Republicans working on a realistic alternative to the DREAM act

The Donk version claims reasonable objectives but subverts that by including nothing of substance  to ensure that only the target group is benefited  -- thus being a virtual open door to almost anyone

A Republican congressman introduced alternative immigration legislation to the DREAM Act on Wednesday.

The Studying Towards Residency Status Act, introduced by Rep. David Rivera (R-Fla.), offers young immigrants living in the country illegally a chance to be granted non-immigrant status for five years if they meet certain criteria. They must have entered the U.S. before they were 16, have lived in the country for five consecutive years, earned a high school diploma and been accepted to a 4-year institution of higher learning.

The bill is meant as an alternative to Sen. Dick Durbin's (D-Ill.) Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which provides a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants provided they have demonstrated good moral character and are working toward completing a degree at a college or university or serving in the military. Sen. Marco Rubio, a fellow Florida Republican who is friends with Rivera, plans on introducing an alternative to Durbin's bill by the end of the summer.
Rubio's bill would provide non-immigrant visas to the children of illegal immigrants provided they attend college or serve in the military. Unlike Durbin's bill, Rubio's bill will not provide a path to citizenship.

"The STARS Act would allow undocumented students who arrived here at a young age, graduated from high school and are accepted into a university, to apply for a five-year conditional non-immigrant status," Rivera said in floor remarks.

According to an aide, Rivera has had discussions with Rubio over their proposals.

"Congressman Rivera has had discussion about the STARS Act with Sen. Rubio, but the congressman recognizes that the House and Senate each have their own legislative process," the aide said. "The STARS Act is meant to start the conversation in the House of Representatives in the hopes of achieving some sort of immigration reform in the 112th Congress."

Durbin and other Democrats have expressed openness to working with Republicans to pass some kind of immigration reform legislation but it's unclear how successful that effort would be given the opposing views over granting citizenship.

Rubio's legislation could be an effort to appeal to Hispanics in order to help Mitt Romney. Rubio is often mentioned as a top prospect for the vice presidential spot on the 2012 Republican ticket. Romney has said he is "studying" the proposal as it's crafted but is yet to endorse it.

Romney has said, if elected, president, he would veto Durbin's DREAM Act.

SOURCE




In Far Northwest, a New Border Focus on Latinos

Obama probably sent his agents there because he didn't know there were Latinos there

The Olympic Peninsula has always felt more like the edge of the world than a mere national boundary.

Its ocean shoreline, the northwesternmost coast of the contiguous United States, is accessible by a single road, Highway 101, and it has long been traveled by a distinctive fleet: loud logging trucks rumbling out of the dark and wet woods, rusty pickups with windows pronouncing “Native Pride,” stray Subarus hauling surfboards and kayaks to the cold Pacific.

Then the United States Border Patrol vehicles started showing up.

Sometimes they respond unexpectedly to assist with mundane traffic stops conducted by the local police. Sometimes they hover outside the warehouse where Mexican immigrants sell the salal they pick in the temperate rain forest. Sometimes they confront people whose primary offense, many argue, is skin tone.

Those kinds of scenes might be common in towns that border Mexico in Texas, Arizona or California. But the border here is with Canada, which is separated from the peninsula by the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

“What’s the purpose of the Border Patrol in a place that has no border problems?” asked Art Argyropoulos, who is from Greece and runs a restaurant on the peninsula with his wife, who is from Mexico.

Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the federal government has kept a more careful watch on the country’s northern border. Here on this remote peninsula over the past six years, the number of Border Patrol agents has risen tenfold, from 4 in 2006 to about 40. This month, the agency is completing construction of a $10 million office in Port Angeles, a city of 19,000. The one-story building, surrounded by a spiked security fence, can house as many as 50 officers.

The Border Patrol says its priority is to address potential terrorism and smuggling threats from Canada (a ferry runs between Port Angeles and Victoria, British Columbia), but many people say the peninsula has instead become an unlikely new frontier in the effort to fight illegal immigration from Latin America.

“Everybody’s scared,” said Benigno Hernandez, 38, who has lived in Forks, population 3,500, for more than a decade. “Everybody’s leaving.”

In Forks, several hundred immigrants had long found winter work picking salal, a wild shrub whose branches are used in floral arrangements around the world. But now, schools are losing enrollment because students’ parents have been deported. Mobile home parks are half empty. At Thriftway, the main grocery store in the town, the weekend rush has slowed because the salal pickers who used to shop after getting paid on Saturdays have disappeared, sometimes because they were detained, sometimes because they were afraid.

“It’s happened very much in the past couple of months,” said Mayor Byron Monohon of Forks. “I think the Border Patrol has just put a lot of pressure on the situation.”

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed a class-action suit against the Border Patrol, claiming that its officers were illegally stopping and interrogating people on the basis of racial profiling. This month, the Rights Project filed another suit, alleging that Border Patrol agents sometimes asked to support other law enforcement as interpreters — Border Patrol agents are required to know Spanish — while intending instead to investigate for immigration violations.

In the class-action suit, the three named plaintiffs are all minority members who said they were stopped and questioned without cause: two were corrections officers, one was the student-body president of Forks High School, whose parents were born in Mexico. The student, Ismael Ramos-Contreras, who will be a freshman at Western Washington University in the fall, said the Border Patrol’s presence has become unnerving but also a source of dark humor, including when the school soccer team travels to away games.

“If we see Border Patrol, it’s like, ‘Everybody hide!’ ” he said. “The majority of the soccer team is Hispanic.”

The Border Patrol would not comment on the lawsuits and said it prohibited profiling based on race or religion.

“What they’re focused on up there are the same things that we’re focused on around the country,” said Ronald D. Vitiello, the deputy chief of the Border Patrol. “That’s, you know, the threat of terrorism, the criminal organizations that use the border for their own gain and being prepared to combat those threats, eliminate the vulnerabilities that we know about and mitigate the risk where we can.”

Officials sometimes cite the 1999 arrest of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who became known as the “millennium bomber” for his plan to detonate explosives at Los Angeles International Airport. Mr. Ressam was convicted after he tried to enter the United States at Port Angeles with bomb components.

More HERE