DREAMS DEFERRED BY DEMOCRATS

Libidiot, bleeding heart, illegal alien invader hugger alert!

DREAMS DEFERRED BY DEMOCRATS.

Don't look now, but the Senate Democrats got enough Republican votes yesterday to overturn a filibuster on a critically important social issue. Eleven GOPniks joined the Democrats in favor of ending the filibuster against the DREAM Act -- the bill that enables undocumented-immigrant young persons to stay in the U.S. and eventually win citizenship if they were brought here as children, graduate high school, and then either complete two years of college or serve two years in the military.

What's that? You missed the story on how the Democrats broke a Republican filibuster? Of course you did -- because eight Democrats voted to sustain it. Worse yet, most of those eight come from states that have experienced the least immigration.

Fifty-two senators voted to end the filibuster -- 41 Democrats, 11 Republicans. Nor did all those Republicans come from the moderate wing of the party (there aren't 11 Republican moderates in the Senate). The list of Republican Dream Act supporters included not only Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Chuck Hagel, but also Sam Brownback, Larry Craig, Orrin Hatch, Kay Bailey Hutchison and, believe it or not, Trent Lott. Looked at with an unjaundiced eye, it's easy to understand why such a bill might appeal even to conservatives: After all, its chief effect is simply to declare that it's public policy to hold children harmless for the infractions of their parents, provided those children grow up to be responsible adults.

But this logic didn't seem to sway the eight Democrats who voted to kill the bill by filibuster. Some were up for re-election next year in socially conservative states -- Arkansas' David Pryor, Montana's Max Baucus, and embattled Mary Landrieu of what is the increasingly ethnically-cleansed Louisiana. Two had come to the Senate in narrow victories last year (and don't face voters for another five): Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jon Tester of Montana. And three -- Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad from North Dakota and Old Bobby Byrd from West Virginia -- are neither neophytes nor facing voters any time soon.

What's striking about this list of anti-DREAM Dems is how it overrepresents states that have minimal immigrant presence. Precisely because immigrants come to work, they tend not to migrate to states with a dearth of economic activity, states like West Virginia and North Dakota. Montana isn't exactly clogged with south-of-the-border immigrants, either. Yet those three states are represented by five of the eight dissenting Democrats. What West Virginia and North Dakota do have in abundance, however, are working-class whites adrift in economic backwaters. Talk radio tells them that their problems are the fault of illegal immigrants. Marx once famously referred to the idiocy of rural life, which is still a pretty good encapsulation of what's wrong with the Senate, the legislative house that represents land rather than people. Still, it's worth noting that a number of Democrats from socially conservative states -- not least, South Dakota's Tim Johnson, who's up for re-election next year, and Jim Webb from the presumably anti-immigrant hotbed of Virginia -- voted to support the DREAM Act.

Profiles in courage aside, however, the DREAM Act was just about the only pro-immigrant bill that stood even the slightest chance of passing these days, rooted as it is in the moral precept that the sins of the fathers should not be visited upon the children. Wednesday's vote suggests that it will take a Democrat president with a strong commitment to justice for immigrants just to line up Democratic votes for a comprehensive and humane reform of our immigration laws.

--Harold Meyerson
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapp ... _democrats

And here is the keystone of this gentleman's argument, that, when pulled away, exposes the fallacies of his diatribe:

Quote:

---

Precisely because immigrants come to work...,

---

1. Illegal aliens <> [do not equal] 'Immigrants'; they are very different types of people, motivated by different reasons, behaving in very different ways,

and

2. 'come to work'; well, that is a reality for most people of the world - not just the US - but, I say, we place the most emphasis upon which persons want to become Americans; to play by our rules, learn the culture, become functional in our variation of the English language, etc. There are over a hundred other countries that people can go to, to 'work'; however, there is only one country that enables a person to become American.