| Exciting primaries last night, right? Specter gone! Lincoln hanging on for dear life! And a good chance to wrest McConnell's Senate seat from the Republican party! Lots of analyses are spinning in the lower rungs of the media atmosphere - but it was a good, solid day for progressive candidates, and I won't speculate beyond that. The best analysis I've read is, naturally, Nate Silver's. I do think the best takeaway from yesterday's results is that the GOP, trying to campaign on images of Pelosi, has forgotten that normal people aren't as obsessed by national politics as they are. All elections are local.
But I didn't come here to talk about the primaries. I came here to talk immigration reform, and, more specifically, to lobby for the DREAM Act.
The DREAM Act? What's the DREAM Act? Well, first a story...
A bright-eyed 19-year-old, Juve looks like any other American teen. While growing up in Prescott, Arizona, Juve liked to play baseball, skate, and work at a cattle auction. Carried into the U.S. by his mother at the age of 3 months, Juve knows no other life than in the U.S.
And if it weren't for a fateful traffic stop - one for the sole "crime" of driving with a cracked windshield - Juve would be still living out his teen years with his family in Prescott.
Juve had long known that he did not have his papers. His flaw was that he refused to succumb to this fact; he wanted to live life like a normal American kid. Arizona law does not allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver's licenses, and yet Juve was a teen and he wanted wheels.
Juve always made sure to drive exactly the speed limit. The irony is that it wasn't Juve's driving that drew the attention of this officer.
Nor was it likely the crack in his windshield. A federal report released last year found that programs like SB 1070 encourage racial profiling.
Indeed, the Justice Department is currently investigating Sheriff Arpaio of Maricopa County - just north of Juve's Yavapai County-for such civil rights violations.
And so Juve found himself in an ICE detention facility in Phoenix. He was dropped off in Nogales, Sonora, and found work in a border pharmacy.
He was sentenced to life in a country he barely knows.
He won't see his parents for years, and the only family he can see is his 18-year-old younger brother, who happened to be born in the U.S.
His brother will have to wait until he is 21 in order to apply for Juve's green card. Even then, due to our backlogged visa processing system, Juve will likely be 36 by the time he is allowed onto American soil. The wait for a sibling's green card is currently 14 years.
Current immigration law takes no account for how long immigrants without documentation have lived in the country, nor how old they were when they entered. The law offers little recourse to families of mixed nationality; too often, this results in split families, and young people who have lived most their lives being deported, essentially, to a foreign country.
The DREAM Act would change this. It's a bipartisan bill co-authored by Utah's Orrin Hatch and Illinois' Dick Durbin that would create a conditional path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country before they were 16 years old. Essentially, those that came before age 16 can become a citizen if they finish a four-year secondary degree.
No brainer, right? The bill would allow, say, a 24-year-old Iranian man to become a US citizen, despite having entered the county illegally...as a 3-year-old. As the law stands, he could be deported back to Iran, where his sexuality is a capital crime. Only the DREAM Act has stalled, thanks to one of its original supporters, Arizona's John McCain, who's reinvented himself as a nativist. And the Iranian man actually exists: he's Mohammad Abdollahi, who was recently arrested staging a sit-in at McCain's office, and who is now in custody of ICE - Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Administration officials and the Senate leadership say they need "bipartisan" support before taking up any immigration reform. But there's no reason the DREAM Act can't be considered separately from the myriad other issues swirling around immigration. Right now the law stands between young immigrants and their education and paths to becoming protective, and documented, citizens of our country. |
