There was a lot of Republican id getting released during the House debate over the DREAM Act yesterday, but I think Rep. Dana Rohrbacher distilled it best. Julianne Hing reports:
“It is not being cold-hearted to acknowledge that every dollar spent on illegal immigrants is one dollar less than our own children, our own senior citizens, and for all those who are in this society who played by the rules, who paid their taxes and expect their government to watch out for their needs before it bestows privileges and scarce resources on illegals who have not played by the rules,” said California Rep. Dana Rohrbacher. He later called the DREAM Act “affirmative action amnesty” because it would allow immigrant youth privileges that “non-minority citizens” would not be allowed to access.
The DREAM Act does force applicants to pay taxes, in addition to about $2,525 in application fees over the 10 years they spend as conditional nonimmigrant residents. But it doesn't "bestow" any privileges on applicants that Americans don't already have; it provides them with a 13-year arduous path to citizenship during which they have to adhere to very high behavioral, educational, and occupational requirements. Michelle Malkin calls DREAM an "illegal immigrant bailout," which stretches the limits of Luntzian truthiness: A bailout is now when people give the government money.
As an argument against the substance of the DREAM act, Rohrbacher's tirade falls flat. But as an expression of the widely held conservative view that minorities and whites in America are in a zero-sum competition for scarce resources, I think it's relatively concise. When "those people win," real Americans lose. That's Rohrbacher's argument against the DREAM Act. It's Rep. Steve King's argument against the Pigford settlement. It's Glenn Beck's argument against the Affordable Care Act, the conservative-dominated Civil Rights' Commission's argument against the financial-regulation bill, and Rush Limbaugh's Rosetta stone for understanding why unemployment remains high.
Since it's actually worse to call something out as racist than do something racist, politeness dictates that we pretend these are all substantive objections to policy rather than fairly blatant attempts to exploit white racial resentment.
