The DREAM fell in the Senate late last week and, again, the result on a vote on immigration reform was a wake up call for all who want to see order restored to the nation’s borders and the manner in which people are allowed to become new American citizens.
The aspiration behind the DREAM Act was certainly noble enough; many young people who are the children of illegal and undocumented parents find themselves coming of age as Americans in an America that doesn’t recognize them as such.
Should the parents manage to secure legal residence or citizenship, the children who first entered the country on an illegal basis, even if they were in a stroller, have no means to change their status and live on a legal par with their mothers and fathers.
It’s not their fault, they didn’t choose their circumstances and they are not to blame. So what do they do? Live a life in the shadows or leave for countries that are strange and foreign to them? Not much of a choice.
In an effort to offer some way out, a bipartisan group of senators came up with a deal. Go to college for two years and / or serve in the military and there will be a path to legalization as a reward.
The idea is simple enough, the politics, not surprisingly, anything but.
The most vigorous opponents decried the measure as an amnesty for the undocumented and illegal; the more subtle critics complained that the Senate had more urgent business to do in the coming weeks than to debate the nuts and bolts of a bill that, at the point of last week’s cloture vote, was a dream suddenly turned pipedream.
Some pointed out, not without some justification, that the act’s two years of college requirement was inadequate. Why, they asked, did it not require four and eventual graduation?
The Senate vote, which stymied an effort just to get a proper debate going, was a stark reminder that the current climate in Congress does not encourage even those who want to tackle the immigration issue only in what they see as manageable parts.
There is, currently, a long line of people outside the United States waiting to immigrate legally so as to be joined to their families.
Those who might have qualified under the DREAM Act are already inside the country’s borders waiting to be fully united with the only country they have ever known and, in many cases, in a fully lawful way with their oft-legalized parents.
A situation such as this, at the very least, is a stark reminder of just what a mess we are in, how difficult an issue immigration and its reform is and will clearly remain.
Nobody can pretend that the solutions to the current problems are going to come easily, or that they will please everybody.
But if they prove to be consistently beyond the imagination and will of the Congress in both the macro and micro sense, then we are in serious trouble indeed.
