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What’s Dick Durbin up to?

By Michelle Malkin • July 17, 2007 10:46 AM

The DREAM Act, which would allow illegal alien students to get special in-state college tuition discounts not available to native-born and naturalized American students, has been resurrected by the Dems. You’ll remember it was a piece of the failed shamnesty bill in the Senate. As I noted during the debate, the Dream Act would repeal a clearly worded provision in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) that states:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a State (or a political subdivision) for any postsecondary education benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit (in no less an amount, duration, and scope) without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident.

Ten states defied that federal law and offered in-state tuition to illegal aliens: California, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Washington. The last time the DREAM Act champions tried to tack their scheme onto a larger immigration proposal, they snuck in language that would absolve those ten states of their law-breaking by repealing the 1996 law retroactively–and also offered a special path to green cards and citizenship for illegal alien students.
See also Kris Kobach’s analysis.

Now, Dick Durbin has announced he will stick the DREAM Act into the Senate version of the House Defense Bill HR1585. The lowdown is here. Durbin’s amendment would also welcome large numbers of illegal aliens into the military (you know, in addition to those the Pentagon has already allowed in).
The open-borders lobby couldn’t get shamnesty “comprehensively,â€