The Possible Dream?

[Jeanfromfillmore]

The Possible Dream?
The debate over United States immigration policy in recent years has been in equal parts tortuous and ineffectual. And one interested party had for the most part been relegated to the fringes: the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who were born abroad but brought to America when they were children. Claimed by neither their parents’ homelands nor the nation they grew up in, unable to work legally here, they exist in a curious limbo.
Wednesday was a good day for those who want to make it easier for such young people to gain legal residency and citizenship: “A bill to grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students passed the House of Representatives late Wednesday, giving President Obama an unexpected although largely symbolic victory in the final days of Democratic control of Congress on an issue he has called a top priority,” reported The Times’s Julia Preston. “The bill, known as the Dream Act, passed the House by a vote of 216 to 198.”
Friday, less so: “Senate Democrats on Thursday pulled a measure that would allow illegal immigrant students to earn legal status through education or military service after Republicans refused to allow a vote on a version of the legislation that had cleared the House on Wednesday,” wrote The Times’s Carl Hulse. “Rather than try to break a Republican filibuster against the Senate’s so-called Dream Act, Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, instead forced a vote to call off the attempt, presumably so he could try again later.”
When “later” will be is unclear, but let’s face it: if the bill can’t be pushed through the Democrat-dominated Senate this session, it certainly stands no chance next year when the G.O.P. adds six seats.
In any case, there were plenty of talking points flying across the partisan divide. “The DREAM Act is not about creating an incentive for, or rewarding, high educational achievement,” writes Heather MacDonald at The Corner. “It is about trying to extend an amnesty to as many illegal aliens as possible, who will then have the ability to legalize their family members.” She explains:
To convert conditional legal status to permanent legal status, the illegal alien needs at most to have completed two years worth of college credits over ten years. He need not have earned a bachelor’s degree, nor have maintained a high GPA. He could have spent five years in remedial classes and the next five accumulating a year’s worth of credits in Chicano/a studies. But even that minimal educational standard is waivable. If the illegal alien shows “compelling circumstances” for not accumulating two years worth of credits or if removal would cause “extremely unusual hardship” to the alien or his family, he can still be granted permanent legal status.
“It’s unclear why anyone thinks the DREAM Act somehow disenfranchises American citizens, because nothing in the bill places undocumented children at an advantage over citizens,” writes Ben Armbruster at ThinkProgress. “The bill the House passed yesterday is not amnesty; it places demands on those undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. with their parents and are thus here illegally through no fault of their own.”
Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog agrees:
Here’s the problem: voters say they want “comprehensive immigration reform” but oppose “amnesty.” That sounds promising, but what it really means is that anything you propose that isn’t “round ‘em all up and deport ‘em” is automatically described as “amnesty” by the right. And then swing voters hear that it’s “amnesty” — whatever the proposal is — and assume they should be against it.
As long as right-wingers control the debate, you can’t propose anything that won’t fall victim to this sequence of events. You could write a bill that mandated fifty years at hard labor before the opportunity to apply for citizenship kicked in, and right-wingers would still call it “amnesty.” And the public, not knowing any better, would just nod in agreement. Someday this will change, I suppose. But not anytime soon.
And Michelle Malkin is gearing up for a last-ditch effort by the Democrats: “The Senate just voted 59-40 to table the DREAM Act illegal alien bailout cloture vote. It’s been ‘vitiated,’ to use Senate parlance. They’ll take up the House-passed version next week. Which means another week of open-borders agitation, radical ethnic tribalism, and new Democrat euphemisms for illegal aliens. It’s also another week for you to re-double phone calls, faxes and e-mails to Washington and demand that they put law-abiding American workers and students — and law-abiding immigrants and visa applicants — first.”
While the politics may be playing out predictably, the debate online has been of high quality, driven by a few of the better young bloggers.
The starting point, however, was not a blog post but a column by Michael Gerson in the Washington post in which he urged fellow Republicans to support the act:
Critics counter that the law would be a reward for illegal behavior and an incentive for future lawbreaking. But these immigrants, categorized as illegal, have done nothing illegal. They are condemned to a shadow existence entirely by the actions of their parents. And the Dream Act is not an open invitation for future illegal immigrants to bring their minors to America. Only applicants who have lived in America continuously for five years before enactment of the law would qualify.
Opponents of this law don’t want earned citizenship for any illegal immigrant – even those personally guilty of no crime, even those who demonstrate their skills and character. The Dream Act would be a potent incentive for assimilation. But for some, assimilation clearly is not the goal. They have no intention of sharing the honor of citizenship with anyone called illegal – even those who came as children, have grown up as neighbors and would be willing to give their lives in the nation’s cause.
“But what of the billions of children condemned to relative poverty because their parents chose not to become unauthorized immigrants?” countered Reihan Salam at National Review. He continued:
Migration is a highly effective means of achieving poverty reduction. An extraordinary 26 percent of people born in Haiti who live beyond the two-dollar-a-day standard live in the United States. As I understand it, the DREAM Act implicitly tells us that I should value the children of unauthorized immigrants more than the children of other people living in impoverished countries. If we assume that all human beings merit equal concern, this is obviously nonsensical. Indeed, all controls on migration are suspect under that assumption.
Even so, there is a broad consensus that the United States has a right to control its borders, and that the American polity can decide who will be allowed to settle in the United States. Or to put this another way, we’ve collectively decided that the right to live and work in the U.S. will be treated as a scarce good, just as we treat the right to access the spectrum as a scarce good.
Timothy B. Lee wasn’t buying it:
Reihan objects that “we’ve collectively decided” that the opportunity to live and work in the United States “will be treated as” a scarce good. I suspect he’s chosen this weird passive-voice phrasing because he knows better than to straight up claim that the opportunity to live in the United States is a scarce good. It’s not. We should let the DREAM kids stay here and we should be letting a lot more kids from poorer countries come here. Doing the one doesn’t in any way prevent us from doing the other …
That brings us to the core political question: does passing DREAM “implicitly tell us” something we’d rather not be told? This is where I think Reihan is furthest off base. From my perspective, the fundamental question in the immigration debate is: do we recognize immigrants as fellow human beings who are entitled to the same kind of empathy we extend to other Americans, or do we treat them as opponents in a zero-sum world whose interests are fundamentally opposed to our own? Most recent immigration reform proposals… are based on the latter premise: immigrants in general are yucky, but certain immigrants are so useful to the American economy that we’ll hold our collective noses and let them in under tightly control conditions. The DREAM Act is different. The pro-DREAM argument appeals directly to Americans’ generosity and sense of fairness, not our self-interest.
Nor was Adam Serwer:
DREAM is politically feasible precisely because it appeals to Americans’ generosity, sense of fairness, and self-interest. Those who would be eligible are poised to offer concrete, sustained benefits to the country as a whole. Sending them away is a waste of the resources we’ve already invested in them, not to mention the ones they’re prepared to contribute. DREAM also shaves about $1.4 billion off the deficit in the next 10 years. So while DREAMers are getting something very valuable, the rest of us are as well.
Second, whether or not America should “value the children of unauthorized immigrants more than the children of other people living in impoverished countries,” it has a clear obligation to the former by virtue of their actually being here to treat them fairly. That means not holding them responsible for what their parents did.
“Gerson’s approach to argument is weak and moralizing in a maddening way,” writes Conor Friedersdorf at the American Scene. But he doesn’t have Salam’s back either:
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Reihan is right, and that when it comes to immigration policy we should do what’s best for US citizens and permanent legal residents. By that imperfect standard, Dream Act beneficiaries ought to be “valued” more highly than the impoverished resident of a Third World country. Compared to his counterpart somewhere abroad, the potential Dream Act beneficiary is almost certainly higher skilled. Having avoided legal trouble for many years, she is less likely to end up in jail than lesser known quantities. For anyone who values cultural assimilation, she is much farther along the path, if not fully assimilated. Most importantly, the ties the Dream Act beneficiary has to US citizens binds in two directions –– if he or she is given legal status rather than deported, there is a constellation of American citizen friends, lovers, neighbors, teachers, corner grocers, and employers whose loved one, friends or friendly acquaintances will be around for many years, rather than tragically deported or else living in the shadows, circumstances that’ll make some of the important stakeholders in this hypothetical very sad.
These points are increasingly convincing to the extent that we look at the Dream Act as a test of America’s highest ideals. But Salam, in a follow-up posting, reminds his critics that politics is still a fairly practical business:

My sense is that there is an upper bound on the number of foreigners that U.S. citizens will welcome to work and settle in the United States in any given year. I don’t know what that number is, but I imagine it’s not much higher than, say, 1.5 million per annum at the very high end. I am willing to accept that as a starting point, i.e., we’re not going to allow 3 million or 7 million or even 1.6 million. Chances are that a number smaller than 1.5 million would reflect the preferences of a voting majority, e.g., 800,000. So how do we decide who “gets these slots”?
On humanitarian grounds, I can see why we might welcome at least some potential migrants with limited English language proficiency, modest skills, etc. These migrants, like any migrants, will make an economic contribution, yet this contribution is somewhat more likely to be outweighed by costs associated with social service expenditures … A serious humanitarian immigration policy requires a rigorous assessment of how to achieve the greatest humanitarian gain constrained by the aforementioned (constructed) scarcity.
For Salam, that greatest gain may come from increasing the ranks of immigrants from the very poorest countries — Haiti, Kenya, Madagascar, Niger, Senegal — and not Mexico, which has “a GDP per capita of $13,609, ahead of Turkey, Brazil, South Africa, and Colombia.” You can agree with his points or side with his detractors, but I’ll say this: Coming on the heels of the recent screaming over WikiLeaks, paranoia about airport scanners and bashing of the deficit commission, it’s quite heartening to look at a heated discussion among people from very different places on the political spectrum over whose plan would do the most good for the the country and the planet.
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