Finally Some Good Immigration Legislation

So it looks like the DREAM Act is finally going to hit the Senate floor.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced today that the Senate would be voting on the DREAM Act and a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (which is a big story in its own right) as amendments to a Defense Authorization bill.

In a nutshell, DREAM would make it easier for immigrant children to gain citizenship.   Via Wikipedia:

“This bill would provide certain illegal immigrant students who graduate from US high schools, who are of good moral character, arrived in the U.S. as minors, and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill’s enactment, the opportunity to earn conditional permanent residency.”

After graduating getting their high school diploma or GED, they can then enroll in college or enlist in the military, and after two years of that they become permanent citizens.

This bill seems pretty uncontroversial to me, and I hope it passes.  Whatever your views on immigration, it’s certainly not “amnesty,” and it even makes good economic sense: we’re adding highly educated individuals to the workforce and saving money and other resources by not deporting them.

Surprisingly, given that this is a bill sponsored by the Dems, even a few Republicans support it, such as Carly Fiorina of California.  On the other hand, most of them (even Orren Hatch, who has co-sponsored the bill in the past) object that appending DREAM to the supposedly unrelated Defense Authorization bill is just a sneaky way to get it passed.   Whether or not they’re right, I’ll be curious to see how many Republicans will toe the line here and how many, among the few who do support it, will stick to their guns.  I’m cautiously optimistic for the latter, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

–Aaron Bekemeyer