Thread: Border university's student leader joins generation in limbo

Border university's student leader joins generation in limbo

By Lynn Brezosky
lbrezosky@express-news.net
Updated 07:58 p.m., Tuesday, May 24, 2011

BROWNSVILLE — When University of Texas-Brownsville student government association president Jose Arturo Guerra, 21, faces an immigration judge Wednesday, he'll be hoping his lawyer can buy him time to graduate.

Chances are just as likely he'll find himself with a one-way ticket out of the country, to Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, where he has a father living somewhere with a wife and family he barely knows.

But Guerra's striving for degrees in management and international business — and the sentiment that has spurred some in Congress to push several failed versions of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act — might work in his favor.

In a pattern noted and decried by congressional Republicans as a de facto amnesty, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has refrained from deporting high-achieving students to birth countries they barely know.

Those who oppose the DREAM Act, which would give students brought to the United States illegally as children a path to citizenship, say Guerra falls into a gray area that should give its proponents pause. He was 15 the last time he snuck across the border, not an infant or toddler.

And even some who support the measure say dropping or delaying cases only keeps the students in limbo.

“They can be removed at any time,â€

Proponents said the bill had a groundswell of support on college campuses across America and said senators who rejected it, including Texas Republicans Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, sacrificed the hopes of some of their constituencies' best and brightest to appease their conservative voter base.

Illegal aliens are not "constituencies", they have not earned the right to have a say in how we run this country! They need to be found and deported back to where they came from!

Originally Posted by miguelina

Proponents said the bill had a groundswell of support on college campuses across America and said senators who rejected it, including Texas Republicans Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, sacrificed the hopes of some of their constituencies' best and brightest to appease their conservative voter base.

Illegal aliens are not "constituencies", they have not earned the right to have a say in how we run this country! They need to be found and deported back to where they came from!

Exactly. Citizens, who get to pick up the bill, said "no" to the Dream Act.