Dream Act

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

When Dreams Turn To Nightmares

I thought it was an amazing number. In choosing 25 football players for the All-USA Today High School Football Team, coaches, recruiting experts, and sportswriters picked only one white player. The other players, identified by picture, name, and my own racial profiling, were one Mexican, one Hawaiian, and 22 blacks. One must assume that a strong majority of these players are descendants of slaves, forcefully “immigrated” to this country over 250 years ago.
Fourteen of the players came from the Confederate states, six from other Southern states, and only five from the North. I still remember when a Los Angeles Dodger executive lost his job years ago when he commented that black baseball players were faster and stronger because originally their ancestors had been bred to work in Southern cotton fields. He was correct genetically but terribly wrong “politically.”
I suppose it would be too much to ask that our country be guided by at least some of the Ten Commandments so enthusiastically followed by Christian Fundamentalists, Tea Party radicals, other Bible Thumpers, and Republican politicians when in public or on the floors of legislative chambers. The recent rejection of the Dream Act by Senate Republicans seems to indicate the Fourth Commandment is just a simple request by God. All of the world’s great religions have rules about how their members should treat strangers who come to the door. Do these “Good Samaritan” and “visitor” rules by religious Gods and Goddesses provide guidance for how we manage migrating populations seeking a better life? The Fourth Amendment clearly states that it applies everyone in our “territory,” and Scripture tells us it applies particularly to “strangers within thy gates.” Even the undocumented are under our family’s protection and influence. I believe we have this duty, even if by Friday I have often been converted to atheism by religious and political decisions made during the week.
We are not the only country with immigration problems. While the Rio Grande’s immigration traffic runs North, Mexico has illegals from Honduras and Guatemala sneaking across its Southern border. Israel estimates that at least half of its 220,000 foreign workers do not have work permits. Japan assigns all of its African “trainees” to night jobs so they are not as “visible!”

“If You Eat Vegetables and Meat, Live In Personal Housing, And Enjoy Restaurants You Are Part Of The Immigration Problem”

At the present time the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that 8.3 million illegal immigrants are in the U.S. labor force. Over 40 percent of brick masons are illegals. So are 25 percent of farm workers and 28 percent of dishwashers. Gregory Rodriguez of the Los Angeles Times puts the problem succinctly: “When it comes to illegal immigration, nobody seems to take responsibility….If you eat vegetables, enjoy restaurants, reside in a house built in the last 30 years or ever let a valet park your car, the chances are you’re implicated in the hypocritical politics that allows 7 million to 8 million people to work illegally in the country.”
In a previous column I indicated how Latinos got to this country illegally so easily over the last 130 years. “Coyotaje” is a Mexican-Spanish colloquial term which refers to people-smuggling. “Coyotes” are worker recruiters who feed the cheap labor policies of our government,  corporations, fruit and vegetable growers, builders and Chamber of Commerce offices in practically every city. Coyotes, through recessions, the Great Depression, and many economic bubbles, supply the “contract” labor that harvests fruits and vegetables, builds houses and landscapes, plants and weeds gardens, builds electric, water, and sewer lines, and picks up and hauls the garbage away. We have brought in so much cheap labor in the last century we have 50 million LEGAL Latinos in this country, with whites already the minority in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawaii.
Even the Wizard of Oz no longer dominates Kansas. Cheap labor does. Sometimes it’s hard to believe how quickly this country is changing because of coyote recruiting. But it started in the 1880’s. Finney County, Kansas is the home of a new Tyson meatpacking plant that employs thousands. Five generations ago Mexican laborers came to work in the Kansas sugar beet fields and plants and often settled in Garden City, a town of 28,000. Now there are 14 different languages spoken at the plant by people recruited from around the world. Whites have already become the minority in Finney County. Kansas is the home of Alf Landon who ran against FDR and got landslided. It is one of the most conservative Republican states in the Union, the home of Pastor Phelps and his gay-hating placards, the home of killers of abortion doctors–BUT good Kansas Republicans all love that cheap labor.

Enter The Dream Act For Those Who Are Trying To Escape A Nightmare

When George W. Bush was elected president in 2000 he seemed to have immigration reform as one of his top priorities. The Dream Act, actually a minor bill in the attempt to reform immigration laws, was sponsored by Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch when it was first introduced in 2001. Immigration laws had virtually remained the same since 1965. So why did he fight it so hard to defeat it when it was brought to the Senate floor in December of 2010?
A free-market capitalist system which the Republicans worship often runs short of labor during an economic “bubble.” There are only two ways to get more labor during a shortage: (1) raise employee wages until the money attracts more laborers and balance is created between labor supply and demand, (2) find another source of cheap labor. Corporations have never liked to increase wages because such costs cut into profits. That’s why unionization is fought, minimum wage laws are resisted, the forty-hour week is ignored, and overtime is highly restricted.
The Dream Act was designed as the first step in major immigration reform. It would give a few hundred thousand young people a chance at citizenship out of millions of illegals brought here as very young children by parents looking for a better life. Their kids, although members of an illegal family, were educated here and the Dream Act bill would allow them a chance to better themselves and at the same time contribute to this country as soldiers and college students and graduates. After all, when they entered the country they were too young to understand the consequences of being an “undocumented.”

Tina And Pedro Are Typical Dream Act Kids

An example of a possible Dream Act child is Tina, featured in a Christian Science Monitor article.  She was brought North across the Rio Grande by her mother when she was three years old in the dark of night from the small Mexican mining town of Zacatecas. Tina’s mother ended up in Chicago working illegally for several employers. Tina was an excellent student in elementary and high school, earning high grades through hard study. She went to a Chicago community college for two years and then attended Northern Illinois University at Dekalb, earning a bachelor’s degree in history and political science. She hopes to become a lawyer, but many jobs remain closed to her because she has been unable to establish legal status. She cannot take the Illinois bar exam because she is not a citizen.
Tina is like thousands of other undocumented college students who are attending or have graduated from American colleges and universities. Does it make any sense to deport these kids to Mexico when they have grown up in the U.S., succeeded in school, and are eager to join the military or continue their studies here? Perhaps we need to read that inscription on the Statue of Liberty again.
Pedro Ramirez, also featured in The Christian Science Monitor, sneaked across the border with his parents when he was also three. He is now classified as an undocumented immigrant while serving as student body president of California State University at Fresno. Pedro wants desperately to be a citizen, and says: “You can’t be all that you can be. Some students I know are very hardworking, can do great things. But they could go further.”
Democratic Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, also a sponsor of the Dream Act, pleaded with his fellow senators at the crucial vote: “You probably will never face such a clear vote on justice. These are children who have been raised in this country. They stand in the classrooms and pledge allegiance to our flag. They believe in their heart of hearts this is home. This is the only country they have ever known.”
But to no avail. Back in 2001 when he sponsored the bill, Senator Hatch argued for the bill on humanitarian grounds: “It allows children who have been brought to the United States through no volition of their own the opportunity to fulfill their dreams.” Senator Hatch is somewhat leery of Tea Party opposition in his next reelection bid in conservative Utah, so he led the Senate Republicans in a “Hell No!” vote. What a “Profile in Cowardice” vote! No more talk about “humanitarian.” No more talk about “opportunity” and “dreams.” Just a crass, cowardly, self-interest vote to preserve his lofty position because Tina and Pedro and their families would most likely vote for a party that supports civil rights instead of more tax cuts for the rich.
But will the Republicans become the “White Only” Party pushing only tax cuts and street gates?  Lou Dobbs of CNN fame preached against any reform program allowing illegals to become citizens–while hiring five illegals to work his East Coast estates and horse barns. E-Bay billionaire Meg Whitman campaigned for the California governorship–while employing an “undocumented “ immigrant as housekeeper for nine years. The shift of Arizona Republican Senator John McCain from Dream Act supporter to denigrator during his 2010 reelection campaign turned him into a crass, double-talking Senator Blowhard–reinforced by the fact that he ranked 894 out of 899 in his class at the Naval Academy.

What Is Right About The Dream Act?

I have a snow-hating brother who has lived practically his whole personal and business life in California. They now live in Rancho Mirage near the desert. A sister married a California newspaperman 50 years ago and lived in Los Angeles and Pasadena until dying of vicious Alzheimer’s two years ago. So having some ties to the California immigration “problem,” I have had a keen interest for years in the toils of migrant labor so aptly described in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
Many Californians became billionaires on Latino stoop labor, always happy to hire them for peanuts to work the almond trees, the lettuce fields, the grape vines, the orchards that cover the Sacramento Valley. But, geez, why didn’t they just fly home at night so they wouldn’t dirty up the landscape, pollute the air, rivers, and parks, and where 25 of “them” would live in one small house?
The Migration Policy Institute of D.C. says the bill would possibly cover up to two million children and young adults who are in school or have graduated. MPI estimates that 66,000 have a BA or higher and that over a 100,000 have completed two years of undergrad work. Their path to citizenship would require graduation from high school and then two years of college or two years of military service. Bill backers claimed that the country needs reinforcements in the military and a much more educated work force. National polls indicated before the Senate vote that 66 percent of the American people favored this “work and learn” approach to citizenship for those who had been brought here when they were under sixteen. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the passage of the Dream Act could reduce the federal deficit by as much as $2.2 billion over the next decade. But with the Republican “government takeover” of the House, the chances of the Dream Act are slim if at all.
And Slim is out of town.

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