Schrag: Federal DREAM Act Up for Vote Today--Why Isn't Schwarzenegger Demanding Its Passage?

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

A bipartisan group in Congress has been struggling for years to pass the federal Dream Act, which would allow an estimated 360,000 young illegal immigrants who are recent graduates of U.S. high schools – many are now in college – to get on the track toward legal residency. An estimated 45,000 live in California.

The act is scheduled for a cloture vote in the Senate today. If it gets the required 60 votes – hardly a sure thing – it would head off the filibuster threat that conservatives have used to block it before.

The act covers students brought here by their parents as young children. Many don't speak their native language and know little about the country where they were born. Collectively they represent an investment of some $18 billion-plus in their American education.

Despite that education and their almost total assimilation into American culture – Americans in all but the right to call themselves that – they live in the shadows, can't get the jobs their skills qualify them for, can't get driver's licenses and worry constantly about deportation to places they don't know and to which they desperately don't want to go. They study in the hope someday things will change.

The Senate sponsors of the Dream Act – short for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, a concoction cooked up for the initials – include Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat; Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican; and Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican. (It's also supported by California's two Democratic senators.)

But a minority of congressional hard-liners, echoing the blog and talk-show frothers who call it amnesty for the alleged crimes of the parents who brought them here, have beaten back every attempt to pass the act. It's Old Testament redux: punish the sons for the sins of the fathers. What crime did the kids commit? The paranoid fringe also issues dark warnings that once the kids meet the stringent conditions of the Dream Act, they'll sponsor parents, sisters, cousins and aunts, thereby opening the gates to more immigrant hordes.

That's nonsense. The visa backlog for siblings is decades long. And illegal parents would have to return to the home country for 10 years or more before they would have any chance of returning legally.