Getty Images
Marco Rubio is getting ready for his close-up.
Following up on an item from a couple of weeks ago, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has been a senator for about a year now, but hasn't managed to do much of anything. The sum total of his legislative accomplishments? A resolution designating September 2011 as National Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Month.
As Rachel explained in a recent segment, the Florida Republican "is not a particularly serious guy in terms of what he has done in his Senate life or even as a Senate candidate." That's clearly true. But given his right-wing worldview, his ethnicity, and the electoral significance of his home state, Rubio is widely seen as a strong contender for the Republican presidential ticket in 2012.
And to that end, Rubio is scrambling to prepare for the national spotlight, publishing a memoir, hiring opposition researchers to identify potential controversies in his background, and even starting work on an important piece of legislation.
Recognizing the importance of immigration policy, the far-right senator is reportedly eyeing a proposal that would be similar to the popular Dream Act, only the Rubio version would take out the important parts.
Mr. Rubio's idea to make it palatable to his party is to offer them legalization without citizenship. "You can legalize someone's status," he says, "without placing them on a path toward citizenship." He warns that if Dream Act youths became citizens, they could -- horrors -- someday sponsor family members to enter legally. This idea is nothing more than some newly invented third-class status -- not illegal, but not American.
It's the Dream Act without the dream and should be dismissed out of hand....The only Dream Act worth passing is simple. It tells high schoolers who want to make something of themselves, for the good of the country, to go ahead. Join the military or go to college and take your place as full-fledged citizens in the only country you know. That Republicans reject this shows how far they have strayed from American ideals of assimilation and welcome.
If Rubio thinks this will help him appear more credible, he really hasn't thought this through.
The larger immigration issue isn't complicated. Every year, tens of thousands of young, undocumented immigrants graduate from American high schools, but are quickly stuck -- they can't qualify for college aid, and they can't work legally. America is the only home they've ever known -- in most cases, they were, at a very young age, brought into the country illegally by their parents -- but at 18, they have few options.
The DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act), which has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support, provides a path to citizenship for these young immigrants -- graduate from high school, get conditional permanent residency status, go to college or serve in the military, pay some steep fees, and become eligible for citizenship. The Pentagon has urged Congress to pass it, and the CBO found that it lowers the deficit, a priority Republicans at least pretend to care about.
President Obama strongly supports the bill, and were it not for a Republican filibuster, it would have become law in late 2010. That GOP lawmakers like Orrin Hatch and Dick Lugar helped write the bill is a detail that seems to have slipped down the memory hole.
Rubio seems to think he can strike a compromise with a pale imitation of a popular, bipartisan proposal, but this almost certainly can't pass, since it will satisfy no one. So why bother? I suspect it's because Rubio and his party's leadership realize the GOP has a severe problem with Latino voters, and want to be able to say, "We support a different version of the Dream Act, so feel free to vote for us."
I don't imagine voters who care about the issue will fall for this, but for a senator eager to do something notable with Senate power, it's apparently the best Rubio can come up with.
Leave a Comment:
Senator Rubio is not the only one supporting an apartheid-type, un-American bill for immigrants. Members of the Hispanic, Asian Pacific American, Progressive and Black Caucuses co-sponsored H.R. 1466 a bill that would provide a non-citizen status to legal foreign workers of the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) and chain them to the islands!
H.R. 1466 takes our country back to a dishonorable and shameful time in our nation's history. It is utterly amazing that members of the U.S. Congress who promote themselves as champions of immigration reform and advocate for undocumented aliens would support such unjust, un-American and undemocratic legislation. The similarities between laws that were implemented after the Civil War and H.R. 1466 are striking. H.R. 1466 proposes to grant about 1/4 of the 14,000 legal, long-term nonresident workers a CNMI-only status. No other state or territory has their own status under the INA, and for good reason.
The long-term foreign workers of the CNMI have been considered as labor units for decades. Under H.R. 1466 they will remain as a disenfranchised underclass, as labor units chained to the CNMI. The discriminatory status would restrict travel and deny them of political, social and economic rights just as the post-Civil War Black Codes kept the freed slaves as second-class citizens unable to serve on juries, vote or hold public office. Under the Black Codes, some states forbid social mobility, prohibiting freed slaves from entering certain states. Similarly H.R. 1466 would prohibit the "freed" nonresident workers from entering the United States or leaving the CNMI.
The sponsor of H.R. 1466, Delegate Gregorio Sablan (D-CNMI) and every co-sponsor should read Rubio's bill, including Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Judy Chu (D-CA), Mike Honda (D-CA), Charles Rangel (D-NY), Nydia Valazquez (D-NY), Charles Gonzalez (D-TX), and the rest. Then they should look in the mirror and see Senator Rubio staring back at them. It is time that the Democrats either remove their names from H.R. 1466 or defend their hypocritical stance. See:http://unheardnomore.blogspot.......
This is completely wrong, you are misinforming the public. Go to fox latino and watch the interview with Marco Rubio, he says at 1:27 minutes: "it wouldn't prohibit them in the future from accessing the citizenship process, but it wouldn't give them a pathway to it especially carved out". and in an article with the Miami Herald he said: "They do not have a special pathway to citizenship —- they would have to do it the regular way, just like anybody else would. But they’re not prohibited from accessing the citizenship process". Marco Rubio is not trying to create a third class citizenship order or a dream act without the dream, he simply wants to give them something that already exists in this country and there are millions on this category: it is called a "dual intent non-immigrant visa".
There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of workers on non-immigrant visas working legally in this country, in many cases those workers who entered the country legally and pay taxes (many times more taxes than American citizens) have to wait years to be eligible to apply for a green card and once they get it, they have to wait five years to apply for citizenship and wait from 3 to five years to be naturalized.In many cases the spouses of those workers are not allow to work legally and they have to support their families with one income. when their kids turn 21 they age out and are no longer in a legal status under their parents unless they get married or pay an outrageous amount of money to go to college on a student visa.
The question, then, is: why should the nation give those teenagers and young men and women eligible for DREAM act a preferential treatment and grant them an easy way to citizenship? why should they be put ahead of the line? why can't they wait and go through all the hassle that we have to go through for years and years and years. I have been in this country for 11 years and I have to wait at least ten more years before I can get my citizenship. I have paid over $20,000 in lawyers and immigrations fees and trips to my country just to stay legal and continue the process. why should those kids be handed a citizenship in a silver plate? Why are they so special? If you want to do something to start fixing the immigration system give "us" EB3 workers, who have been living, working and paying taxes in this country for years waiting for an incredibly slow and unfair bureaucratic system to move, our papers and then give those kids work visas and have them go through the same process that we have to go through.
Here is the link to the Marco Rubio interview in Fox latino where he clearly says that his bill: "wouldn't prohibit them in the future from accessing the citizenship process"
Please, do your homework before you start posting all this garbage.
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2012/04/01/video-full-marco-rubio-interview-uncut/