DREAM Act vote, tomorrow
December 7, 2010
Please pray for justice.
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Please pray for justice.
Comments are closed.
It passed the House, now on to the Senate.
Apparently, there is a procedural vote in the Senate today.
http://www.cbsnews.com/ 8301-503544_162-20025123-503544.html
Speculation about a filibuster attempt, but I have not heard about anything like that for sure.
What makes you think that these people deserve the Dream Act. They are illegals! If anything the legal residents need help with school costs, not illegals.
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The proposed DREAM Act indeed is a dream for coddlers of illegal aliens. For Americans — particularly those pursuing higher education — it’s a nightmare.
DREAM, front and center this week in the lame-duck Congress, would grant permanent legal status to illegals age 35 or younger who came to the United States before age 16 and complete two years of college.
And they’d pay in-state tuition — which would cost U.S. taxpayers $6.2 billion a year, according to a new Center for Immigration Studies report (cis.org/dream-act-costs).
Mainly low-income, an estimated 1 million-plus DREAM-beneficiary illegals would gravitate to lower-cost state schools and community colleges, where they’d get taxpayer-funded annual tuition subsidies averaging almost $6,000.
And with public institutions’ enrollment and funding limited, tuition hikes, tax hikes funding expanded enrollment and/or fewer slots for U.S. students would result.
DREAM provides no money to help states and counties cope. But one way or another, taxpayers would foot tuition bills for illegals whose enrollment would bar those taxpayers’ children from classrooms.
The DREAM Act is yet another product of a political mindset that ignores the definition of “illegal” and puts foreign lawbreakers ahead of law-abiding citizens. It must never become law.
Harry: You are being ignorant. This is not about schooling, it is about justice — about giving children who came to this country under no fault or will of their own and have lived here most of their live a path to stay in the only home they know. And these are not generic “these people”; they are people I know, student I have in class and friends of mine.
Any Catholic who opposes the principle of this piece of legislation is rebelling from the demands of the Gospel.
Sam
Gregory: I don’t care what it may cost. Regardless, it is the right thing to do. If that is your logic you are treating person as a means, not an end. You are not being faithful to the Church or to what is right.
Sam
Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini is the patron saint of immigrants and seems to have had an interesting and inspiring life.
More.
“I don’t care what it may cost.”
There’s a lot of that going around. Continued schooling might benefit those of us who insist that money and purple unicorns will magically appear to meet the expense of so called “social justice”? – the strangest notion, with it’s twin “greater good”, considering that like purple unicorns there are no such things. Count the costs before we build the tower, much, as God instructs?
Rather than call people ignorant and question their faith to the Church and what’s right (nicely played though, defaulting to the personal instead of arguing the substance, right out of the handbook), can we examine this through a right lens, because what you’re suggesting is entirely counter to a human rights attitude while simultaneously denying reality – normalizing criminal behavior, theirs or anyone else’s, is not beneficial to any child. Removing consequences of anti-social behavior encourages continued anti-social behavior. Stealing from one person to give to another is still just petty theft, no matter what it’s couched as – using people as means, as you put it (and blasphemous when when reducing Christ to some sort of juvenile Robin Hood figure). All of those things are enemies to humanity.
Yet, all of those things are required to get to the DREAM act, and advocating for it is arguing a false paradigm. No one has a “right” to go to college, or much of anything else, materially speaking, born here or elsewhere. I don’t find it in the Bible or the CCC, so saying that someone is not being faithful to the Church because they don’t buy in to a political agenda is insulting and smacks of indulgences and other corruptions visited by man on the Church. It’s interesting, too, that this attitude is borrowed from a political persuasion that would obfuscate any of us practicing our faith at all. Not the company I’d care to align myself with for any cause.
Do I believe the children of illegal immigrants have some standing as political refugees considering the state of Mexico (and other similarly blighted countries)? Sure. I can see granting asylum for those children and encouraging our State Department to insist that the Mexican government either pay us to maintain the portion of their population who arrive here or change their myriad corrupt ways.
At the age of majority, asylum-status children of illegal immigrants will need to make application for a student visa and go through the same channels as all other foreign students, without preferential acceptance or ear-marked financial aid, and work for permanent resident status if that’s their desire.
There’s no injustice suffered by these children except by that imposed on them by their ILLEGAL immigrant parents. Perhaps they should be encouraged to take it up with them?
rachael: I don’t have time to correct the false assumptions you make about me in this reply. A little browsing in my writings here will remedy many of those false assumptions.
Again, this is not about schooling but about what is right. I have a student who was brought to the US when he was 2 years old. He graduated as a valedictorian from high school and considers the US as his home, it is all he knows. He is willing to go through the application process, but it will require him to go “back” to a place he has never lived. This act has many problems, but, in principle it is meant to address these cases.
By the way: the “illegality” of this act of immigration sits on the genealogy of unjust war and arbitrary political decisions. For instance: my family has lived in Texas as a part of Mx., TX, and the US. We never crossed the border, the border crossed us. These borders are strange things: they allow the free flow of goods and capital, but limits the flow of labor and residents.
I am hardly going to persuade you, but you should see what the Church has to say on the matter. Read an encyclical or call your bishop.
-Sam
Sam, I will continue to read your work. I certainly don’t hold that a misunderstanding can’t occur and be rectified.
I’m sorry for your student. I pray political asylum will become the avenue by which he and others in his situation will be able to navigate the admittedly overly complicated (obnoxious, convoluted, etc) immigration process. I have no desire to send children to such a corrupt and volatile place as Mexico in its current state.
Back to the DREAM act – you keep saying “it’s what is right” – based on what? There is a difference between sentimentality and right Christian understanding, and I fail to see what is right about it from any point of view. Again, the DREAM act is NOT addressing basic human rights, it’s addressing the political and material wants of a cultural group (being used by a political group, if you want to discuss what ISN’T right, going so far as to obfuscate basic rights of others). Facilitated schooling is one example of the many material provisions in this proposal, and one of the most expensive, so to continue to insist that it’s irrelevant is to not argue honestly.
“By the way: the “illegality” of this act of immigration sits on the genealogy of unjust war and arbitrary political decisions. For instance: my family has lived in Texas as a part of Mx., TX, and the US. We never crossed the border, the border crossed us. These borders are strange things: they allow the free flow of goods and capital, but limits the flow of labor and residents.”
Sorry, but that’s a straw man – wars of all kinds have been waged and won, fought and lost, borders moved. It’s the tragic condition of a fallen world. We share a similar heritage, if not an identical one. I can’t imagine life in Texas with a border fence or a diminished legal workforce and immigrant population, from Mexico and the whole world, really, and yes!, we must figure out a way to afford the bodies that come with the backs and brains (and hearts!) we so desperately need. But I won’t diminish the experiences of someone who works diligently and accomplishes his own version of a good life through legal channels simply because he or she is an unskilled laborer rather than a class valedictorian. Preferential recognition for children of illegal immigrants only amounts to discrimination against those who followed the law of the land in which they chose to live. That is what is arbitrary and unjust. And again, they should take it up with their parents, who should be well assimilated and prepared to negotiate the ramifications of their decisions by now, if they’ve been here long enough to to see their children complete high school, rather than assigning burdensome encumbrance to the communities that have already extended resources on their behalves.
The “border” of a nation-state is a modern invention, as is the political apparatus it derives its authority from. That fact gets to the core of both my politics and my sense of what is right. Your nativist perception of immigration as a competitive, social-Darwinian situation echoes the same arguments leveled against other predominantly Catholic immigrants since the 19th century. I will be clear about my sense of those who immigrate illegally: the illegality of their action is itself suspect. As Augustine put it, “An unjust law is no law at all.”
Sam, I’m sorry you feel the need to default to personal insult – there’s nothing in my reasoning that indicates either social-Darwinism or “competition”, as you describe it, and most certainly NOT anti-Catholic. And that’s not just insulting to me, but deliberately inflammatory, and that line of thinking is designed to keep a certain demographic dependent on a provider class and a defining class – the providers pay for what the definers determine is “good enough” for everyone. It’s a control mechanism, born of politics, not Christian theology.
Borders aren’t all that new, and not a nativist notion – that’s just not historically accurate. The US is relatively new on the scene, I’ll grant you, but if you’re only arguing US borders I suppose we’ll have to assemble the UN so we might redress our grievances to the countries of the Six Flags for their contribution to the whole muddled affair? And I defy you to attempt to enter any country illegally, better yet, scale the Vatican walls and argue your anti-border sentiments there. Good luck with that. You can get in there, though – by appointment, just like here. There’s nothing evil or anti-Catholic about that, is there?
“An unjust law is no law at all.” Amen. And exactly why the DREAM act should not pass (and didn’t), though I’m sure the Republicans won’t be able to contain themselves and will attempt a version to ingratiate themselves to the same potential constituency, which is in fact, what this whole thing is about.
It’s a shame to not find any common ground, but I’ll not insult you by implying I think you’re only misguided, but plain wrong, theologically, and the DREAM act out of bounds, politically. Thanks for the conversation, nevertheless.
The social-Darwinism/competition statement was not an insult — it was and is a descriptive statement about the way you talk about this issue. There is no “we” or “them” here. As for my views on borders here is a previous post:
http://vox-nova.com/2010/04/27/what-is-a-border/
I do not mean to imply that you are anti-Catholic, but I do mean to draw your attention to the fact that many objected to the Irish for similar reasons; reasons that pitted “them” against “us.” Take, for instance, your words on assimilation: that could have been taken out of a speech by Horace Mann in the 1930′s talking about the need of the Irish to assimilate to the (protestant) ways of the Whigs.
I lived in Mexico illegally for almost 5 years. I attended public schools there and crossed back and forth the border frequently. The Vatican may ask for you for an appointment, but there is a guarantee you can get in if you like. If that were the issue here, believe me, I would not protest.
The issue is the principle upon which we exploit the free flow of capital and goods across our borders, yet prevent the free flow of labor to willing and dependent employers. Go punish their bosses, not the workers who are lured here to work for them. And certainly not their children.