I'm not sure if this has been posted before, but I came across a letter written to Congress by the President of LCCR in hopes to have the new Congress pass important legislative issues within it's term.
They list CIR (including that they want DREAM Act as a down payment to maker sure they are serious about passing CIR) as happening by the end of the 111th Congress. Here's an excerpt:
Quote:
By the end of the 111th Congress
Comprehensive immigration reform: As Congress continues its efforts to consider reforming our broken immigration system, it must be careful to protect the civil and human rights of all people in the United States. New immigration legislation must take a comprehensive approach that: 1) encourages hardworking undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows by providing a workable path to citizenship; 2) reduces unconscionable backlogs in the family immigration system; 3) respects the civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans and provides immigrants and their families with fair, humane, and common-sense procedures at all levels of the immigration, naturalization, or removal process; and 4) fully protects the rights of all workers regardless of their immigration status. We urge the 111th Congress to demonstrate a solid commitment to comprehensive immigration reform – starting with, as a down payment, the swift enactment of bipartisan legislation such as the DREAM Act, which would provide undocumented children who grew up in the United States the opportunity to become fully integrated members of our society through higher education or service to our country; AgJOBS, a bipartisan compromise supported by labor and management, which provides America with a stable farm labor force and helps ensure that farmworkers are treated fairly by giving undocumented workers a chance to earn legal status; and the recapture of unused family and employment visas, a bipartisan measure which "recaptures" family and employment-based immigrant visas that do not get used each year, due to bureaucratic delays, and allow unused visas each year to "roll over" and be used in the following year.
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http://www.civilrights.org/library/a...ities-111.html