The DREAM Act is a matter of basic fairness. By giving a path to citizenship to those undocumented immigrants who didn't have a choice about being here and who are going to college or joining the military, it avoids punishing the kind of hardworking, Americanized immigrants Republicans say they want to see coming to live here. In fact, it's the kind of moderate, incremental immigration policy that Republicans like Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bill Bennett have supported in the past. The idea is that this would "incentivize" illegal immigration, but that wouldn't make the children brought here before they were too young to have a choice in the matter any more responsible for their predicament.
Sen. Jeff Sessions is now out trying to prevent the DREAM Act, and in doing so, he's engaging in some very basic scaremongering:
“In addition to immediately putting an estimated 2.1 million illegal immigrants (including certain criminal aliens) on a path to citizenship, the DREAM Act would give them access to in-state tuition rates at public universities, federal student loans and federal work-study programs,” said the research paper, being distributed by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The study they cite, by the Migration Policy Center, is 22 pages long. It's not a tough read. But unlike Mark Krikorian, it's not like Sessions' staff didn't bother to read the study. They just knowingly put forth the 2.1 million number when they know the study itself says that only 825,000 people would likely end up with permanent legal status as a result of the legislation. We know they know the realistic number because they allude to other estimates about who would be eligible for conditional status in the footnotes to the white paper. Also, the 825,000 number is on the first page, in the executive summary, directly below the paragraph listing the other numbers they cite.
But let's say America gets 2.1 million more college graduates and service members as loyal citizens, but only because these people were brought here by their parents before the age of 16 and therefore had no part in breaking the law. Where's the bad part? (Matthew Yglesias has more on this.)
Well, from Republicans' perspective, that's another 825,000 Democratic leaning votes. So much of the Republican position on immigration is premised not necessarily on reducing the number of illegal immigrants but the number of Latino citizens in the U.S. The opposition to the DREAM Act, and the obsession with ending birthright citizenship, have this in common.
