Immigration: Congress is expected to vote on the Dream Act on Wednesday, providing a path to citizenship to millions of illegal immigrant youth. It's a bad precedent that uses kids, costs taxpayers and invites new amnesties. After years of failing to sell mass amnesty to voters, the open-borders lobby has turned to tugging at Americans' heartstrings, presenting treacly stories of illegal immigrants brought here as children who then bettered themselves here.
Somehow legalizing this group ahead of all the other people awaiting immigration visas legally is supposed to specially benefit all of us, even though the most obvious beneficiaries are the individuals themselves. But out of guilt, or because we "owe" them "justice," the case is being made for passing the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act.
That act provides a path to citizenship for some 2.1 million illegals who have lived here continuously for five years, avoided felony convictions, came to the U.S. before they turned 16 and completed two years of college or U.S. military service within six years.
Now, in the lame-duck session of Congress, the open-borders lobby has lawmakers right where it wants them. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has filed Senate cloture to bring the Dream Act to a vote as soon as Wednesday, and the House may vote even sooner.
It's a scam, using children unethically to achieve an open-borders political agenda that opens the door to perverse incentives.
The Dream Act is an effort to mimic the benefits illegals derive from having anchor babies in the U.S., a tactic used by millions as an "insurance policy" to avoid deportation and achieve legal status.
The awfulness of that incentive can be seen in the case of Edgar Jimenez Lugo, the 14-year-old U.S. "citizen" who was arrested in Mexico after a rather spectacular career beheading rivals and innocent people for $2,500 each on behalf of a Mexican cartel enforcer.
Cronica, a Mexican newspaper, reported that the throwaway kid was born in San Diego and then spent his life with Mexican parents who took him back to Morelos, Mexico, and "wandered around." Apparently the child's birth in San Diego was the same gambit millions of other immigrants use to game the system for U.S. entry. And he's only facing three years in jail in Mexico, so he'll soon become our problem — not Mexico's.
The Dream Act makes every baby an anchor baby, commodifying children, as young Jimenez seems to have been. It extends the incentive for parents to use their kids to beat immigration laws.
