Peter Schrag: Educate them, then deport them: This is nuts


http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/450067.html
By Peter Schrag -
Published 12:00 am PDT Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B7



A bipartisan group in Congress has been struggling for years to pass the federal Dream Act, which would allow an estimated 360,000 young illegal immigrants who are recent graduates of U.S. high schools – many are now in college – to get on the track toward legal residency. An estimated 45,000 live in California.

The act is scheduled for a cloture vote in the Senate today. If it gets the required 60 votes – hardly a sure thing – it would head off the filibuster threat that conservatives have used to block it before.

The act covers students brought here by their parents as young children. Many don't speak their native language and know little about the country where they were born. Collectively they represent an investment of some $18 billion-plus in their American education.

Despite that education and their almost total assimilation into American culture – Americans in all but the right to call themselves that – they live in the shadows, can't get the jobs their skills qualify them for, can't get driver's licenses and worry constantly about deportation to places they don't know and to which they desperately don't want to go. They study in the hope someday things will change.

The Senate sponsors of the Dream Act – short for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, a concoction cooked up for the initials – include Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat; Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican; and Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican. (It's also supported by California's two Democratic senators.)

But a minority of congressional hard-liners, echoing the blog and talk-show frothers who call it amnesty for the alleged crimes of the parents who brought them here, have beaten back every attempt to pass the act. It's Old Testament redux: punish the sons for the sins of the fathers. What crime did the kids commit? The paranoid fringe also issues dark warnings that once the kids meet the stringent conditions of the Dream Act, they'll sponsor parents, sisters, cousins and aunts, thereby opening the gates to more immigrant hordes.

That's nonsense. The visa backlog for siblings is decades long. And illegal parents would have to return to the home country for 10 years or more before they would have any chance of returning legally.

As for the kids: To get a conditional residence permit under the act, they have to have arrived here before the age of 16, lived here for at least five years, have graduated from a U.S. high school, have good moral character and commit to attend college or serve in the military for at least two years. Those who meet those commitments may then become legal permanent residents. Those who don't fall back into their illegal status.

The bill is also limited to the present generation of students. No one who's been here less than five years at the time the act is passed is eligible.

There are all sorts of ways in which current U.S. immigration law is self-defeating. But there can't be any better illustration than a system that tries to force ambitious and committed U.S.-trained people out of the country at a time when both employers and the military desperately need them.

The employers warn that they'll be forced to outsource more skilled jobs, warnings reinforced by data indicating that there aren't enough Americans in our educational pipelines to replace the boomers who are now starting to retire.

Just last month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a bipartisan group of other governors sent a letter urging congressional leaders to make it easier for U.S. industry to bring skilled foreign workers to this country and get them to stay here.

That, they said, requires more green cards and more H1-B visas to "keep employers in our states and ensure there is a skilled work force in this country to fill their immediate needs." Because of today's shortage of visas and delays in processing applications, "more and more of these talented individuals leave their U.S. jobs and return home."

If that need is so great, why aren't Schwarzenegger et al. also demanding passage of the Dream Act? Repeated queries to the governor's office produced a blank. Worse, despite the thousands of students who've been petitioning Congress, no one in the governor's office seems to know what the Dream Act is.

The premises of the governors' plea for more visas may be overblown. In the past decade, some unemployed American engineers and other high-tech workers charged that there was no real shortage in available U.S. workers. The shortage, they said, was artificially cooked up by employers laying off better-paid Americans and then demanding more visas to import cheaper foreign workers.

But if there's any substance to the warnings about skilled labor shortages the Dream Act could play a central role in addressing it. At a time when there's no end of rhetoric about our low high school graduation rates, why are we trying to drive those we have educated out of the country?




About the writer:
Peter Schrag can be reached at Box 15779, Sacramento, CA 95852-0779 or at pschrag@sacbee.com.