The DREAM Act
Posted by: mcq
on Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Mark Kirkorian brings us up to date on the DREAM Act, an incremental attempt to pass a measure of amnesty for some illegal immigrants:In anticipation of today's cloture vote, DREAM Act supporters have been telling people that the measure would give amnesty to only 60,000 illegal aliens a year; see this, for instance, from the Daily Kos. But even their own think tank disagrees — the Migration Policy Institute has estimated that 360,000 illegals would get amnesty right away, with another 715,000 benefiting in the future, for a total of over 1 million amnestied. Using a different data source, we looked at the same question and estimated that the total number of potential beneficiaries of the amnesty is 2.1 million. What's more, there are another 1.4 million parents and young siblings of the under-18 amnesty recipients who do not themselves qualify for the amnesty, but whom the government is likely to let stay once their family members get legalized. See our analysis here. All this assumes no fraud, which is likely to be rampant, both with people lying about how old they were when they came here and with people lying about their own age, to meet the bill's cutoff of 30. As I've been saying for some time, immigration is and will be the top domestic issue in the upcoming election cycle. Polls have indicated that the vast majority of Americans support immigration reform, however, they do not support amnesty proposals such as this. It'll be interesting to see how this fares today in the Senate.
More here.
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