The DREAM Act has been rejected by Congress approximately half a dozen times. It is proposed legislation designed to legalize millions of people unlawfully residing in the United States.
The DREAM Act has been marketed by its proponents as a "path to citizenship" for people who supposedly have little control over their presence in our country, and a way to the harvest the skills of the brightest, most talented and capable. The reality of the DREAM Act, however, is much different than the advertisments and cheerleading suggest.
Many observers, including staff members of DerailAmnesty.com, have written about the DREAM Act and its shortcomings. Here are abridged versions of a piece we composed and an essay recently written by Heather MacDonald, whose columns often appear in the National Review.
We hope this provides some insight as to why many Americans believe the DREAM Act should never become law. Ms. McDonald's piece appears at the top because, quite frankly, we thought it was better than ours.
The E In Dream
by Heather MacDonald
The mainstream media inevitably presents the law as a way for successful young illegal aliens who are living the American dream by pursuing a college degree to fully join the mainstream. In fact, the DREAM Act is written to maximize the number of illegal aliens who are shielded from immigration enforcement, period. Its educational and character trappings are so minimal as to be pretextual.
Every illegal alien who applies for what is known as “conditional legal status” is immunized from any fear of deportation for ten years. The threshold for qualifying for conditional legal status is extraordinarily lax. An illegal alien can have a criminal record and still qualify, as long as the time served for an aggregate of three non-felony offenses is under 90 days. (The current version of the bill, S. 3992, is a masterpiece of legalistic obfuscation on this count.) In Los Angeles (and undoubtedly elsewhere), jail overcrowding (significantly due to illegal-alien criminals) is such that prosecutors and courts routinely plea-bargain felonies down to misdemeanors and sentence property crimes and even some violent offenses to time served in jail while awaiting a plea bargain. Thus, one can have quite a history of offenses without crossing the DREAM Act threshold for criminal ineligibility. Drunk drivers and drug dealers could also qualify for conditional legal status, so long as they have routinely pled down.
Even if a judge has previously ordered an alien deported on criminal grounds and the alien ignored the deportation order, he may still qualify for conditional legal status if he received the deportation order before he was 16.
The education requirements in a bill purportedly about rewarding educational achievement are also ridiculously minimal. High school drop-outs qualify for conditional legal status, so long as they have obtained a no-brainer GED at some point.
Once granted conditional legal status, an alien is shielded from any enforcement proceedings for ten years, gaining the right to drive, work, and travel internationally, as if he had entered the country legally.
To convert conditional legal status to permanent legal status, the illegal alien needs at most to have completed two years worth of college credits over ten years. He need not have earned a bachelor’s degree, nor have maintained a high GPA. He could have spent five years in remedial classes and the next five accumulating a year’s worth of credits in Chicano/a studies. But even that minimal educational standard is waivable. If the illegal alien shows “compelling circumstances” for not accumulating two years worth of credits or if removal would cause “extremely unusual hardship” to the alien or his family, he can still be granted permanent legal status.
The DREAM Act is not about creating an incentive for, or rewarding, high educational achievement. It is about trying to extend an amnesty to as many illegal aliens as possible, who will then have the ability to legalize their family members.
Heather MacDonald is unaffiliated with DerailAmnesty.com and is not responsible for her materials having been placed on this site. The above-piece has been edited slightly, not by Ms. MacDonald, for the purposes of brevity.
DREAM Act = Amnesty
by The Management
The folks who want to see millions of the undocumented legalized in this country are a minority, but they are a passionate bunch. Many proponents of the DREAM Act view themselves and/or their friends as powerless victims of our immigration system, and believe they are enduring a difficult existence that American citizens are obligated to undo - undo by letting them stay, work and vote here.
They will flatly deny that the DREAM Act is an amnesty by asserting that it allows a large portion of illegal aliens to "earn" citizenship rather than having it simply handed to them. And that assertion is simply wrong. The DREAM Act is, without question, little more than a glorified handout, and what it requires in return is hardly a fair price for the right to call oneself an American. Is it an amnesty of the variety doled out to millions of illegal aliens in 1986? No, it is the thinly disguised type championed by George W. Bush, Barack Obama and John McCain that has been peddled under the name "comprehensive immigration reform." In short, it provides something of almost inestimable value (permanent legal residency leading to U.S. citizenship) in return for practically (not quite!) nothing.
The DREAM Act would work like this. Any illegal alien brought in to the U.S. while 15 or younger, who has been here 3 years or longer and obtained a high school diploma or GED somewhere along the line, is given legal residency in return for 60 college units (2 years of college credit) or 2 years in the military.
The DREAM Act beneficiaries would not be required to earn a degree, would not have to attend a university or any traditional four-year institution (JC or community college course credits will be accepted), and would not have to receive training in any academic or professional area where the U.S. population currently produces insufficient numbers (Mathematics, Nursing, etc.).
For those illegal aliens incapable of, or unwilling to work for, junior college credits that could essentially be accumulated by many of the brighter household animals you may have had an opportunity to walk or feed, there is a military service option. Two years is what it will take. Period. No combat requirement. No assignment to ongoing conflict areas. No length of commitment any longer than what was required of citizens whom we formerly drafted.
In short, the DREAM Act is a sad joke. An amnesty? Sure. Why, because it requires nothing? No, because it requires things that almost no one can fail to accomplish. The academic and armed services "requirements" are so insultingly simple that they are a hop, skip and jump away from asking the beneficiaries to learn to chew gum and walk, clip their fingernails twice a month, and to make sure to have milk in the refrigerator for when the kids come home from school.
Think of it like this - You walk into the nearest Mercedes dealership and plop down $500 in cash. In return, the salesman hands you the papers and keys to a shiny new 2011 model sitting in the showroom; that's pretty much the spirit and essence of the DREAM Act.
