How the DREAM Bill Encourages Amnesty Fraud

[Jeanfromfillmore]

How the DREAM Bill Encourages Amnesty Fraud
Welcome to Round 4 of a debate over the DREAM act between Will Wilkinson and myself.
DREAM is an immigration measure that offers US citizenship to illegal aliens who entered the United States before the age of 16.
Wilkinson’s opening entry;
The message the DREAM Act sends LAST week Harry Reid said he would reintroduce a bill that would create a route to citizenship for certain undocumented young adults who were brought to America as children. According to the so-called DREAM Act, an undocumented immigrant will qualify for "conditional permanent residency" if he or she satisfies the following conditions (taken from the DREAM Act Portal):
• Must have entered the United States before the age of 16 (i.e. 15 and younger)
• Must have been present in the United States for at least five (5) consecutive years prior to enactment of the bill
• Must have graduated from a United States high school, or have obtained a GED, or have been accepted into an institution of higher education (i.e. college/university)
• Must be between the ages of 12 and 35 at the time of application
• Must have good moral character
Then, if the qualifying individual enlists in the armed forces or enrolls in college, and completes two years of military service or two years of work toward a bachelors (or higher) degree within six years of having gained conditional permanent residency, he or she will qualify for plain vanilla legal permanent residency, which entails the right to apply for citizenship.
Suppose your parents moved to America from Mexico without legal permission when you were five years old. You grow up in America. You graduate from high school in America. You're an American in every sense except the legal one. You want to go to college, but because your parents came into the country illicitly, you don't qualify for government financial aid, and you can't get legal work. If caught by immigration authorities, you face the possibility of detention or deportation, even though this is, in every sense, your home. That doesn't seem fair. Every year, over 60,000 kids like you graduate high school in the United States. And unless something like the DREAM Act becomes law, you and they will become part of a growing class of marginalised and unprotected Americans without papers. Even then, the papers are no sure thing. You've got to serve in the military or get a couple years of college under your belt, and stay out of trouble. But at least you'll someday have the chance to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as your date to the prom.
This strikes me as sensible and humane, if a little over-demanding. But here's what the National Review's Heather MacDonald has to say about it.
The act signals to prospective illegal aliens the world over that if they can just get their child across the border illegally, they have put him on the path towards U.S. citizenship—and, as significant, the child will then be able to apply for legal status for his parents and siblings...
DREAM Act beneficiaries are certainly the most sympathetic category of amnesty candidates, and opponents of the act have been accused of hard-heartedness. Yet the act indisputably encourages and incentivizes more illegal behavior. It continues to send the message that the U.S. is not serious about its immigration laws, but will always eventually confer the same benefits on people who break the law entering the country as on those immigrants who respected American law.
I think it's useful in this debate to be as clear we can be. We're mostly talking about Mexicans, so let's just talk about Mexicans. Lots and lots and lots of Mexicans come across the border to the United States not because they're a nation of heedless antinomians, but because this is (was?) where the work is. Many come because much of their their family resides here, legally or ilegally. It's worth noting that the southwestern portion of the United States just was Mexico, once upon a time. There is an undeniable economic and cultural continuity between Mexico and the United States. The border distorts and disrupts it, but it cannot and will never put an end to it. The pattern of traffic between these two countries is not something to choke off, but something sensibly to regulate and rationalise.
"But we do regulate it sensibly!" you may insist. Well, suppose you're a hardworking and ambitious Mexican with no family legally in the States and not much education, but you've got friends there, 50 miles away, and they tell you they're getting steady, relatively well-paying work. One of the things that's so attractive to you about America is it's sound institutions, including its sturdy rule of law. You would very much like to migrate to the United States legally. So what are your options? Zip. Zilch. Zero. You have no options! There is no way to "get in line" and "wait your turn" because there is no line for you to stand in that leads to the legal right to live and work in the United States. So you pack up one day, take a hair-raising hike through the desert with your young daughter, meet up with your friends in Tucson, and get to work on the American dream. What were you supposed to do? Consign yourself and your daughter to a life on the edge of poverty out of respect for the American rule of law? Please.
The DREAM Act sends the message that although American immigration law in effect tries to make water run uphill, we are not monsters. It says that we will not hobble the prospects of young people raised and schooled in America just because we were so perverse to demand that their parents wait in a line before a door that never opens. It signals that we were once a nation of immigrants, and even if we have become too fearful and small to properly honour that noble legacy, America in some small way remains a land of opportunity.
Yes, the DREAM Act also incentivises illegal activity. But if the activity is not one that ought to be illegal, perhaps we should consider changing the law? Something to consider, anyway. In the meantime, this small reform will make America a somewhat more decent place.

, my comment here, then Wilkinson’s rebuttal here.
With Wilkinson’s Round 3, the debate takes an ugly turn. Among other disobliging personal remarks, Wilkinson repeatedly accuses me of lying, and then for good measure accuses me of “goading the nativist rabble.”
I’ll answer Will Wilkinson’s specific points, but I first have to say this: Wilkinson’s mode of arguing exemplifies why the immigration debate doesn’t ever seem to go anywhere.
Advocates of more and more immigration habitually use a 4-stage method best identified by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn in the Yes Minister series. The stages go as follows:
1) Nothing is going to happen.
2) Something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
3) Maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we *can* do.
4) Maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now.
Immigration proponents are so convinced that more immigration is good in itself that they do not always worry as much as they should about the way in which they achieve their aims. They sell huge society-changing transformations as small incremental steps.
When the sales pitch proves wrong or hugely exaggerated, they seem untroubled. Wilkinson’s own blitheness perfectly exemplifies the pattern. Running through his first post is a persistent undertone that the very idea of immigration laws is a big mistake. “Yes, the DREAM Act also incentivises illegal activity. But if the activity is not one that ought to be illegal, perhaps we should consider changing the law?”
Then when I point out the various ways in which this incentive operates, he squawks that the law in fact is “narrowly tailored” and applies only to “a relatively small group.”
Is it too Freudian to suspect that the lurid accusation of deceit repeatedly lodged by Will Wilkinson reveal an awareness of the credibility problems on his side of the argument?
My goal was to see beyond the advertising materials, to understand how the law would work in practice. I offered 3 ways that DREAM could benefit many, many people beyond the supposedly “narrowly targeted” designated beneficiaries.
Let’s look again at my 3 ways that DREAM might be abused. But since I’m going to proceed slower and with more detail than in my first post, I’d better break up the argument into parts to ease the burden on the reader.
Here’s case 1.
The language of the DREAM law offers benefits to people who arrived in the US after age 16 or who arrived before 16, but have spent less than the required 5 years in the United States.
I suggested that this language created some interesting possibilities for fraud. Perhaps the illegal immigrant arrived after age 16. He could still file an application, only with his birthday altered.
If the illegal immigrant is lucky, the fraud would deceive the authorities. It’s generally agreed that north of one-quarter of all the legalizations in the last amnesty, 1986, were fraudulent.
But even if the false information does not deceive the authorities, it can still be useful to the illegal immigrant. DREAM forbids the Department of Homeland Security to use material provided under DREAM in deportation proceedings. So if apprehended after filing his false application, the would-be immigrant can argue: “This proceeding is tainted! You would never have found me if I had not applied for the benefits of DREAM.”
The illegal argument might or might not succeed. But as I said in my original post, DREAM creates a great one-way option: a new set of legal tools to delay, impede and outright thwart enforcement actions. And given the crushing overburden of cases that paralyzes immigration enforcement in the United States, a deportation delayed is very nearly good as a deportation prevented.
Wilkinson seems to have entirely failed to grasp this point. Perhaps I expressed myself poorly. Wilkinson says: “If you’re in the country illegally and don’t qualify for DREAM, how does DHS’s inability to use bunk info in your DREAM application keep them from deporting you exactly as they would had you not filed some crooked papers?”
But what matters of course is DHS’s inability to use the truthful information mixed with the false information. DREAM creates a kind of Miranda right for illegal immigrants – and it’s very reasonable to fear that this new right will benefit many people beyond Wilkinson’s imagined few.
When I first took up the DREAM debate, I noted 3 ways in which the law’s reach was far, far bigger than advertised.
The first way is the way that it encouraged fraud. DREAM creates new opportunities for an illegal immigrant to use fraudulent documents to gain amnesty (and remember, it’s generally agreed that one-quarter of the legalizations in the last amnesty, 1986, were fraudulent). Possibly even more important, DREAM creates new opportunities for an illegal immigrant to use fraud to halt proceedings against him. Suppose an immigrant files a DREAM application, lies about his birthday, but tells the truth about his address and the social security number he is using. His fraud is detected, and he is apprehended. He can argue that the deportation is fatally legally tainted, because the government cannot use against him the information he himself provided. This will at a minimum severely delay proceedings – and because the immigration system is so clogged – a delayed proceeding is almost as good as a halted proceeding.
Will Wilkinson didn’t seem to understand this point. He suggested instead: people who lie on their DREAM applications will be caught and deported, period. I say: he’s dreaming.
Now to the second point that Will Wilkinson does not understand (or perhaps: refuses to understand).
Will Wilkinson describes DREAM as narrowly targeted and affecting only a small population.
Depends I suppose what you mean by “small”: the Center for Immigration Studies estimates the potentially eligible population at over 1 million, even assuming no fraud.
Once naturalized, those 1 million people will gain the right to sponsor their relatives – including of course the parents who brought them to the country illegally. In other words, DREAM could very plausibly legalize a population as large as that legalized by the 1986 amnesty: 3 million.
Will Wilkinson has two answers to this point:
1) It will happen slowly and 2) it doesn’t matter.
The process by which our notional 40-year-old undocumented immigrant can become a citizen is precisely the same as the process by which Mr Frum’s Canadian father could become a citizen through Mr Frum’s sponsorship. It’s not amnesty, and Mr Frum is simply goading the nativist rabble by choosing to misuse language in this way.
The first point may be right, we’ll see, but I don’t know why we should attach much weight to it.
The second is just breathtakingly defiant of reality. DREAM starts a process by which millions of people who could never otherwise qualify for legalization in the United States will qualify. They may not be directly amnestied themselves, but it is because of amnesty – and only because of amnesty – that they will become legal US residents over how long the process takes.
Will Wilkinson’s personal reference here only underscores the importance of the very thing he says doesn’t matter.
A sound immigration policy can be a very powerful force for social improvement. A Canadian-style immigration policy that emphasizes skills and that attracts immigrants who pay more in taxes than they consume in services strengthens the nation. But American immigration policy has steadily lowered the country’s skill levels (see the ETS report predicting the American workforce will actually decline in basic literacy over the next decades as a result of current immigration policy). US-style immigration policy increases demands for government services, including health care subsidies. (More than 1 in 4 of the uninsured are foreign born.) US-style immigration policy has intensified inequality, as we import millions of people whose families are likely to remain poor into the second and third generation, even the fourth generation. (See Telles & Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion.)
I’m not going to sponsor my father into the US. (My US citizen mother could have done that if my father had been interested.) But it’s just fanciful to imagine that the secondary beneficiaries of the DREAM amnesty will be substantial taxpayers. The parents and siblings of the people who will be amnestied under DREAM will be poorly educated, low-skilled, and likely to qualify for a range of services from food stamps to Section 8 housing to Medicaid and then very likely Medicare and Social Security. DREAM means millions of new claimants on US public services and billions of dollars in new costs for the federal government and the states. As CIS calculates today, simply the subsidies for DREAM beneficiaries’ college tuitions will cost $6.2 billion a year.
Dismissing such serious concerns as unworthy of notice does not become a debater who is as quick as Will Wilkinson to issue flamboyant but false accusations of deception and ignorance. Again, such behavior is more like advertising than arguing.
http://www.frumforum.com/the-dems-dr...han-it-appears