Senate Republicans say No to Dream Act for Children of Immigrants
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WASHINGTON (By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post) September 22, 2010 — Republican lawmakers on Tuesday stalled a Senate measure to allow children of undocumented immigrants to get on a path to citizenship, and accused the Obama administration of seeking amnesty for illegal immigrants through administrative changes within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Dream Act, which would grant permanent residency to immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and who have completed some time in college or in the armed forces has been a sought-after goal for Democrats, who attached the measure to an important defense spending bill.

 

Republicans used a procedural vote to block the bill. Immigration advocates accused Republicans of sacrificing the well-being of thousands of young people to cater to nativist sentiment.

 

Senate Democrats vowed to reintroduce the Dream Act, but odds of the measure becoming law this year are slim.

 

Sen. Dick Durbin, the majority whip, said repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy and passing the Dream Act were a matter of justice and fairness.

"We do not in this country hold the crimes and misdeeds of parents against their children," Durbin, D-Ill., said in reference to the Dream Act. He has been trying to pass the legislation for about a decade.

Earlier Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he sent a letter to Reid and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., backing the Dream Act.

"America is the only country they know ... they deserve every opportunity to go further in life. Our country needs the benefits of their skills, their talent and their passion," Duncan said.

Congress has failed to take up a comprehensive immigration bill the past two years. President Barack Obama has been under fire in the Hispanic community for failing to keep his promise to tackle immigration reform in the first year of his presidency. Some have feared Hispanic voters will stay home because of the inaction.

In April, Obama said Congress lacked the "appetite" to take on immigration, essentially removing it from the legislative agenda.

As the prospects for a sweeping immigration bill looked bleak, young activists began lobbying Democrats to separate the Dream Act from the immigration reform package and try to pass it on its own.

The students, risking deportation, protested at lawmakers' offices and tangled with immigration reform advocates who did not want the comprehensive immigration bill divided.

In some cases, the Obama administration has deferred the deportation of some of the young people while the politics of the bill played out, drawing heavy criticism from some Republicans. McCain said laws should be followed in regard to deportation of the students.

"What am I going to tell people in Arizona when I legalize 2 million people here, when we haven't secured the border?" he said.

This summer, Obama signed a bill providing $600 million to pay for the deployment of 1,200 National Guard troops to the border and to beef up other border and immigration enforcement.

In a day of fast-moving action, Republicans released a draft of a memo they said was composed by Department of Homeland Security staff to explore ways to create a more lenient immigration system, with expedited approvals for visas and family reunification, and measures to head off deportations of undocumented immigrants.

 

"Done right, a combination of benefit and enforcement-related measures could provide the administration with a clear-cut political win," reads the draft memo, dated Feb. 26, 2010. The draft, released by Republican senators to the news media, does not cite an author. A Republican congressional staff member who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the matter said the memo was sent to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

 

"We would need to give the legislative process enough time to play out to deflect against charges of usurping Congressional authority," the 10-page memo says. Referring to the hopes for passing comprehensive immigration reform (CIR), it adds, "announcement of such measures would have to wait until it was evident that no legislative action on CIR was possible by the current Congress. This is likely to mean the best time for administrative action will be late summer or fall -- when the midterm election season is in full swing."

 

The idea that the department was seeking to administratively accomplish what Democratic lawmakers had failed to deliver legislatively was ludicrous, said Matt Chandler, a DHS spokesman.

 

"As we have said repeatedly, DHS will not grant deferred action or humanitarian parole to the nation's illegal immigrant population," he said in an e-mail, as he explained that the agency welcomed policy proposals from staff, but rejected bad ideas. Already, he added, immigration authorities' "record-breaking enforcement statistics speak for themselves - removing more aliens in 2009 than in any prior year in the agency's history and already surpassing records for criminal alien removals in 2010 - and demonstrate that we are doing more than ever before to enforce U.S. immigration laws. To be clear, we are not engaged in a 'backdoor' amnesty and are on pace to place more people in immigration proceedings this year than ever before."