Wake Up, Yahoos! DREAM Hasn't Died.

Jonathan Strong of The Daily Caller assesses the chances that Democrats will sneak through the "DREAM Act" partial immigration amnesty in the waning days of the lame-duck Congress. As feared, the conclusion is murky, given the crisscrossing array of potentially soft Republicans and potentially tough Democrats in the Senate. But a) a "proprietary vote simulation and prediction engine" called WhipCast gives DREAM a 33 percent chance of passage; b) Microsoft and other tech companies are pushing for it; and c) even more worrisome, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell's spokesman gives a shockingly nonchalant answer when asked if stopping DREAM is a priority:

“I don’t have a whip count on it … Our priority is making sure no one gets a tax hike and funding the government while reducing spending.”

I take that as a "no."

Will the most immediate result of the dramatic Republican midterm success—fueled in part by Tea Party resentment of illegal-immigration amnesty proposals—be a large illegal-immigration amnesty? That would be an astonishing failure on McConnell's part and a humiliating defeat for conservatives. But consider: i) We still don't know which way a lot of squishy senators will jump; ii) the bill is so chock full of excesses that it is relatively easy to cut it down in an effort to win over the swing legislators; and iii) if Democrats wanted to really pass the bill, as opposed to simply pandering to Latinos, they would spread the word that they were simply pandering to Latinos, which is exactly what they are doing! Now they can surprise everyone—especially gullible journalists—when they turn out to be serious.

It's time for amnesty opponents—not infrequently derided as "yahoos"—to make themselves heard, no? ...

P.S.: To my mind, the two killer arguments against DREAM are

1) It's a fraud. It claims to give amnesty only to illegal immigrants brought here when they were young by their families. "We don't punish children for the sins of their parents," the argument goes. But the parents get legalized too: once the kids are citizens, in a few years, they could obtain legal papers for their mothers, fathers, and perhaps other relatives. Under DREAM, it turns out we don't punish parents for the sins of parents either.

2) It creates a huge new incentive for more illegal immigration. Even if only illegal-immigrant children (and not their parents) get put on a "path" to legalization, that creates a big incentive for potential future illegal immigrants with children, now living in other countries, to sneak across the border to await the next installment of DREAM. It would seem hard to create a bigger incentive for a poor Latino family than the likelihood that their children could grow up legally in the prosperous, relatively safe United States. There's nothing illegitimate about the immigrant motives that underlie this incentive. They're admirable. But it's still an incentive. Unless we want another wave of illegal immigrants soon, it doesn't make sense to create any more such incentives until the border is secure. (That's not to say we shouldn't open up more avenues for legal entry by potential immigrants from Mexico and other nations. But DREAM doesn't do that. It rewards and encourages the breaking of whatever more generous law we might write.) ...

Note that neither of these flaws is curable by amending the bill. Even if DREAM is written to explicitly ban children from legalizing their parents, that ban could be overturned by a future Congress—and there would be lots of pressure to do so. (What do you want to do, tear immigrant families apart?) And any amnesty for children (or grown-up children), however carefully targeted, will create an incentive for their parents to smuggle them in ...

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* Update: McConnell's spokesman, Don Stewart, has now "reached out" to Hot Air's Ed Morrissey to "say that people have misunderstood." In Hot Air's words:

It’s not that stopping DREAM isn’t a priority, it’s that he was simply drawing a contrast between the GOP’s focus on economic relief and the Democrats’ preoccupation with ancillary “liberal wish list” items like DADT and DREAM.

The epistemological status of this statement is uncertain. Is Stewart spinning back his previous remarks? Does this mean blocking DREAM is a priority of any kind? If that were the case, there are ways to say it! Stewart apparently didn't avail himself of them in either his Daily Caller or Hot Air discussions, which kind of confirms Daily Caller's original point (that it's not a priority). Or else both web sites left that key part out. ... 4:50 p.m.

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