Jose Luis Marantes would like to introduce you to his friend Sam. Sam is not real, but there are many Sams.

“Sam is a young person who arrived here at the age of five, was brought here with his family, wasn’t really sure where he was going,” said Marantes, a founding board member and programming chair of the United We Dream Network.

“All he saw was a big plane and his parents told him he was going to go to Disney World… His parents tell him to go to school, get good grades and do the best you can, and Sam does just that. He gets good grades, he learns the language quickly, he stays out of trouble, and he does what he can to do the best thing he can for his family.”

Then in high school, Sam’s friends start talking about college. Sam goes to talk to an adviser about his college options.

But then it hits him: there are none.

Because Sam’s parents came to the United States illegally, Sam will not be able to attend college. But the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, is in Congress now and would allow Sam to pursue higher education.

Marantes was part of a panel at UF Law on Tuesday to debate the DREAM Act along with Ira Mehlman, with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Susana Barciela, the policy director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center.

The DREAM Act would permit an estimated 65,000 children the ability to pursue higher education or join the United States’ military and would give them a path to lawful permanent residence.

But Mehlman, who is against the DREAM Act, argued that these children should not be rewarded for their parents’ illegal entry.

“They are in this situation for the most part through no fault of their own,” he said. But, we also have to recognize that what we’re talking about here is not punishing Sam, it is simply not rewarding Sam for the fact that his parents violated the law... That is one of the realities of the world in which we live – children do wind up paying the price for mistakes the parents have made.”

Mehlman said for every DREAM Act child who is getting a spot in college, a student whose parents did everything by the law will lose that spot.

Marantes said children should not morally have to pay for their parents’ sins.

“The DREAM act in itself is dealing with a particular moral problem and that is the sin of my parents versus my own sins,” he said. “We have American values, and those values really are based on independence, on the power of the individual, on being able to propel yourself to do what you’ve got to do.”

Barciela also disagreed with Mehlman and said that prohibiting these children from higher education definitely amounts to punishment. She framed the issue as one of the United States wasting the talent of the DREAM Act children.

“Given the global economy and our state today sort of losing the edge on innovation, my question would be, ‘Do you want to get anyone who applies and subsidize them or do you want the best and the brightest in our schools of higher education?’ she said. “I think we should get the best and the brightest and among them are going to be some of these DREAM Act kids.”

Mehlman argued that the DREAM Act would not just encompass the best and the brightest, though.

“I think the first misconception is that this will apply only to the best and the brightest,” he said. “In fact it would apply to just about everybody under the age of 35 who can manage to get a high school diploma and get into a community college… This is basically an amnesty for anybody who can simply earn a high school diploma and stay out of trouble – which is nice… but that hardly is something that we ought to be making special exceptions for.”

Barciela said the proposed legislation would be changed by Congress before it is passed and the current age limit of 35 could very well be lowered.

Marantes argued that the DREAM Act would just be a start to fixing the United States’ immigration problem. He said the Supreme Court decided Plyler v. Doe, a 1982 case that made it illegal to deny education to undocumented aliens, to prevent an underclass from forming in the United States. But that underclass has formed anyway, and the DREAM Act would help fix that, he said.

“We need to repair this broken immigration system because the reality is that it’s creating that underclass by not taking into account and identifying every single one of the people that are in this country, making sure who they are, that they come forth.”