The Dream Act dies–for now
Depending on the source, articles describing the defeat of the Dream Act refer to the young people involved as either illegal immigrants (correct) or undocumented immigrants (annoying euphemism).
The measure, which would have granted citizenship to those who “came to the United States as children, completed two years of college or military service and met other requirements including passing a criminal background check,” was defeated by 41 Senate votes although it had majority support.
This effectively means the Dream is dead until at least 2014; be assured it won’t be given up permanently by the Democrats, who among other things are eager to swell the voter rolls with those they consider their constituents, and to encourage more illegals to come here with their children in order to receive similar benefits.
Legal immigrants are already eligible to serve in the military and be fast-tracked to citizenship. Illegals aren’t. And this “undocumented” business really, really gets my goat. It suggests that those who came here illegally are guilty only of a mere paperwork glitch.
Even the NY Times, which at least doesn’t use the “undocumented” gambit in its article, plays the sad violin:
…[The Dream Act] would have helped grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students and recent graduates whose lives are severely restricted because they are illegal residents, though many have lived in the United States for nearly their entire lives.
And Senator Durbin of Illinois, in a plea for support of the Act, had this to say of the young illegals:
They stand in the classrooms and pledge allegiance to our flag. They sing our star-spangled banner as our national anthem. They believe in their heart of hearts this is home. This is the only country they have every [sic] known.
It’s a fascinating argument. The believe in their hearts that this is home. They feel it, don’t you see? And who are we to frustrate those feelings? It is incumbent on us to remedy the lack of a few piddling papers, and to make reality conform to belief, as it should.
Thank God.
I agree with you 100 percent concerning this post, Neo.
As an aside, much as I love ’em on criminal justice issues (with the exception that I support the death penalty) the comparison between the hand-wringing at Talk Left and the joy in this site is quite amusing. But then I believe one of the two lawyers who runs that place is an immigration lawyer.
“If you just wish hard enough and long enough, your wishes will come true.” – Jimini Cricket.
1. A joyless necessity. This child of refugees is relieved but not celebrating.
Many of the illegals are decent people who de facto were invited here with the acquiescence of a corrupted government.
I refuse to pursue the implications of that until the borders are secure.
2. I suspect that the incompetence of the immigration bureaucracy is a dimension of this issue that does not receive adequate attention. I’ve read bad things about how legal immigrants and visitors are treated by our government.
What is maddening to me about the liberal agenda is it can not be turned back. It can only be stalled. The liberals keep the water dripping on the rock that is America. Even a resounding defeat at the ballot box for an initiative or political candidates has no meaning. To hell with the will of the people, they will give you open borders or national health care. On the other hand, all of their victories are permanent. That becomes the new base line. We see in Europe how that works out when attempts are made to peel things back a bit.
One of the things I have a hard time understanding is if the federal government is willing to naturalize some several million of so, illegal or undocumented aliens, why would they not also accelerate the citizenship of those who are here legally, working, paying taxes, singing the national anthem, believing that this country is their home and who are lawfully trying to become citizens?
Does is not stand to reason that Senator Durbin and others should also be working equally hard or harder to remove the bureaucratic hassles, monies and time spent, hardships, and other negatives for those who are permanent resident aliens, otherwise known as immigrants?
I mean, why stop at the illegals? Why are they so important and how did they get to move to the front of the line?
Just askin’.
“”I mean, why stop at the illegals? Why are they so important and how did they get to move to the front of the line?””
MeTooThen
Well it’s the difference between a vote you can buy with political favors and one you can buy with a live rooster.
Some 10-15 years ago the LA Times ran a delightfully misleading series of articles about gang members who were brought here to the US as children, but because of crimes committed and the technical fact that they weren’t actually citizens got deported back to points South. I remember the article I read in detail was very long covering more than one whole page top to bottom no advertising. The LAT quoted extensively from these young men who were very depressed about being sent down to countries they had no memories of and no real connection to. They said ‘We’re really Americans’ and the LAT clearly communicated the great injustice that had been done to these young men. OK, so I wondered what were their crimes? I looked thruout and the LAT did not mention ONE word as to the crimes they committed that got them deported or anything about their victims. The liberal mind is capable of truly outstanding feats of rationalization.
Regarding the Dream Act….
I’m sympathetic to the those young underage people (basically under 16) who were brought here by their parents. However, the Dream Act seems to be another monstrous size bill (deliberately?) that is described one way positively, but which contains much more than advertised – including much that likely could not survive a vote if done out in the open air and sun.
I haven’t read the act, but have read summaries that make it unacceptable. It basically is an amnesty bill for millions of people who entered illegally. Not only are the definitions loosely structured as to whom it would apply, but once one person in a family is tagged then effectively their whole family is set on a pathway to citizenship. In other words if parents accidentally or by design happened to bring over an underage child then they too will be getting amnesty. That covers a lot more people than advertised in the media.
We don’t need a 2,000 page bill to help those who were brought here when very young. An acceptable bill should be narrowly defined, require significant proof, and apply only to the person brought over – not their families. Any pathway to citizenship and the right to sponsor other family members should be off the table – just legal status granted with citizenship (and therefore the right to vote) barred permanently – should they decide to exercise this pathway to legal status.
The idea (floated in earlier amnesty bills) that paying over a few hundred or thousand dollars as a fine for illegally entering the country is a joke. At that price we will have tens of millions seeking to enter in the near future – how good at you at learning tonal based languages?. The penalty has to be meaningful, nor should people who chose to enter illegally ever be able to influence the political direction in our system.
This is not racism, but a simple exercise of sovereignty.
Hopefully, next year a more rationale and honest (concise) bill can be written and voted on.
A good idea for some conservative group is to publish the names of companies that do not use everify to match social security numbers with names to prevent the hiring of illegals. Perhaps that organization could publish the names of companies that hire illegals so people can boycott them. This could be done without having Congress pass a law. Would anyone here be willing to boycott a business that was routinely hiring lots of illegal aliens? Many amusement parks, hotels, restaurant chains, construction companies, etc. hire lots of illegals. Public shaming and the loss of business would make any business voluntarily change their hiring practices.
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Earlier this year, Bob Parks linked and commented on a violin-playing article about illegal aliens who had been accepted to Ivy League schools but were anxious for the Dream Act to be passed. Most had been given special consideration because they belonged to an under-represented minority (Hispanic) on their campuses.
And there was a financial advantage for some of them. I remember in particular a girl who acknowledged that, although unable to legally work, she had personally saved over $30K for college. That floored me. I know whole families of legal aliens who haven’t got that kind of cash at hand. But then again, she hadn’t had FICA and everything else taken out. And as an added bonus, her lack of documentation would mean that she wouldn’t have any pesky federal tax forms to submit with her financial aid application.
One who knowingly commits an illegal act is a criminal. The people in question are criminal aliens. Or alien criminals.
Why use language that denies their moral agency? It feels nicer, and classes them as victims deserving of “justice”.
Only those younger than the age of reason can be properly described with the passive term “illegal”.
It is also unclear if the people are “immigrants”. Most such people I know are not in the USA permanently. They’re working to earn enough to go back home and live in decent conditions instead of poverty.
If the DREAM act is really dead, than we just dodged a bullet.
Why? Because it tied obtaining U.S. citizenship to attending college.
Our country has been through this before, and it virtually destroyed our higher education system. During the Vietnam war, the primary method of getting out of the draft was to enroll in college. The intent may have been noble — why tear a college student out of their studies to put them in uniform — but the unintended side effect was to turn our colleges and universities into sanctuaries for draft dodgers. The result was that colleges and universities became ground zero for the radicalization of young people in the United States. Curriculum was dumbed down enough to allow people who had no business academically even being in college to slouch through four or five years of draft avoidance, taking courses specifically designed to radicalize them. And even after the war, the worst of the student radicals stayed on and became the next generation of faculty.
The left is itching at the chance to do it all over again. Their dream is to become the new gatekeepers to U.S. citizenship. Under the DREAM act, millions of uneducated illegal aliens would have flooded the college and university system. These would be “students” with sub-high school educations, many or most of whom could not speak English. They could never survive in a regular school curriculum. Our colleges and universities would be forced to create a new “DREAM” curriculum to process them through for their minimum two years necessary to qualify for citizenship. These classes would by necessity be segregated from the regular students, and probably have to be taught in Spanish. These students would be at the ideological mercy of their “instructors.” Have no illusion, under such a system “students” with an affinity for socialism and grievance politics would have no problem passing their classes, regardless of their ability to read, write or think, while those “students” expressing conservative views would tragically fail to meet the academic standards of the, ahem, university.
The last thing this country needs is to flood our colleges and universities with illegal aliens. This is the same ideological mischief that the left engaged in during the 1960s and 1970s and if we have stopped it then we have dodged a bullet.
H.R.5281
Latest Title: Removal Clarification Act of 2010
Thanks for making that clear to me, jms. Had no idea of the college angle. Wow.
The Demwits have nixed/outlawed the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms for some three decades, as far as I know (since it refers to the Almighty, it gets the atheists’ boxers in a wad), and because the Demwits have decreed that all patriotism is “jingoistic,” macho, and annoying, they similarly rain cold water on singing the National Anthem . . . Well, I just don’t know what this particular jackass is talking about. Has he even entered a public school in the last thirty years?
Illegal = criminal.
One of our cohort, Subotai, has posted this latest enormity at another blog:
S. 510, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act; which gives the Federal government absolute authority over all food-growing, down to home gardens [with reams of regulations and fines if you offend the bureaucrats] was dead, dammit. It was attached to the Democrats’ last ditch attempt to lock in their wasteful spending, and when Harry Reid had to pull the Omnibus resolution, it died.
Since the Democrats [keep in mind that they have a majority in both Houses until January, and you can’t filibuster the budget] had decided not to bother putting a budget together for the fiscal year that started ….. almost 3 months ago, we needed another Continuing Resolution to hold things together until the adults take over the House in January and we put together a real budget. You know, that thing that is the primary duty of Congress under Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution.
The Democrats attached the seizure of control of all food growing to the Continuing Resolution, and the gou3 cao4 de5, jing1chang2 mei2 yong4duh5, dai1ruo4mu4ji1, short bus window lickers that are pleased to call themselves the Senate Republican “Leadership” failed to notice and passed it by unanimous-freaking-consent.
Anyone else hear about this latest GINORMOUS power-grab?
It’s like the EPA seizing control of everything under the sun that emits carbon freaking dioxide.
i heard of it… and if you read the law that i put up, the dream act is embedded in it…
I’ll look into this and report back, Beverly.
Sometimes these things pan out, some times they are just wild rumors and exaggerations of laws. Don’t get me wrong: both sides do it, and honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if I find that what you said is totally true. The appropriations process has been abused in major ways since long before I was born.
If they have indeed “seized control” of gardening, then I think a SCOTUS challenge is in order. Every now and then SCOTUS comes down on the side of liberty.
Artfldgr:
Despite their length , your posts usually have some good information in them.