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"Make or Break Day" for the DREAM Act
I couldn't help but be drawn to the subject line of one of the first emails of the morning: PLEASE HELP US!
I would have probably deleted it without opening it, assuming it was another one of those overseas money scams, but then I noticed it was from a listserve that has been very active with fighting the building of the border wall along Texas and Mexico.
When I read the email, it was a plea to help two sisters who were enrolled in college -- one had graduated from a nursing program and the other was in the middle of her own nursing studies.
The plea wasn't for money. It was to give them the opportunity to put their U.S. college degrees to work.
You see, legally neither sister can work here in this country, even with U.S. college degrees.
Why? Because they're both undocumented immigrants.
The emailed plea was to make these sisters' dream of helping the sick a reality by supporting the imminent Senate vote on a bill known as the Dream Act.
Across the country, debate over the DREAM Act -- providing undocumented students who were 15-years-old or younger when they arrived with their parents, a path to citizenship, if they either go on to college or military service and prove to be of good moral character -- always seems to get stuck on the point of granting undocumented immigrants in-state tuition.
It doesn't matter to critics that studies show that in states that already allow undocumented immigrants college access and the opportunity to compete for financial aid that the number of undocumented students is far too small to deprive native-born students of college admission slots or financial aid.
Critics still complain.
But the real complaint should be of the wasted talent that this country is allowing itself not to take advantage of and instead (here's the real kicker!) would rather import from outside the country.
For example, it's estimated that 65,000 undocumented students graduate from high school in the United States every year. There are no exact numbers of how many go on to college but we know they do by virtue of the existence of college student groups such as S.U.R.G.E. (Students United to Reach Goals in Education) and IDEAS.
These students juggle classes with homework, jobs, community service, extra-curricular activities and graduate with degrees in hand in the hopes that somebody will notice they are worthy to work legally in this country.
So far, no dice.
These students are graduating as bilingual teachers, nurses, engineers, business administrators -- the list goes on.
Yet, this country would rather slap these young people in the face by not acknowledging the fact that these students, who may not be native-born but are "home-grown," have a ready command, in most cases, of two languages and an intimate knowledge of the history, the traditions, the culture/pop culture and the issues of this country.
The further insult is that school districts facing a shortage of bilingual teachers are bypassing our own qualified graduates, albeit undocumented, to import teachers from Mexico, Spain and other South American countries to teach in a school system that they are unfamiliar with and where they should be role models in modeling both English and Spanish to their bilingual students, inevitably need to either learn English themselves or are naturally stronger in Spanish.
Hospitals are bypassing qualified nursing school graduates who are bilingual to recruit nurses from such countries as the Phillipines. Nurses who must learn U.S. routines and patient care that is unique to this country.
But because our graduates who are undocumented cannot legally work, they must stand idly by and watch their rightful jobs go to people who have a steep learning curve when it comes to knowing the culture and people of the United States.
Yet, there is one last chance to help these students, and in the process our own economy, and that is to speak up about the absurdity of this situation by asking that the Senate pass the DREAM Act.
This evening, I was invited to participate in a conference call with Senator Durbin, the main sponsor of the current DREAM Act bill going before the Senate tomorrow afternoon.
He said that many of his colleagues, who are the same critics who have shouted down the DREAM Act before, have expressed their "displeasure" in having to vote for this bill again.
Why? Because it may help the children of undocumented immigrants?
As one reader of Latina Lista commented, since when in this country do we blame the children for the sins of the parents?
If that were the case, then every child of a drunk driver, robber, rapist, embezzler, etc. would be locked up.
It's not done because our common sense tells us it's not right.
In an example of where common sense has gone out the window: on the conference call, one of the speakers made it known that in preparation for tomorrow's Senate vote on the DREAM Act, a group of undocumented students, college graduates and current students, bravely appeared before members of Congress to brief them on their lives, their struggles, and their hopes.
It was an effort to put a human face to the issue. A memo was sent out to all congressional representatives that the students were doing this. The memo went to Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, a vocal opponent of undocumented immigrants.
His response to the memo was to issue a press release calling for ICE to come and arrest the students.
It is this kind of senseless attack that has doomed this issue to forever be unresolved and is putting the lives of innocent children under undue stress.
Senator Durbin said that if the bill fails to get the 60 votes it needs tomorrow it is dead until after the next president is elected.
These children are ready to serve this country.
Isn't it time to let common sense prevail?
It can if we call our Senator and tell him/her it's time -- to see reason.
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Yay!!!
Cloture FAILED 52 - 44
Follow the money, folks. The corporations want the illegals here for cheap labor and to buy their products, the NEA wants them for job security, the military wants them for cannon fodder for their stupid war and the politicians want their votes. It's the average American who suffers by way of lower wages, higher local taxes to pay for health and education and having to accommodate a bi-lingual society. Not to mention the gangs that the immigrants feed their kids into. And don't kid yourself, many of these Latin immigrants feel that this is their land and they are merely re-taking possession of it.
In all the excitement, has ANYONE figured out the monetary cost of this shameless bill?
Just like the collective IQs of the religious right does not go beyond the average Richter Scale of 0-10, on this issue, a lot of otherwise 'normal' folks, lose all reason!
These are kids, who are here because their parents brought them here. They have already used public funds/tax payer dollars to go to school. They want to go to College, which puts them into 50% of our population, if they actually Graduate, they fall into the top 28 percentile of our population. Plus they grew up here, they ARE Americans!
So, slash down the work permits and student visas, do not produce your own engineers, nurses, doctors etc., do not "import" from outside, do not let these "illegal" kids join our work force and THEN, complain when the work is outsourced overseas!
Does anyone realize that it is equivalent to shooting yourself in the foot? In other words, damned if you do and damned if you don't and the xenophobes are ready to that to themselves?!
Going against the DREAM ACT for some insane xenophobic reasons is the same as supporting Bush blindly on Iraq. The operative word being "blindly" ...
A warning for democrats.
The issue of illegal immigration will make you lose the election in '08.
Should we be rewarding other criminals?
Agreed. I've been saying this for the last five months. The facists, whoops, I mean republicans, know illegal amnesty is their trump card. How can the democrats be so blind?
I have two kids in college now. They qualified for some financial aid, but the bulk of their tuition and expenses have been paid by PLUS loans that we secured. "Average Joe" college students don't come out very well with the financial aid folks. We make too much to qualify for low-income assistance. We're not a minority. My children are good students, but they're not 4.00ers so there's no academic scholarships.
My point is that it makes one rather resentful to hear about the "poor immigrant" kids and how they aren't allowed into the financial aid pool.
You mean to say that you wouldn't rather your money go toward the education of kids other than your own because they broken the law and you didn't?
How.... selfish of you to want to provide for you kids first.
I don't see any reason why the DREAM Act shouldn't pass.
It will serve as a magnet for more Third World, immigrants to illegal enter the U.S.!
I don't see any reason why the dream act should pass.
If you let this Dream Act pass you are opening up for another influx of millions of illegals into our system which can't keep up with helping our own citizens. It opens up millions more since these as you say are children (up to 30 yrs old)can put in for their fathers, mothers, uncles etc to become legal too. We already have anchor babies we don't need anchor teenagers and young adults. If we allow amnesty to anyone we open the doors to all. We can not afford this. We need to send all the illegals back to their homes, to stand in back of the lines of those who are doing it legally.
When one breaks the law they should be punished not rewarded.
Yeah, but these kids didn't break the law. Their parents did. We shouldn't be punishing them for trying to improve their lives and the live of others.
This bill IS for illegal immigrants. Not just the children of illegals.
The military and NEA are both lobbying hard for this.
Really, that's all you need to NO !!!!
Would it make a difference to any of you if all 12 million illegal immigrants were here legally? They'd still be working the same or similar jobs. Their kids would still be going to our schools. They would continue to pay taxes, as the vast majority of illegal immigrants already do. http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0321/p02s01-ussc.html You have to hand it to the IRS - they're at least practical in addressing illegal immigrants. So ask yourselves this - what is your real issue with the illegal immigrants in this country? Why do they scare/anger you so much more than legal immigrants? And what solutions do we have that are practical, humane, and lasting?
There is no end in sight. They just keep making more. That's the problem.
If you came to L.A. and saw all the Spanish language billboards, the gang graffiti on every wall and sign, the third world conditions in the trash-strewn immigrant neighborhoods, you would begin to understand why people are fed up. Schools with Spanish speaking kids perform the poorest and get extra funding for bi-lingual teachers. Then the taxpayers are rewarded for this burden by 50% of Latino kids dropping out of high school. Studies show that even third and fourth generation Latinos don't measure up in academic achievement.
Do we want to further lower the living standards all over the country because of an influx of people who don't perform well intellectually? The dumbing down of America, indeed.
Why do you suppose they perform so poorly in school? Why they drop out and don't earn enough money to support themselves? My guess is that it's the same reason black kids in inner city schools have such a tough time - we treat them like crap and their family lives are a mess. When your parents can't get good jobs because they don't have proper ID or don't speak the language so they end up working 2 or 3 jobs, 80 hours a week, there's nobody around to keep the kids out of trouble. And the kids don't see any hope for their future because everything around them is violent or depressing. So they drop out of school and pick up exactly where there parents left off. We punish illegal immigrants every day through low wages and silent oppression, then blame their children for not performing up to our standards. And then when some of them do step up and complete their education, try to put decent lives together like the people in this article, we shoot them down again.
There was no such thing as legal immigration in the early part of the century and as such people who pontificate about how there grand parents or parents did it legally should get their facts straight. This country is not overpopulated by a long shot and thanks to the crack down many farmers and growers are just now beginning to lose their crops in the fields due to a lack of labor. You will never see even poor white kids in the fields picking fruits and vegetables and that is just a fact. Until we give this nation back to its rightful owners and let them decide who should stay or go, I say let everyone in!
cowboyjerkface; Wrong.! When my family was homeless in King city California due to our car breaking because someone had poured sand in the crank case we were denied both work and housing because we were not Spanish speakers.
Our children were treated like crap in school because they did not speak Spanish. We both would have gladly worked if given the chance. We had to resort to food stamps and welfare just to survive until we could get transportation.
While in a Safeway store getting food one day we saw a immigrant cashing both a pay check and a welfare check while buying their food with food stamps. When we reported this to the welfare office we were told that if we wanted to keep what we had to SHUT UP. So my advice to you is SHUT UP.
So you reasoning is that the U.S. should approach the pop. levels of India in the 1950s....450,000,000....? Why? To what end? The U.S. had a population of approx. 130,000,000 before WWII, fought on two fronts, and increased production mightily. By 1950 the population was approx. 150,000,000. TODAY the population is 300,000,000, i.e., more than doubling in half a century?
Crop harvesting can be automated; no one advocates going back to handpicking cotton. In fact the first cotton-picking machines were patented in the 1850s, but due to cheap labour, machine harvest did not begin until the 1930s.
By the way, that you telling us "that is just a fact" as though it were an immutable truth. When your ilk really knows any of the latter, it will be so obvious that you MAY omit the telling....!
I live in Nevada and have voted for John Ensign AND Harry Reid. I detest neoconmen but will probably not vote for Reid again. As the leader, he deserves reprisal for carrying bush's water.
Ms. Trevino why do you insist on the term undocumented. Why do you leave it the very important fact that they broke the laws of this land by entering the country? BTW it is illegal in the United States to profit from illegal acts. But you seem to support people doing that? So do you also support a bank robber being allowed to keep the monies they stole?
As for the instate out of state tution rates. I only have one beef. I use to be a resident of NH but I worked in MA. Under the laws of the commonwealth I had to pay state incoem tax to the commonwealth but I was not elegible for in state tutition rates even they I was a tax payer of the state.
So How can my situation be fair and those that are illegally in the US also be fair?
Clearly you didn't read the whole article. She is talking about the children of illegal immigrants. They are undocumented because their parents brought them here illegally. It is not the child's fault if mom and dad decide to cross the border without going through the legal channels. The point of this piece is to show that not only are we hurting the blameless children of these immigrants, we are also hurting the rest of the country by refusing to acknowledge their presence and not allowing them to contribute to society.
This gut reaction that so many people display when the topic of immigration comes up makes no sense to me. Why is it so horrible that people wish to come here and experience life as Americans? Why are we so focused on keeping out immigrants? Everyone says they take our jobs, yet unemployment is still pretty low and we probably lose more middle and high income jobs to outsourcing than we do to illegal immigrants.
If you want to solve the "problem" of illegal immigration, you have to do something other than punishing the blameless. Create steep fines for businesses who hire undocumented workers. Revoke their licenses if they do it more than twice. Pressure (and help) the governments of Mexico and other Central and South American countries to take care of their own people and maybe find a way to make them pay for deportations of future illegal immigrants from their countries. Revise our current legal immigration standards (no more quotas, no more decades-long waiting periods). Instead of wasting money on a border fence, set up border registration offices where people seeking legal status in America can register, apply for their visas, and look through job listings. We could provide placement plans, connecting seasonal workers with employers and temporary housing. And if we're doing a better job of tracking who is in the country legally, that makes the job of finding the dangerous one's a lot easier.
You have a lot of good ideas and you're right the children shouldn't be blamed for what their parents did.
But why, WHY why why, should the American CITIZENS
have to provide education for children from any other country with tax dollars? Why should we have to do that when there are so many problems in this country that need fixed that our government says WE CAN'T AFFORD.And why should the American taxpayer once again subsidize workers for businesses to make obscene profits?
Durbin's dream act is more like a nightmare and would reward illegal immigrants. This lobby thinks it has rights no one else could even dream of. Are Mexicans the new chosen people?
Why not? If people can say that the land belongs to them because God gave it them thousands of years ago, why can't Mexican Indians say the say the same thing?
Yesterday, another boatload of immigrants landed on our shores. Appealing to our better natures, they appealed for help in setting themselves up in what they had hoped would be their new home. Their claims that they were seeking religious freedom fell on deaf ears, as we sent the weakened and sea-sick illegal aliens back home, on board their rickety old ship, the Mayflower.
Do you really think these ILLEGAL aliens are here because of religious freedom? LOL. If they were there are special channel they could go through to be here legally. You are grasping here. All ILLEGALS should be deported, anyone who hires ILLEGALS should be heavily fined, and we should return to the original intent of the 14th amendment and do away with anchor babies. No matter how you SPIN it if the Pilgrims arrived on our shores today they would be welcomed with open arms as are all who seek religious freedom.
Marisa,
I am a U.S born Latino, of Central American descent. An Army veteran and an attorney. Although I was born in this country, I cannot figure out the grotesque hate expressed here by so-called progressives. Do you know how when you watch in old news footage black protesters in the South getting firehosed and dogs sic'ed on them, you cannot understand how that could have happened? That's how bizarre and irrational public attitudes now are going to seem later on, viewed through the lens of history. Please keep writing on the subject, we have to chip away at the hatred. We shall overcome!
By the way, has anyone noticed how the downturn in the U.S. economy began at about the time the current crackdown on illegal immigrants began? No one is out there buying the starter homes that support the whole housing market. I guess illegal immigrants weren't sending all their money to Mexico!
There is NOTHING to substantiate your argument that the economy is dropping because of the ILLEGAL immigrant crackdown so don't try to pull the wool over our eyes.
Since you say you are an attorney, I suppose you are using ILLEGALS to make money by helping them to file documents and other assorted paperwork for citizenship.
In other words, you probably are one of those making money from ILLEGALS.
What crackdown?? Illegal immigrants have kept wages low in industries such as factory work and construction. Los Angeles County alone, according to the L.A. Times, spends half a billion a year on aid to children off illegals. Let them go home to their country and straighten it out. We don't need them here.
If you are an attorney why do you support illegal acts?
You must be kidding - trying to compare what happened to black AMERICANS and what is now happening to ILLEGAL immigrants. That type of spin won't work here. Watch the news footage again. The black protesters were here LEGALLY -they were CITIZENS of this country. ILLEGAL immigrants need to go back to their own countries and fix them. We spend BILLIONS to provide health care and an education to people who don't belong here. They need to go back to their own countries and live off them. We need to spend these BILLIONS on our own CITIZENS.
elcid66:
I don't think the people commenting here are progressives. Many of their screen names have appeared in other comments sections and they're always the descenters. I read through all the comments before coming back to yours for a couple of reasons. I am stunned at the level of hate expressed on this page. References to immigrants that would make them appear to be little more than viscious animals, it's disgusting. My apologies. We are not all evil. I do believe there is a problem with the level of undocumented aliens in the country, but I certainly don't advocate rounding up kids and shipping them off. In fact, the notion of rounding up immigrants is so absurd I have to chuckle. The number of undocumented aliens outnumbers law enforcement by such a huge degree the logistics are simply not possible. The loss of the taxes these people pay, sales tax, income tax, etc., would be devastating to our economy and even hate-mongers like Tancredo know this.
Second, in response to all of the folks here who are repeating the republican talking point about these people have broken our laws and can't be trusted. I say, if that's your level of compassion, then anyone here who has gotten free cable TV, downloaded a single song, piece of software or movie should also be thrown in jail. The law's the law, people. It's your motto so be consistent. Moreover, it is unlikely there is anyone here who would not steal food to feed their starving family; who would not break a law to see their children survive.
Lastly, I hope Ramos and Compean fry (metaphorically as I am opposed to the death penalty). They broke laws they were hired and trained to protect. It doesn't matter who the person they shot in the back was because they didn't know he was a criminal. He could have been a doctor and they didn't care.
You should be forced to live in a barrio with these people and see your street filled with trash and fear for your kids lives from the Mexican gangbangers.
I can tell you why we want them to go back home it is the numbers just like you said they out number our law enforcers to such a degree that we have to continue to hire police just to keep the gang members in check that this wave of 12 to 20 million illegals brought with them. Ramos and Compean were hired to keep illegals out of our country and the person who testified against them was a know drug dealer. It's to bad they weren't a better shot or that they didn't shoot to kill. Your idealism is wrongly placed.
Yeah. Doctors are out roaming the border zones at night, and they run away when confronted by legal authorities. Maybe in Mexico.
Two things:
1) There seems to be a major delusion among hispanics regarding the hispanic contribution to this country. The net result is negative.
2) This will obviously be a war of attrition. Starving them out by enforcing employer sanctions will be a part. The fact that we have numbers, arms, technology, wealth, home turf, and a just cause, tend to favor our side. Being permanently on the run, never knowing who's going to be knocking on their door, or when their traitorous employer is going to be raided, are hardly conducive to an effective resistance.
Regreso a Mexico
Camel - you are too funny. The one who broke the law was the Mexican drug smuggler. He was in our country ILLEGALLY and he had drugs in his van. He should be rotting in jail.
All ILLEGALS should go back to their own countries and make changes there. I am tired of spending BILLIONS on people who don't belong here. All ILLEGALS should be deported ASAP!
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Posted October 23, 2007 | 08:07 PM (EST)