Waking to the Realties of the DREAM Act

I was volunteering at a non-profit legal office in San Francisco when I heard chanting outside my window. The chanting was quite loud, so I poked my head out the window to see what the noise was about. The office was on the twelfth floor, so I could not see the people very well. I did see lots of orange and red though, and I could make out a few signs. The rally in San Francisco, like rallies in other cities across the country that day, was about immigration reform.

Congress has debated for the past four year a bill first introduced in 2001: the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act. The bill has not passed Congress, although states like California have passed their own version. President Obama, impatient with the democratic process, announced in 2012 that his administration would be stopping deportations as though the DREAM act were already law. The President’s program is called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program.

Ignoring the oddity of a President enforcing a law which doesn’t even exist yet, the 2009 version of the DREAM Act would allow illegal aliens to remain in the country if they meet the following criteria: 1) proof of arrival in the country before sixteen years of age, 2) proof of residency for the last five years, 3) criminal background checks and proof of registration with the Selective Service, 4) be between the ages of twelve and thirty-five, 5) graduated from an American high school, hold a GED, or be admitted into a state university, 6) and have good moral character, as defined by the Department of Homeland Security.

The goal of the law is admirable, although there are a couple of issues which must be addressed if our immigration laws are to make any sense. First, children between twelve and seventeen need a legal guardian. Unless the parents are legal citizens, the federal government would either have to permit the parents to remain as well, or deport the parents. Neither solution is acceptable: the intent of the bill is that it is for minors only, but it seems cruel to take a child’s parents away and to leave the children in a foreign land.

DREAM Act proponents claim that allowing illegal immigrants who are minors to stay in the country will benefit the American economy. Legal immigrants have to pay taxes, so allowing these minors to stay legally would add billions to government coffers, in addition to the billons of taxes that illegal immigrants already pay into the system.

An unexpected population spike adds problems other than taxes though. The drug cartel members are in the same age range that the DREAM Act seeks to help. The college bound minors that the bill purports to help, if allowed to stay, would not be working on farms. They would be going to American colleges and competing with American middle class students for jobs. Given that middle class students loaded with debt are already having a hard time finding work, adding a few thousand young people to the labor market all at once seems like a recipe for more social unrest.

Second, and the reason the bill has been in hiatus for so long, is that there are number of states opposing allowing illegal immigrants to stay. Arizona and Nebraska, for example, refuse to give illegal aliens drivers’ licenses despite the lawsuits the Department of Justice has thrown at them.  The perception is that the waves of immigrants are a foreign invasion who bring crime and are unwilling to conform to American culture.

Although the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) should be spending more time arresting drug dealers than parents, it is hard for me to feel too much sympathy. I come from a family of immigrants, so I understand that the United States is a nation of immigrants. My grandparents spent hundreds of dollars in the 1970s so that my mother could come to the U.S. It took almost three decades for my mother to sponsor my aunts and uncles so that they could legally reside in the United States as well.

Obviously our immigration system is flawed, to say the least, but is important to understand that the reason legal immigrants oppose illegal immigrants with such vigor is not always racism, but from a sense of fairness. By avoiding the current immigration structure, legal immigrants perceive illegal immigrants as being unfairly favored by the federal government. These illegal immigrants are favored not because who they are or what they do, but because their country of national origin is physically close to the United States. Meanwhile, immigrants from Asia, Africa and Europe have to wait in line.

This may or may not be true, but feelings give rise to political outlooks. Illegal immigration does fuel class and ethnic tensions, although not in the way that illegal immigrants think it does. As illegal immigrants march down America’s major cities, they should stop and consider how other immigrants might perceive them.