By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--January 24, 2018
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I'm not sure what more anyone would have expected from these three. Graham has never been serious about immigration enforcement. Flake has come to identify as nothing more than a Trump antagonist. Durbin is . . . Dick Durbin.
I have more sympathy for the plight of childhood arrival than your typical conservative, and I think there should be a legislative fix that makes it possible for them to stay here legally (as opposed to the DACA approach that simply ignores statutory law), but when this is your starting offer, you're not going to get far.The Graham-Durbin plan would legalize the Dreamers, with a 10-to-12-year path to citizenship, and provide about $2.7 billion in funding for border security and operations. It would end the diversity visa lottery, which randomly awards 50,000 green cards to would-be immigrants from underrepresented countries, and impose a modest limit on green-card holders to sponsor adult children for immigration to the U.S. Ms. Sanders’s remarks were in keeping with past statements from the White House on the issue, but took on increased significance Tuesday as lawmakers take up the immigration issue again in the wake of the brief government shutdown. Ms. Sanders had said Monday that Mr. Trump would follow through on a promise to work on immigration policy after Republicans and Democrats reached a deal to reopen federal agencies. That same day, Mr. Trump hosted a group of six Republican senators who have taken a skeptical view of a broad immigration overhaul that would include a long-term deal on the young immigrants sometimes known as Dreamers. Elements of the Graham-Durbin plan are likely to be part of the coming Senate debate on immigration, which Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) promised in return for Democratic support for ending the government shutdown on Monday.
In the House, it would be a challenge to pass a bill without Mr. Trump’s backing. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) is under pressure from conservative House Republicans to consider a separate bill from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.). That bill, which Ms. Sanders said Tuesday was “something we would support,” would provide $30 billion to build a wall along the Mexico border and tighten border security, crack down on so-called sanctuary cities that don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, and require employers to use E-Verify, which allows them to check prospective workers’ immigration status. It also would provide Dreamers three years of renewable legal status but not green cards or a path to citizenship.Can we first deal with this whole business of referring to childhood arrivals as "Dreamers"? That is an Obama term through and through, a classic case of rebranding something to make it seem more sympathetic. The Obama Administration decided to pin this group with that label and the media enthusiastically co-opted it. It gives the impression we're talking about an earnest group of America-loving, civic-minded go-getters who are ready to change the world for the better if only the mean old INS would bestow upon them the status of real Americans. It's one thing for a partisan group of people to coin a term for propaganda purposes. It's another thing for the supposedly unbiased news media to adopt it as standard language, even capitalizing it and not bothering to apply scare quotes. At least this story dropped a "sometimes known as" with one reference, but it otherwise used the term as uncritically as you or I would use someone's first name. The accurate term for the people in question is childhood arrivals, and if you really want to be technical, illegal childhood arrivals. That said, I believe the right thing to do is to provide them with a legal way to live here via a change in the law. If your parents brought you here illegally when you were 10 years old, and you spent the rest of your childhood here, you have zero culpability in that. The responsibility lies 80 percent with your parents for breaking the law and 20 percent with a federal government that talks about immigration enforcement but almost never takes it seriously in practice.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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