Risking arrest, a group of DREAM eligible youth staged a protest in an Obama for America campaign office in Denver, Colorado on Tuesday. Their demand: the President should use his executive authority to stop the deportations of young people who were brought to this country as young children and who would be eligible for relief if the DREAM Act passed. If that bill were passed, it would provide a pathway to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants who complete college or military service.
This action by the DREAMers in Colorado was not surprising to immigration politics observers. Earlier in the week the National Immigrant Youth Alliance sent out a statement demanding an executive order to halt the deportations of DREAM Act eligible youth. In that statement, the NIYA expressed disappointment that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had disregarded prosecutorial discretion guidelines that were supposed to prevent young people who were DREAM eligible from being removed. Furthermore, the youth led organization issued a firm warning to the administration:
“We hope that our call for an executive order has not fallen on deaf ears in the White House. If the Administration does not issue an executive order, we will be forced to respond with direct action in the coming days. The administration, by not taking action by means fully within its power, keeps our lives on hold. That position, for us, is no longer acceptable.”
Last year, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo that provided ICE agents with guidelines in exercising prosecutorial discretion. The intention was for ICE to use its resources in removing undocumented folks who posed a risk to the country and to better prioritize the agency’s resources. Many activists were hoping that since President Obama signaled that he supports the DREAM Act and since many DREAMers are law abiding aside from their immigration status, this memo would provide some relief for the young people.
But the deportations continued.
Politic365 was able to connect with some DREAMers about what is happening with prosecutorial discretion. Isabel Castillo of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance explained, “Currently in Virginia, we are working on a case where an individual was put in deportation proceedings for picking up firewood, a forest ranger saw him and took him to ICE. According to the Morton Memo this is a low priority case, Cesar has a US Citizen sister and his mother is a legal permanent resident. Where is the discretion they talk about? You can read more about his case here.”
For well over a year, activists and immigration attorneys have been urging President Obama to use his executive authority to provide relief to DREAM eligible youth. And it’s been documented that the President does have this authority as other Republican and Democratic Presidents in recent history have used it. Should President Obama use his executive authority to provide some relief to DREAMers, this could signal to Latino voters and the immigrant community more broadly that the President still has some “skin in the game” because the DREAM Act failed in 2010 and since he couldn’t deliver on his campaign promise of immigration reform. In fact, the Obama administration has set records for deportations, and over three quarters of Latinos disapprove of how the President has handled the immigration issue.
“I feel like President Obama is taking the Latina/o vote for granted,” Neidi Dominguez, a member of DREAM Team Los Angeles, told Politic365 . “He is actively choosing to not take action and use executive authority to protect undocumented youth, like myself, who know this country as home.”
“There is no legal reason why President Obama has not granted categorical administrative relief to undocumented youth, so it’s clear that his inactivity is fueled by his fear of losing votes and being critiqued by the conservative right wing for granting relief to this group of young people,” added Dominguez.
Should the deportations of young people continue the Obama campaign could have a serious problem on its hands. It’s the President saying he would like to see DREAMers become productive members of our society, yet the actions of ICE agents and others tell another story. With DREAMers spread out across the country ready to take action, Obama for America offices could become the targets of more sit-ins and protests.
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There is no legal reason why President Obama has not granted categorical administrative relief to undocumented youth…..
The reason is because being an illegal is against the law! Perhaps the Dreamers should start learning to obey the law instead of being little brats "demanding" things they are not entitled to.
That's the point. They're saying it shouldn't be illegal. Your argument makes no sense considering how much legislation evolved over time.
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•H.R. 692 – The Nuclear Family Priority Act introduced by Rep. Phil Gingrey would finish Chain Migration. The bill would reform the family preference visa categories to only allow nuclear family members (spouses and minor children) that are foreign nationals to receive green cards. The bill would also create a provisional, but renewable visa for the parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. Eliminating Chain Migration was a recommendation of the bi-partisan Barbara Jordan Commission issued in 1995 and would have the greatest impact in reducing overall immigration numbers.
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H.R. 2885 – Already well sponsored is Mandatory E-Verify, which was initially sponsored by Senator Lamar Smith of Texas. The bill entitled ‘The Legal Workforce Bill’ (H.R.2885) has been blocked by House speaker, John Boehner of Ohio and Dave Camp of Michigan, who is Chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. Americans must insist these lawmakers. E-Verify have gained a success rate nationwide, but is still only voluntary. We must insist both parties place (H.R.2885) to be presented on the house floor without delay. Millions of Americans that remain jobless would benefit highly from mandatory E-Verify. This computer based government application can detect illegal workers and reject them from every business—large and small—with heavy punishment for indifferent company owners.
Just these few zero tolerant bills, could begin a slow, but gaining departure of foreign nationals. Many will flee to Sanctuary States as California, Nevada, but nationwide mandatory laws would even end this.
Years of intentional encouragement by both political parties, has erupted in a major response from anti-illegal alien organizations, including NumbersUSA, Americans for Legal Immigration (ALIPAC), The Heritage foundation, The Federation for Immigration Reform, Judicial Watch and thousands of more groups, blogs available to all readers across the Internet.
Employment visas should only be granted to professional people and STEM workers (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workers to the U.S. in an expedited process. The Constitutional TEA PARTY is gaining in power and will unseat liberal Democrat-Republican pro-illegal immigration politicians, derailing open border zealot ideologies. Lastly we must oversee all elections, as Democrats are indifferent to illegal aliens voting, which is carefully hidden; surf the Internet for information on voter fraud and ID theft that has been gaining momentum in the last two decades. Read the latest irregularities by checking Florida.
Join your local TEA PARTY (THE CONSTITUTIONAL PEOPLE’S PARTY) and fight back, before it’s too late. The Tea Party is huge and still increasing and ready to throw out corrupt lawmakers. This is the time to empty the sleaze from Washington. WE MUST RID OURSELVES OF THE TAX AND SPEND LAWMAKERS. Read in order by state the good politicians we have in congress at the ALIPAC website. Discover for yourself who in state and federal tiers of government, which incumbents should be dumped and who is really working for the American people? This will be crucial in the coming months as we head towards the most significant election of our lifetime. Study your states costs to pay for the financial support of the illegal alien invasion. Call your Senator and Congressman at the Washington, DC. , Switchboard 202-224-3121 and demand they pass these above mentioned laws. Only citizens have the right to vote, although the liberal Democrats have tried to conceal it, illegal aliens have been voting in large numbers for years.
Anti-illegal immigration personages as Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, Senator Sessions of Arkansas, Tea Party Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker are some of a few standing alone, so we need to support these individuals. For without these two men the liberals Democrats, Republicans we would have open borders and no interior enforcement whatsoever.
Republican Rep. Ben Quayle of Arizona has cosponsored three immigration bills from the list of bills that make up NumbersUSA “5 Reduction Immigration bills” Rep. Quayle has now cosponsored bills in 4 of our 5 categories – only omitted a bill to end the Visa Lottery. That bill, H.R.704 introduced by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, has already been approved by the House Judiciary Committee and can no longer add more cosponsors. Rep. Qualye serves on the Judiciary Committee and voted for H.R.704 during markup.
Last week, Rep. Qualye co-sponsored:
•H.R.100 – The CLEAR Act presented by Rep. Marsha Blackburn would augment interior enforcement by requiring federal immigration officials to cooperate with local law enforcement agents. It also provides full backing for SCAAP, which compensates states that incarcerate criminal illegal aliens.
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•H.R.140 – The Birthright Citizenship Act introduced by Rep. Steve King would end Birthright Citizenship, requiring that at least one parent of a child born in the United States be a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. The U.S. is one of only two developed nations (Canada) to still offer Birthright Citizenship. This is a hundred billion dollar expenditure for taxpayers. Smuggled children that inherit instant citizenship through misguided laws, which have not been tested in the Supreme Court. Another unfunded mandate, that is part of uncompensated mandates such as education through high school graduation, free health treatments from the common cold to expensive surgeries paid by YOU. An overcrowded prison system full of criminal aliens, who are to blame for high percentages of wicked acts. Then a kaleidoscope of welfare programs manipulated by both parties, giving access to programs, denied to our citizens and legal residents.
Poor Brittanicus…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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"Just these few zero tolerant bills, could begin a slow, but gaining departure of foreign nationals."
Ah, xenophobia and neo-Nazi sentiment, exactly what the Tea Party needs!
Brittannicus, I hope you can come back to this wall and could formally answer this one question (excuse the essay down below, but hopefully it can give everyone some perspective on this debate;
Given the relative economic and geographic positions of the United Stated and Mexico, it should be hardly surprising, that unrealistic legal limits will produce large number of undocumented immigrants. It’s not a stretch to say, as historian Mae Ngai has, that we have created the “Illegal” immigrant. With that said, I’d like to ask the following question:
Is it inconceivable to believe that a person; from any origin, with any form of hardship, and means of migrating to our nation, will assimilate to become an American because he has learned the English language and is willing to speak English for the future, and even to cast his vote for an American political party?
In 1919, Theodore Roosevelt affirmed that "if the immigrant who comes here does in good faith [with the help of education] become an American and assimilates [herself or] himself to us [she or] he shall be treated on an exact equality with every one else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such [woman or] man because of creed or birth-place or origin."
Today, the anti-immigrant sentiment, as introduced by Manny Guisa in Can We Stop the Anti-Immigrant Hysteria, “Immigrants take our jobs, become public burdens, compete with our own poor, and don’t contribute to our economy. What’s more, they can’t assimilate and ultimately divide our society with a mixing of cultures that we can’t accommodate. Immigrants are uneducated, often unvaccinated, and will only end up creating overpopulated urban areas.” http://socialblemish.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/can…
Almost everything that has been said in the arguments about closing the border and shutting immigration has been said before. Comparing the above diatribe to a news story, Manny Guisa points out that “you would likely read [it] in a flyer in 1844 America about the Irish, or the Chinese, in the same century.” The basic drama has been reenacted again and again. “Replace Irish or Italian or Jew with Mexican or Muslim, and what comes from immigration restrictionists now could have come from the opponents of immigration a century or more ago” as stated in Not Fit For Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America by Peter Schrag.
Manny Guisa challenges that “although we may find these [exclusionary events] in our history textbooks to highlight America’s dark social past, the vitriolic phenomenon is being recycled today.”T he elements of our immigration policy failures have to be noted: the eleven or twelve million undocumented residents living in the shadows of American Society; their hundreds of thousands of children who were brought here at a young age, went to school here, or are going to school now, but under current law have no real future; a long-term economic prospect that, notwithstanding any recession, will require millions of new skilled workers that are denying ourselves; the ongoing social and economic dangers, not to say the hypocrisy of keeping millions as legal Untermenschen in a nation that professes equality and equal opportunity.
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." -Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" –Voltaire
I believe that the sentiment of exclusion, and its unfortunate action, banish our neighbors, tear our American families apart, and wave away the investment that each undocumented member of our society has attained. We must together realize that this debate has existed for more than 300 hundred years- from one immigrant generation to the next. The only threat posed and continuously created into a diatribe throughout all that time, reframed and repackaged, is the novelty of threat of hate that ardently suffocates the Love that COULD exist between us all, as humans and as friends. How can we be inclusive of the many that didn't come through Legal means, and have come to exist in our society without bashing us like scapegoats in such pejorative tunes? Aren’t we all of the same kind; the many of the one? Is there too much pluribus and not enough unum? In Beyond Borders, A History of Mexican Migration to the United States by Timothy J. Henderson, he describes laws as exclusive functions that “protect affluence and privilege, as well as to protect and preserve distinctive cultures and practices."
Why can't we be inclusive of diversity? Instead of having laws debate a binary argument, Legal or Illegal, we should acknowledge the successful gradual and voluntary process of assimilation, education, aspirations to contribute to society, and encourage each individual, not pressure, to use their “religious and/or ethnic institutions” to “carve niches for themselves, preserving their values, language and customs and using them as platforms to find their way into their new social environment,” a “creative combination of the old and new,” as defended by Peter Schrag.
Laws will always convey what people feel and convey what we're trying to compete for. Status means a lot in our time in age. Legal is what legal does: status means a lot in our time in age. The exclusionary function of citizenship, or Legality, is very subjective when each law, each committee and each judge overlooks an individual’s character by a stereotype, assumption, and pejorative remarks and statements. Harry Binswanger, a professor of philosophy at the Ayn Rand Institute, argued that “immigration quotas forcibly exclude foreigners who want not to seize but to purchase housing here, who want not to rob Americans but to engage in productive work, raising our standard of living. And end to immigration quotas is demanded by the principal of individual rights. Every individual has rights as an individual, not as a member of this or that nation. One has rights not by virtue of being an American, but by virtue of being human. A foreigner has rights as much as an American. To be a foreigner is not to be a criminal. Yet our government treats as criminals those foreigners not lucky enough to win the green-card lottery.”
I think, that if we're to thrive as humans, we must be sensible to the legacies of conflicts, assumptions, stereotypes, and racism that have led many people to be excluded or talked down to, and/or killed and understand the past and grow together for the future. We must become aware of each other’s struggle, differences, and not only be tolerant but welcome diversity among us and be inclusive of each other’s unique being, without having to resort to hurting each other. Let's be non-violent, together. You and I are “children of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”
As we all unite, in diasporas, under the same sun, undocumented, documented, Latino, African American, Caucasian, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, European, Chaldean, and everyone; we all shine brighter together, unashamed, where there is nothing to be ashamed of, and unafraid, where there is "nothing to fear "! Awaken your hearts and shatter the borders in your minds. We're all in the pursuit of happiness, let's become aware of each other’s struggle.
"In the end, embracing uncertainty, mystery, chaos, and social entropy, helps us embrace mystery. These lives we live, surrounded by beauty and horror, profound knowledge and pitiful ignorance, are a mystery to us all. To push that truth away with false certainty, falsely derived from either religion or reason, is to miss our most perfect truth."
We are, after all, just "such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
[...] Evidence points to the administration not following its own guidelines. As reported by Adriana Maestras at Politics 365, low priority cases, that is cases involving DREAM eligible youth with ties to the U.S. including [...]
[...] up the pressure on the President and his re-election bid, DREAMers in Cincinnati, Ohio and in Dearborn, Michigan paid his campaign [...]