Thursday, June 14, 2012 | 12:21 p.m.
GOP can't agree on Dream Act: Rep. Steve King, vice chairman of the House immigration subcommittee, said he would not support any of the versions of the Dream Act currently being batted around.
In an interview with Fox News Latino, the Iowa Republican said that alternatives to the Democratic version of the Dream Act proposed by Rep. David Rivera and Sen. Marco Rubio, both R-Fla., still amount to amnesty and reward those who have broken the law.
King said the bills would struggle to get through the House, which has a Republican majority.
“They say things that tug at our hearts,” King told Fox News Latino. “They say (immigrants) weren’t aware they were breaking the law. But it was their parents that made the poor choices for their children. It's not our moral obligation to make up for the poor decision to bring them illegally from their countries.”
In May, Rivera introduced the Studying Towards Adjusted Residency Status Act, which would allow immigrants without a legal residency status under the age of 19, who arrived in the country before the age of 16, to apply for a five-year nonimmigrant visa if they demonstrate “good moral conduct” and get admitted to college. After graduation they could apply for a five-year visa renewal, and then subsequently proceed to permanent resident status and eventually citizenship.
Sen. Marco Rubio has suggested he would propose a new version of the Dream Act but has not done so yet. Some have taken to referring to the expected proposal as "Dream Act Light," due to the belief that Rubio’s version will not include any path to citizenship.
The Democratic version of the Dream Act would provide a path to citizenship for college students and those who serve in the military as long as they meet certain provisions for conduct and the age at which they were first brought to the United States.
Time magazine cover draws attention: Former Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas, who was brought to the United States illegally by his aunt when he was 12, shares the cover of the June 25 edition of Time magazine with other immigrants who have made their lack of a legal residency status public.
The cover declares: "We are Americans* ... *Just not Legally"
Vargas “came out” last year in a story for the New York Times Magazine.
“There are an estimated 11.5 million people like me in this country, human beings with stories as varied as America itself, yet lacking a legal claim to exist here. It’s an issue that touches people of all ethnicities and backgrounds: Latinos and Asians, blacks and whites. (And, yes, undocumented immigrants come from all sorts of countries like Israel, Nigeria and Germany.) It’s an issue that goes beyond election-year politics and transcends the limitations of our broken immigration system and the policies being written to address them,” Vargas writes in Time.
Vargas started a campaign called Define American “to document the lives of the undocumented and harness the support of our allies around this very controversial and misunderstood issue.”
The story also includes a video of the immigrants on the cover sharing their stories.
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