1) My point was to ask why there is more concern in the legislature about illegal/undocumented folks than there is about American citizens whose rights are being taken away from them. It’s not simply this issue, but the bigger picture of the PATRIOT ACT, drug war, prison-industrial complex.

2) For that matter, why is there little campus concern about students who are being deprived of financial aid by federal policies against draft refusers and drug users? This is another example of the feds denying due process, and inflicting double jeopardy. Yet this goes by without hardly a cluck of protest from the campus. I’m one of the few people I know who has actively protested this (and I long since graduated college, and I’d refuse financial aid if offered for more reasons than I would tell you).

If the feds came out and denied financial aid to people who had, in the past, been convicted of illegal homosexual acts, I think we’d see some justifiable protest. Or are there groups in this country whose rights may be taken from them without any notice?

3) By the way, I’d say that anyone who does a tour of duty with the military ought to get citizenship. The Romans had a similar system and it worked for centuries. But this is a matter of earning a privilege, not having it handed to you.

I have another friend who had his financial aid for college pulled because he refused to sign up for Selective Service. Even though there is no draft, young men are required to register for the draft. He refused to sign up on grounds of principle. Now he can not go to college.

Can someone please explain why there is no similar Dream Act for these people? Both are American citizens. Does that make them less than people who entered the country illegally?

It ought to be a basic moral principle that children shouldn’t be punished for their parents’ crimes.

They’re not. They’re just not being rewarded for it, as they would be if the Nightmare Act had become law. No one seriously contends that the benefits in question ought to be extended to non-citizens who remain in their own countries; the only question is to whether to give them benefits they otherwise would not receive, solely because they’ve chosen to intrude upon ours.

I’m not sure I regard illicit immigration as a crime, but if I could be convinced that it was…

It is a crime. Reasonable minds may differ as to whether it should be a crime, but there’s not much room for debate as to whether or not it is.

…it’s a crime for which the punishment ought only to come to bear on those who were adults at the time it was originally committed.

Does that “basic moral principle” apply to all crimes, or only to this one? If only this one, what makes this crime so different from the rest, and does the answer change if the parents also committed the crime of child endangerment by entrusting their kid to a ruthless “coyote” along the way? And if the principle applies to crimes generally, how on earth can we as a society justify punishing any criminal for any crime, however heinous, so long as he has kids who would be adversely affected?

It’s election year in Mississippi, and a commercial just came out blasting the (Republican!) incumbent for not being “tough enough” on undocumented Mexican immigrants. For a brief moment, the camera panned over a Latino worker in a local poultry factory as ominous music played.

And I recognized the guy.

Did I meet him while volunteering at the Hispanic Ministries program of the local Episcopal diocese? While shopping at the grocery store? I don’t know. But I know he has a wife and kids.

I didn’t expect the DREAM Act to go anywhere in this Congress, but maybe in 2009 we can get some humane immigration reform passed. The DREAM Act would be item #1 on that agenda, from where I sit.

She is not being punished for the crime - she is a victim of it.