Congress To Address The Dream Act In 2011
By John Christensen on January 7, 2011, 9:40 am
With the failure of the DREAM Act in the US Senate in December 2010, it is likely that any and all developments in immigration policy will occur at the state level. State legislators have already played key roles in framing the debate on immigration at the state level, and their influence is slated to grow in 2011. Unfortunately, this includes anti-immigrant forces, who just this week launched.
14th Amendment
Critics of the 14th Amendment have supporters in Congress. Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jon Kyl of Arizona are among the most vocal about changing the automatic citizenship law. Today, GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa introduced the first citizenship bill of the 112th Congress, to do away with what he calls “anchor babies.”
Birthright
One of the main sponsors of the bill, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, told Fox News, “Passage of this bill will ensure that immigration law breakers are not rewarded, will close the door to future waves of extended family chain migration, and will help to bring an end to the global birthright.
Immigration Enforcement
Conservative local lawmakers have consistently pointed to Washington’s inaction on immigration enforcement when passing new anti-immigrant laws. But ironically, the shift is driven largely by Washington’s active devolution of immigration enforcement to state and local law enforcement over the past several years. The Obama administration has continued that trend. The result is that the country is now covered in a lattice work of increasingly hostile localized laws and practices that are fueling an intensifying confrontation between immigrant rights advocates and anti-immigrant policy makers in state and local governments.
Legal Immigrants
To claim that the children brought here by illegal immigrants deserve the same rights and advantages that citizens and legal immigrants are afforded is to say that children of burglars, robbers and thieves have a right to the goods that their parents stole because they received them through no fault of their own. Also, the financial drain the illegal immigrants place on our resources should not be rewarded by allowing them to displace a citizen or legal immigrant in our places of higher learning.
