Crushing the American Dream
Posted: December 4th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
It’s been over a month since the Senate rejected the Dream Act, but I’m still hopping mad about it. This act would have granted temporary legal status to illegal immigrants who have graduated from high school in good status and are either in college or in the military. But shortly before the measure was put to a vote, President Bush denounced it, the result being that 36 Republicans and 8 Democrats voted “no”. (Who are these Democrats???)
Let’s look at the group of young men and women at issue here. We’re talking about approximately 500,000 young adults, about 4 percent of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.. This group has attended college or technical school, and they obviously speak English well in order to have achieved this level of education. They had to have been younger than 16 when they entered the United States, and in most cases they were probably far younger, so that their move here was not even their decision. In an OpEd piece in the New York Times, Cynthia Tucker sited an example of the type of person denied a path to citizenship by the Senate’s “no” vote: Marco, a Georgia Tech engineering student with a perfect score on his math SAT, and who has been in this country since he was 4. Who could possibly benefit from our denying Marco a path to citizenship? Isn’t this exactly the type of young adult we should be recruiting to be part of our nation, our work force, our intellectual capital, our tax base?
The fact that our Democratically-led Senate wasn’t able to pass this narrow bill, forging a path to citizenship for the best and brightest of our undocumented immigrant population, is appalling. And it certainly doesn’t bode well for the success of more far-reaching legislation to normalize the living situation of the other 11.5 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. I would like to chalk this up to something other than fear, suspicion, and xenophobia, but what would that be?
