Young immigrants with hopes of college or U.S. military service (but without immigration papers) will have to wait until after the November mid-term elections for any possible action on a legal overhaul while President Obama said he doesn’t believe immigration reform should come through regulation or other administrative tweaks.
The proposed legislation, which would give a pathway to citizenship for thousands of young college-bound or military-minded illegal immigrants, stalled again in Congress. The U.S. Senate failed to pass a procedural vote that would have thrust the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, or DREAM, Act into a larger debate on a defense spending bill.
The defense bill included several amendments, such as the immigration legislation and the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which bars openly gay men and women from serving in the military.
In interviews later in the week with Mexican media, Obama blamed Republicans for blocking the bill.
We could not have that debate because not a single Republican was willing to vote for this. And so, that has been a source of frustration. But my hope is that after the election maybe some of the Republicans who previously had supported these measures will come back and come to their senses and recognize that this is the right thing to do.
Republicans have said the legislation rewards lawbreakers and would be a magnet for illegal immigration.
While Obama sat down for the Mexican media, comedian Stephen Colbert Migration Policy Institute, in a new report, found that immigrant labor isn’t just low-skilled farm workers and high-skilled college graduates, but is “more evenly dispersed across the skills spectrum than has been widely recognized.”
Border governors from the United States and Mexico called for an immigration law overhaul at an annual conference held this year in New Mexico. Bill Richardson of New Mexico was the only U.S. governor to attend. His six Mexican counterparts also called on U.S. immigration officials to fly deported Mexicans back to their hometowns rather than drop them off in border towns.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has in place a limited system, known as the Mexican Interior Repatriation Program, or MIRP, that returns illegal immigrants found by U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona to their hometowns in Mexico.
The New York Times wrote about a young girl — a U.S. citizen — who was essentially deported with her father, and her mother’s efforts to have the U.S. Supreme Court hear her lawsuit against the U.S. Border Patrol for detaining and deporting an American citizen.
In a significant development, a Mexican journalist will not be deported after a U.S. immigration court judge granted him asylum two years after he fled Mexico where he’d received death threats.
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