AgJOBS Next Up

Now that the DREAM Act has officially been sent back to marinate in the toilet for a while longer a few of it’s finer points are coming loose and floating to the surface where we can see them more clearly. It appears now that the eligibility requirements would not have been all that difficult to meet in light of the simple fact that the overworked and understaffed Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services is currently carrying a backlog of more than 6 million pending applications for immigration benefits and the Bureau’s administrators have become so desperate to get the work done that they are offering prizes to the employees who get the most applications processed. Demanding quantity over quality is like issuing a license to cut every conceivable corner imaginable and if the ridiculous DREAM Act had passed it would have added another 2 million applications to their backlog and increased the desperation of an already desperate federal bureaucracy.

The DREAM Act would have provided illegal alien students the preferential ability to attend college while paying lower in-state tuition rates, a preferential ability that is denied to American citizens. The DREAM Act would have rewarded illegal aliens with a preferentially expedited path to American citizenship that legal aliens currently in this country do not have access to, and illegal aliens who are also known gang members would have been considered eligible for legal status providing they were willing to give an un-sworn statement renouncing their gang affiliation.

Like the comprehensive amnesty bill the U.S. Senate failed to shove down the throats of the American people last June, the Dream Act is now gone, but it is not dead and the Democratic politicians who slapped it together are committed to bringing it back at some point in the future. In the meantime, the Senate Democrats are dusting off any number of previously failed proposals, assessing the questionable merits of each and trying to determine which of them they can pitch to the American public without breaking into fits of laughter. Inasmuch as few American voters were swayed by the “Its for the kidsâ€