The DREAM Act

John Derbyshire may be a dangerous defeatist on Islam, but he is on top of the outrageous DREAM Act, a mini amnesty for young illegal aliens. The bill lacks any justification whatsoever except that Democrats want to do things for Hispanics, namely they want to give all illegal aliens in the U.S. (the great majority of whom are Hispanic) permanent legal residency, but since they can’t get that passed this year, or ever, they are trying to sneak through an amnesty for a very large number of illegals.

Derbyshire writes:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has slipped the DREAM Act as an amendment into a big defense appropriations bill the chamber’s about to vote on.

The “DREAM” in “DREAM Act” is an acronym, D-R-E-A-M, standing for “Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors” Act. The deal is supposed to be that if you are an illegal alien in the country more than five years, were under the age of 16 when you arrived, are less than 35 years old at the bill’s enactment, and have graduated high school in the U.S.A., you get amnesty. The idea is that kids brought here by illegal alien parents and put in our schools to get an education funded by American taxpayers, should also get permanent residence rights.

You have to give some verbal assurances that you intend to go to college or join the military, but you don’t actually have to follow through on those assurances, you just have to say them. Oh, and if you do go to college, you can pay in-state tuition rates, unlike out-of-state American citizens. Citizens? Who cares about them?

Note that once you’ve got your amnesty and your green card, you can then easily get green cards for your parents. You can also start applying for your foreign brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandpa’s ex-wife’s second cousin’s step-daughter, et cetera, to be admitted under the “family unification” rules.

Even setting aside all that, though, the DREAM Act faces a huge problem common to all so-called “immigration reform” measures: administrative overload.

If you have any interaction with the immigration authorities, the first thing you see is that they can’t possibly cope with their current workload. Mark Krikorian’s splendid book The New Case Against Immigration has many blood-curdling examples of this impossible level of administrative work. In one case, a backlog of ninety thousand documents that needed processing was eliminated by shredding the documents. Mark also describes the technique of “lane flushing” at the Ambassador Bridge where Canada meets Detroit. That is, when the lane of vehicles waiting to have their immigration documents scrutinized gets too long, border officials just wave a few hundred through without any checks. Problem solved!

These kinds of things are routine in the system as it now is. And Harry Reid wants to add this new huge burden to the work of our immigration bureaucrats? They’re going to have to, for example, check that the Guatemalan birth certificate someone just presented is valid. How are they going to do that in a timely fashion, with 200 people on line behind the Guatemalan guy? How are they going to do it at all?

What in fact will happen will go like this:

Immigration Officer: Did you arrive more than five years ago? Applicant: Yes. See, here’s a Dunkin’ Donuts receipt from 2003—that was my first meal in the U.S.A.! Immigration Officer: And were you less than 16 at the time? Applicant: Yes. Here’s my birth certificate. You can read Laotian script, I hope? Immigration Officer: And you were under 35 in September 2010? Applicant: Sure. Do the arithmetic. Immigration Officer: And you intend to go to college, or join the military? Applicant: Certainly. Soon as I get my papers, straight to the recruiting office! Immigration Officer: Okey-dokey. Take this to Window Twelve, then you’ll be all set.

What Harry Reid actually wants, of course, is to boost up his Hispanic support in the tight race he’s in with Tea Party insurgent Sharron Angle. Compared with that, what does a little thing like the integrity of American citizenship matter?

[end of Derbyshire article]

The nightmare Derbyshire describes is similar to what the Democrats and pro-open borders Republicans sought to achieve with the Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill in 2007. As I remember, under the proposed law federal authorities would be given 24 hours to determine if each applicant for legalization was qualified or not. It was beyond madness. This and other measures in the bill were so insane that even the open borders true believer William Kristol, who had supported comprehensive reform and amnesty in 2006 (“I like illegal immigration,” he said with a complacent smile on national TV), turned against it in 2007.

The DREAM Act is amnesty in miniature. It must be stopped.

- end of initial entry -

Bill Carpenter writes:

Years ago, a writer in The Weekly Standard referred to citizens who objected to the DREAM Act as “the nativist claque.” I never renewed my subscription.

LA replies:

That remark is absolutely typical of the way the Weekly Standard has dealt with the immigration issue for many years. They are, quite literally, knee-jerk open-borderites, and intrinsic to that attitude is that they believe that all people who don’t share their knee-jerk open-borderism are ignorant bigots worthy of nothing but name-calling. Which makes whom the actual ignorant bigots?

Also, it was similar remarks made by that magazine’s contributors during the huge debate on either the 2006 or the 2007 version of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill that, as with Mr. Carpenter, turned me off so much that I completely stopped visiting their site. I had a gut feeling that these people were anti-Americans, enemies of our country, and I just closed them out. I might on rare occasions go there when someone sends me a link to an article, and I probably have posted a couple of articles of theirs, but other than that I don’t think I’ve clicked on that site in three or four years.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 20, 2010 05:21 PM | Send