Bush's Retreaton Immigration Reform(bipartisan backing loses to BushBase)

[papau]

the demise of Ag Jobs under Bush's Watch

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A475-2004Jul20.html

Bush's Retreat on Immigration Reform


By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A19


<snip>For Marie, who seems to have stepped out of a 21st-century update of a Norman Rockwell tableau, has a problem (re going to college): The government wants to deport her to Costa Rica. And Marie, whose parents brought her to the States when she was 5, faces the abrupt prospect of losing everything she has in all good faith worked for.

She can be forgiven for having thought she was leading a normal life. Her father, after all, worked as a courier in the office of the governor of Missouri. Her mother was a grade-school Spanish teacher. Her parents' initial visas had lapsed and they had been applying for naturalization, but they plainly lacked the proper documentation. Since this was discovered in 2002, they have been unable to work (though her mother still teaches Spanish on a volunteer basis). But for the support of the largely conservative, white parishioners in their church, the Gonzalez family would have been in desperate straits. Their straits are dire enough as is.

Marie's story, unfortunately, is not all that exceptional. Every year the government deports American teenagers -- who have gone to school here and are on their way to productive careers -- to Latin American and Caribbean nations they may not have seen since infancy. It's for that reason that legislators of both parties support the Dream Act, which would enable 65,000 high school graduates who are undocumented to become citizens if they complete college, and allow them to pay the in-state rate for tuition at public colleges and universities.

The Dream Act passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last fall, with heavy bipartisan backing and the support of Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch. But like the Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits, and Security Act of 2003, or Ag Jobs, which also looked bound for passage until some recent mind-boggling legislative maneuvers, it has fallen prey to the Bush administration's reluctance to do anything that might rouse the ire of the nativist right.<snip>