U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren backs Dream Act and better border regulation

http://www.telegram.com/article/2012...104109953/1052

BOSTON — U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren outlined her immigration views yesterday at a Statehouse immigration event, saying the Secure Communities program should be improved, and that she supports the Dream Act to give legal status to children of illegal immigrants.

“We need to enforce our current laws, and that means our current border laws, and it also means laws about not letting employers recruit and exploit workers,” said Ms. Warren, the likely Democratic challenger to U.S. Sen. Scott P. Brown’s re-election.

“We need systematic immigration reform. Not a piece here and a piece there, but a genuine review of the laws to get something that works for all Americans,” she said, noting that her son-in-law is an immigrant from India.

One reform she pointed to would encourage foreign students to stay in the U.S. after graduation.

“Those who come here to the United States and study could stay, and help make this country richer, and help create jobs for this country. We ought to be thinking about immigration policy that encourages that,” Ms. Warren said.

She said she supports changes to the federal Secure Communities program that Mr. Brown wants to see implemented at an accelerated pace to empower local police to check immigration status of suspects for possible detention and deportation.

“Secure Communities will be the law in 2013, and will be in effect all across the country and all across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” she said. While the timing of the program is fixed, she said, it needs to be re-examined to prevent it from hampering local police efforts to fight crime.

“This is not about trying to get a headline or a bumper sticker. It is about the hard work of trying to make law work on the ground,” she said of her concerns.

“There are many who are worried that the way it is directed right now it doesn’t focus on violent offenders,” she said.

She said Secure Communities “builds walls between communities and those who police them, and it is very important in order to have truly safe communities that the communities and police are working closely and have ongoing relationships that are deep and lasting and based on trust.”

She talked about her immigration views after speaking to about 600 people at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, including lawmakers, on a variety of immigration-related subjects.

Eva Mottola, executive director of the group and a Worcester resident, said the group is supporting funding for a number of legal immigrant programs as the House version of the 2013 budget is set to be released Wednesday. The programs include $30.7 million for adult education and English as a second language classes for legal residents in the country for at least five years, $6.39 million for domestic violence prevention programs and funding for health care subsides for low- and moderate-income legal immigrants, as required in a recent Supreme Judicial Court decision.

Also speaking at the forum were two other U.S. Senate candidates, independent candidates William Cimbrello, who said he supports a series of immigration reforms, and Democrat Marisa DeFranco, who is an immigration attorney.

Mr. Brown was invited, but did not attend the forum.

Ms. DeFranco said she has far more experience on immigration issues than Ms. Warren, and maintained that Mr. Brown’s views on Secure Communities are uninformed.

“He talks about it being needed to do criminal background checks on immigrants. Right now, as we speak, without Secure Communities in place, police can access FBI criminal database background checks and always have been able to do it,” she said.

Secure Communities, she said, is about a simple database to tell you the immigration status of a person.

“We are not going to turn community police into federal agents,” she said of the program’s flaws. “It’s going to make the immigrant population a perfect pool for exploitation by criminals,” because it would discourage people from cooperating with police, she said.

She said many Republicans are currently advocating for mass deportation of all illegal immigrants, and that it would cost the government hundreds of billions to uproot families across the country.

“We cannot afford to spend $500 billion kicking people out of the country,” she said, but the government should deport illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes

i hope she beats Scott Brown.

Godspeed Mrs. Warren.

This is good news.

when they pass border security,dream act ( original version) will pass.

Go Warren! Scott Brown has no chance in hell beating this woman in November:P