Dreamers get more lip service Rubio ally offers a "1/4 DREAM Act" while Obama stalls

A Hispanic Republican from Florida boldly broke with his party’s orthodoxy on illegal immigration yesterday, introducing a bill to help undocumented young people stay in school — but it wasn’t Sen. Marco Rubio.

While the Florida senator’s much-touted but still vague plans to offer a GOP version of the DREAM Act have yet to materialize, Rubio’s friend Rep. David Rivera of Miami introduced the Studying Towards Adjusted Residency Status (STARS) Act, which would allow undocumented high school graduates who arrived here at a young age and are accepted into a university to apply for conditional non-immigrant status that could put them on an eight-year path to citizenship.

Rivera’s initiative came as leaders of United We Dream, a leading group of undocumented students, presented White House officials with a letter signed by more than 90 immigration law professors who argued that the president has “clear executive authority” to halt deportations of students who might benefit from such legislation, according to the New York Times. The Obama administration says its policy of “prosecutorial discretion” spares otherwise law-abiding young people, but student groups such as the National Immigrant Youth Alliance say the administration has broken its promises.

The students, disenchanted with Obama’s failure to secure passage of the DREAM Act in 2010, have expressed interest in Rubio and Rivera’s proposals as a way to save young people from being deported from the only country many of them have ever known. With the latest poll of Latino voters showing Mitt Romney trailing President Obama by 34 points, Hispanic Republicans have been looking to moderate the party’s hardline stance against illegal immigration. Without a change in the party’s image, said one Texas Republican this week, the growing Latino demographic may transform Texas into a Democratic bastion by 2020.

But this week Rubio took an inspection tour of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo, which seemed intended to burnish his foreign policy credentials as a possible vice presidential candidate, and left immigration to Rivera, his former ally in the House, who is under investigation for tax evasion.

Rivera said he was moved to introduce the bill by the story of a constituent, Daniela Peleaz, who came to the United States from Colombia with her family when she was four. Now Peleaz, a high school valedictorian who has been accepted to Dartmouth, faces the possibility of deportation.

The legislation authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to suspend the deportation of an undocumented immigrant and to grant him or her temporary non-immigrant status if he or she is 19 years of age or younger, arrived in the U.S. before age 16, has lived here for five consecutive years and has been accepted by a four-year college or university. After five years, those students who have graduated could apply for a five-year extension of non-immigrant status. After eight years of non-immigrant status, the students would be eligible to apply for permanent residence.

Rivera’s bill faces the same obstacles that have stymied Rubio: a Republican presidential candidate who is uninterested in immigration reform as a campaign issue, a party on Capitol Hill that is actively hostile to the idea of helping undocumented youth, and a Democratic president who already seems to have the Hispanic vote wrapped up.

Rivera’s initiative is even more limited than the limited approach that Rubio says he wants to take. Gaby Pacheco, a United We Dream leader, described the bill as a “¼ DREAM Act.”

“It mirrors the DREAM Act with a component for achieving permanent residency after ten years, but it has no provisions for military service, and it applies to a much smaller group,” Pacheco said. She said DREAM activists were nonetheless open to supporting the bill if it would spare any young people from deportation, but that they needed more time to study its provisions.

Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors reducing both legal and illegal immigration, dismissed Rivera’s bill as a form of amnesty “that is not going to be acceptable to us or the vast majority of the American people.”

Pacheco said the DREAM Act students enlisted the law professors to pressure the Obama administration to halt deportations while Congress tries to address the issue.

“Even Republicans are saying something needs to be done,” she said. “We’ve been hearing from Celia Munoz [Obama's adviser on Latino affairs] that the president says, ‘I wish had the power’ to stop the deportations. Well he does.”

The letter from the law professors said the president has wide leeway under the law to defer deportations.

“We did not want doubt about the president’s legal authority to muddy the waters of the debate,” Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the letter, told the Times.

But with the president reluctant to be seen as protecting illegal immigrants and the inability of Republicans like Rivera and Rubio to sway their party, the political prospects of relief for undocumented students are worse than ever.


Jefferson Morley is a staff writer for Salon in Washington and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/31/drea...ice/singleton/

Fuck this bill. If it were to pass, call it game over for those who also came here before the age of 16 (some at the age of 2 or 3) but have aged because of governmental inaction. This shit is fucking intensely inhumane and inconsiderate.

The Obama Administration is guilty of the BIGGEST back stabbing job ever in the history of mankind. He has used Latino votes to become the first African American President and he has then gone on to deport non-criminal children of undocumented immigrants. This guy is not issuing an EO to JUST HALT DEPORTATIONS. How can we expect him to issue an EO to grant us work permits? We must be kidding! Feck we have no supporter..how the hell is this thing gonna work out...on the other hand we have another guy who's trying to squeeze more and more votes outta this issue..unbelievable he is Latino too.

Relax brah. God is great. The sun rises every day. There is proof for you. It shall rise one day for us too. Don't get worked up about this new House bill. It has no chance and if Rubio is planning on introducing something similar in the Senate, it will have no chance. But I can tell you this. The coming months will decide our future. I am telling you if Obama does not issue EO or if the bill doesn't pass BEFORE the elections, I am fecking carving my own path..either marriage or GTFO. I am not waiting for that backstabber to issue an EO after he wins the election. I'm gonna start applying to Jobs in Canada. Toronto is much cleaner and pleasant than America anyways.

SOBATE!!! lol

This bill is going nowhere. If Obama doesn't do shit for us by Christmas, I think I'll be making an early exit next year. Why? The exchange rate for the U.S dollar to MXN peso is $1 to 14.4 pesos. I hope it keeps going up...

Indeed, Allah Akhbar (sorry if I misspelled that). It just angers me greatly. WHY IN THE FUCK DOES AGE HAVE TO A FUCKING FILTER IN THIS SHIT?

Some relief has to happen this year. Fuck the lip service from both sides.

Edited posts for excessive profanity. Last warning, Smooth. I agree with you, but DAP is a public forum and what is posted here is a reflection of all of us.

Calling people out is going overboard.

Lol at 19 years of age, and younger than 16 when they came in, and lived here for 5 years. This basically qualifies only those who emigrated between 1993 and 2008, and were also born between 1993 and 2007.

Now, they also have to be accepted by a 4-year American university, only then can they get a non-immigrant visa.

=====!!!=====

Here's the punchline, anyone who is18.5 or younger, can leave the country without a ban, and simply apply for a student visa. If one already has an acceptance letter from an American university, and has shown that they are willing to leave when their status goes south, their petition will most likely get approved. You used to be able to do it from within the US, but I think they have changed it a bit.

The only thing this non-immigrant status would grant, is the right to work, which is usually also granted to graduate students with their visas. 8-year waiting period for the right to apply for PR? Come on.

This is not a dream act, it does not actually do anything, and if the legislature actually wastes their time and takes it up, it will be the biggest political farce of all.

Profanity my rear-end. You gave me an infraction for saying this:

Fuck this bill. If it were to pass, call it game over for those who also came here before the age of 16 (some at the age of 2 or 3) but have aged because of governmental inaction. This shit is fucking intensely inhumane and inconsiderate.

Don't lie. And, it is inhumane. You disagree or view my post as trolling because I bet you would benefit from the STARS Act. IT IS INHUMANE, period because many of us would be filtered out based on a factor that we cannot control. Stop being so freaking authoritarian and let us express our opinions.

I gave you the infraction for what I had to remove. This isn't the first or second time other users have had to tell you to tone it down. I was going to delete the entire post, but what you said in the beginning is the truth. STARS is inhumane and doesn't address the overall need of the undocumented student population.

I'm 25. DREAM Act is my last hope, just like you.