coming years, our hope is to prepare hundreds of students to graduate with associate or bachelor’s degrees so they can build meaningful new careers.
This is just a small step towards creating immigration and education solutions that help our community and country make progress. You can learn more about this program at: http://www.thedream.us
In May, the Arizona Board of Regents granted DREAMers in-state tuition at the three public universities. Locally, the nonprofit Scholarships A-Z regularly hosts meetings to help undocumented students search and apply for scholarships, because they do not qualify to get any financial aid funded by state money. The group and other organizations led the years-long in-state tuition fight.
DREAMers have been able to get in-state rates at Pima Community College since the fall of 2013.
The next scholarship help meeting is happening Tuesday, June 23, from 6 to 7 p.m. at 655 N. Alvernon Way.
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2015.
At least Bill Gates supports actual American citizens with his scholarships. Yet another reason not to use Facebook.
Better idea…why doesn’t he pay for them to cross the border legally and become citizens. If they don’t want to do it that way then they have no business being here.
I am continually amazed at the hate of some of my fellow Arizonans and citizens. Like it our not, these kids are here and here to stay. Nobody in their right minds would try to deport them to some country that their parents escaped from and that is foreign to them. Better that they become educated and contribute to our society instead of being marginalized and a drag on our economy. Kudos to Mark for this!
He’s looking for more cheap labor. It’s what you guys would say if the Koch Bros did it.