Senate set to take up immigration reform bill Read more at the Washington Examiner:

While lawmakers will be pressing the House to address expiring tax cuts and an arms treaty with Russia when Congress returns this week from its Thanksgiving break, Democratic leaders in the Senate plan to make one last effort to pass an immigration reform bill before their majority diminishes significantly in January.
With just a few weeks left in the 112th Congress, it will be difficult for lawmakers to clear the DREAM Act in time for the president's signature this year, but it will nonetheless consume part of the shrinking lame-duck calendar.

The DREAM Act would provide a path to citizenship for anyone under the age of 35 who came to the United States as a child and who enrolls in the military or college for two years.

The proposal won its place on the agenda in part because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., promised on the campaign trail that he would take it up this year, arguably helping to secure the Hispanic votes he needed to overcome Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle.

Immigration reform advocates see the lame-duck session as perhaps the last chance to pass such reforms since Republicans will take control of the House and expand their minority in the Senate in January.

Proponents argue that the bill, much more modest than reform efforts proposed by President George W. Bush, would aid young adults who, by no fault of their own, ended up in the United States and simply want a chance to succeed.

With the lame-duck clock ticking, university students across Texas staged a hunger strike in an effort to pressure their senator, Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, to back the bill. Hutchison, along with seven other Republicans, voted for the DREAM Act when a similar measure came to the Senate floor in 2007, but she's against it now, calling it too broad.

Reform opponents alerted Hutchison and other senators to a DREAM Act provision that provides retroactive benefits for certain illegal immigrants of any age who arrived in the United States as children and who have completed some military service or college. In other words, say critics, the path to so-called "amnesty" could be open to a much larger and older pool of illegal immigrants.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who backed the bill three years ago, also is now leaning against supporting it.

"This legislation is being cynically used for political purposes by Democrats desperate to curry favor with a political constituency," Hatch spokeswoman Antonia Ferrier told The Washington Examiner.

In order to make the bill more appealing to the GOP, Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., offered a different version with an age limit of 30. But the second bill also contains the retroactive benefits.

Passage of the bill could hinge on the sentiments of a bevy of outgoing Republicans including Sen. Robert Bennett, of Utah, who signaled his support for the bill, said Julie Kirchner, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which opposes the legislation.

"It's always a difficult calculus especially with so many people leaving," she said. "It really changes the whole dynamic on a vote like this."


http://washingtonexaminer.com/politi...on-reform-bill

We have to maintain calling and activism to see this to it's end. Keep working dreamers.

We really need to get Hatch on our side.

I just can't make sense of the fact that these senators supported this same exact bill in the past and now are against it.

Times have changed, my friend. The anti-immigrant sentiment wasn't this bad back then.

He is right. Things are different. This bill would have passed easily in 2009

Well these haters don't know what they are up against...We will see this bill through the senate and house and safely under Obama's pen

MAY THE LORD JESUS CHRIST HEAR YOU!!

Maybe instead of responding with name calling and hunger strikes and just maybe, fixing the stupid loopholes in the bill would help?
I don't know, it's a crazy idea

How about getting rid of the radioactive provision.

Since it bothers them so much.