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Sept. 19, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:49
3830 The Truth About The DREAM Act
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Freedom is not sustained through the laws of physics.
It is not sustained through the inertia of history.
It is not sustained by the prior efforts of those who fought and died to provide you the freedoms that you still enjoy.
Freedom is maintained through knowledge, through willpower, through virtue, through effort, through risk sometimes.
Sometimes not even risk of a martial kind, but of a social kind.
And that is where we are, I beg you.
Please, educate yourself about the DREAM Act.
This is a watershed moment in American history.
This is a true fork in the road where one path goes up and one path goes down.
You must educate yourselves.
You must act. It is that important.
So let's dive in. The DREAM Act was originally introduced and actually passed the House in 2001 and different versions of the bill have been regularly reintroduced in the Senate and the House.
This heavily pushed, let's call it what it is, amnesty bill would legalize illegal aliens brought or claiming to be brought to the United States as minors and provide them with a path to permanent legal status.
A path to outright citizenship is also being discussed.
The DREAM Act is very different from DACA and pro-amnesty sophists purposefully conflate the two for propaganda purposes.
There are two active versions of the DREAM Act right now, one in the Senate and another in the House.
While very similar in language, they contain different criteria for eligibility.
The Senate Bill 2017 is sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Jeff Flake and Senator Chuck Schumer, while the House Bill 2017 is sponsored by Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on September 13, 2017.
We're ready to pass it.
I'm confident that if put on the floor, it will garner overwhelming support from both sides of the aisle.
But let us say this. If a Clean Dream Act does not come to the floor in September, we're prepared to attach it to other items this fall until it passes.
There's an old saying, I think it was Bismarck, who said, there are two things you do not want to see being made.
Sausages and laws.
But this is what you do. If you really have the will to win, if you really want to get your legislative agenda pushed forward, you attach it, you include it in Save the Puppies legislation, you jam it through however you want.
And the reasons for that we will get to in a moment.
Whoever wants it most in general wins.
You just have to want your freedoms more than they want their amnesty.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, September 14th, 2017.
Last night, Leader Schumer and I had a productive meeting with President Trump, where we agreed to a path to work out an agreement to protect our nation's dreamers for deportation.
We insisted that the Bipartisan Dream Act, the one introduced by Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard, would be the basis for the protection.
Now, they did backpedal a little bit after reporting on this meeting, but this does remain their goal.
She went on to say, Senator Tom Cotton, September 17, 2017, said, This is where millions of illegal immigrants were given amnesty and a path to permanent status by Ronald Reagan in California.
And of course, California then very quickly switched to Democrat and has remained so ever since.
According to the most recent numbers, approximately 690,000 illegal aliens are protected under DACA. Another 100,000 or so qualified for DACA previously but failed to renew or were deported due to criminal activity or used an immigration law loophole to gain a green card, which was never supposed to happen.
How do these numbers compare to what is proposed under the DREAM Act?
And for those who want to know more about DACA, I've done a presentation on that, which we'll link to below.
Let's look at these numbers. So there's a minimum threshold for eligibility.
So the minimum threshold for eligibility under the Senate Bill 2017 is being under 18 years old when arriving in the United States and having lived in the country for four years or more.
These standards are more lenient than both the 2010 and the 2017 versions of the House bill, which set age of arrival at 16 years old and required five years or more of U.S. residence.
I mean, there was a 2010 bill passed the House, but then it died, and it simply shows the lowering of standards as time moves forward.
All bills require a, quote, lack of criminal record and good moral character.
So... I guess there's a checkbox.
That sounds pretty easy to enforce and figure out and understand.
Conditional status.
This is very important. There are no age requirements on Senate Bill 2017, but House Bill 2017 has a minimum age of 18 years old and House Bill 2010 capped applicants at 30 years old.
All require the minimum educational attainment of a U.S. high school diploma or GED. The Senate Bill 2017 offers special considerations to those enrolled in high school and previous DACA beneficiaries.
The Senate Bill 2017 offers eight years of conditional status, and both House bills provide ten years total conditional status, five-year initial and another five-year extension.
Now, remember, of course, that people who've come in illegally are not vetted, For things like mental illness, they're not vetted for communicable diseases which are in some places running rife in America as a result, to some degree, of legal and illegal immigration from third world countries.
This is unvetted.
And the thing is too, of course, DACA, they say, well, you know, they've been used to America, this is all they know, so if you allow them to stay for eight years or ten years more, then that argument becomes even more solid and provides further impetus for a path to legalization.
So let's look at the numbers, and if you're just listening to this on audio, please check it out on the video side as well.
So, this is from the Migration Policy Institute.
They're not particularly opposed to this kind of stuff.
They seem to actually be quite pro it, so these are best estimates to date.
This is the populations who are potentially eligible to apply for legalization for amnesty under the DREAM Act.
So we're going to look at three categories, the minimum threshold, that's the age at arrival and years of residence criteria.
The conditional status is the earned high school diploma or GED, or if you're enrolled in high school or if you have valid employment authorization.
The permanent status is a post-secondary degree.
Or if you've served honorably in the military or held continuous employment for the time specified in each specific piece of legislation.
So, let's start with the House Bill 2010, the one that died.
The permanent status, 233,000 people were eligible to apply.
Conditional status, 825,000 people.
These larger numbers subsume the smaller numbers.
And for the minimum threshold, it was 1,993,000 people.
That was 2010. Let's look at the House Bill 2017.
The permanent status has jumped from 233,000 to 938,000.
Conditional status is just over a million, and the minimum threshold has gone from under 2 million to 2.5 million and 4,000.
If we look at the Senate Bill 2017, permanent status from the House Bill 2010, 233,000 has gone to over 1.5 million people.
The conditional status, 1.8 million people, and the minimum threshold eligibility is 3,338,000.
Now, we're going to go through the permanent status thing in a bit.
So, if we look at 800,000 for DACA, which is now down to...
It's down by a significant amount to 700,000 or so.
Here we're talking 3.3 million.
And this is prior to them having kids.
This is prior to the birthright citizenship.
And this is prior to the chain migration of bringing, quote, family members in, which is largely unvetted.
And remember... Mexico has a huge incentive to get people into the United States because they send tens of billions of dollars back to Mexico in remittance payments, either because they're working or because they're getting welfare or some other form of income, perhaps criminal income.
So there's not going to be a lot of vetting and withholding or saying, well, you know, you can't take these people from the Mexican government, not the most honest government in the world, and has a huge incentive to get people into America.
So this is amnesty for everyone, pretty much.
And it's going to be, in the long run, seems almost inevitable, tens of millions of people.
They're going to come in and they're going to vote for bigger and bigger government.
The massive cost involved in this can scarcely be calculated, and of course it's going to fall on what seems to be at times the eight remaining taxpayers in America.
So let's look at the education levels and eligibility.
The House Bill 2010, if you are looking at those who have an associate's degree or higher, it's two years of post-high school education or more.
So you're 18 plus and you have an associate's degree or higher.
The House Bill 2010 was 96,000.
No high school diploma or GED, not enrolled in high school, 392,000.
Again, these are cumulative.
The minimum threshold, just age and residence criteria in the House Bill 2010, 1,993,000.
If you look at the House Bill 2017, those numbers have gone up.
So that associate's degree or higher, eligibility, 141,000.
No high school diploma or GED not enrolled, 667,000.
Minimum threshold, age residence criteria, Has gone to 2,504,000.
Now, if we look at the Senate Bill 2017.
Associates degree or higher, 18 plus, 193,000.
No high school diploma or GED not enrolled in high school.
1,122,000 people.
The minimum threshold, just the age and residence criteria, 3,338,000 people.
Just astonishing.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, and I quote, immigrant adults without a high school degree are the largest group among those who would not immediately qualify for conditional status under the 2017 House and Senate proposals.
For this population, obtaining a GED may be considerably challenging due to limited English proficiency, high levels of poverty and family pressures.
So in the Senate Bill 2017, of the people coming in, about 5.7% of them have associate's degree or higher.
And these are not people who've got PhDs in physics for the most part.
And of course, once they want to start getting into this higher education, they're going to use affirmative action to elbow their way in.
Standards are going to have to be lowered.
You know where this all goes.
So, let's look at the pathways to legal permanent residence.
Again, according to the Migration Policy Institute, and I quote, An authorized youth able to successfully obtain conditional status would have a certain period to meet the criteria for LPR status.
Earlier versions of the DREAM Act included two pathways to LPR status, post-secondary education and military service.
The quote continues, Estimating the number who would pursue the military pathway is difficult because not everyone would want or be able to take the military service route.
Prospective recruits have to pass both medical and aptitude tests and the military has become more selective in its recruitment.
The 2017 House and Senate measures would make it easier to gain LPR status for some applicants by offering a third pathway, continuous employment.
See, here's the challenge. Higher education still has some standards you have to pass.
The military, of course, has some standards you have to pass, and they're obviously concerned that a lot of people aren't going to pass those standards, so you just have to have a job of some kind.
And how do people know you have a job of some kind?
Some people say you do.
You could be a dishwasher, you could be a gardener, you could be any of these things.
Regarding education, the Senate Bill 2017 and the House Bill 2010 require an associate's degree or at least two years towards a bachelor's degree.
The House Bill 2017 requires enrollment in a, quote, higher education institution, end quote, during the first year of conditional status and at least an associate's degree.
Right, right. Could be anything.
Could be women's studies, could be who knows what, because, you know, these...
These recipients of amnesty, they're not going to just go and propagandize themselves in core Marxism and socialism on their own.
They need to get into college for that.
And of course, again, standards are going to be lowered.
There's going to be a general flood.
Oh, it's going to be great for the colleges because the taxpayers are going to be on the foot for a lot of this stuff, I'm sure.
Military service. The Senate Bill 2017 and the House Bill 2010 require two years of military service, while the House Bill 2017 requires three years.
Employment. The Senate Bill 2017 requires at least three years of continuous employment, while the House Bill 2017 requires at least four years during the first five years of conditional status.
The House Bill 2010 had no such provisions or status.
How is this verified? How do you know?
Can you tell? And remember, these bureaucrats, a lot of them of course are on the left, a lot of them are Democrats.
They work for the government after all.
And so they're going to have a great deal of incentive in pushing these forward.
And it's going to be like DACA where, you know, at least in the last couple of months of the Obama presidency, when they were jamming through enormous numbers, like a 98% success rate.
Anyway. These are just words on paper.
You know, it's the old Stalin thing.
It doesn't matter who votes. It doesn't matter who counts the votes.
It doesn't matter what laws are written on the paper.
It matters what are the incentives of the people who are enforcing those laws or not.
Again, according to the Migration Policy Institute, these are the various pathways to legal permanent residence.
Estimates are of there. House Bill 2017, those who are going to get it through employment, 579,000.
Those who are going to get it through the military service, 37,000.
And those who are going to get it through education, 321,000.
According to the Senate Bill, estimates of the Senate Bill 2017, those who are going to get it through employment, 959,000.
Those who are going to get it through military service, 61,000.
And those who are going to get it through education, 491,000.
And these are projections, of course, they're optimistic, I would say optimistically low, because people are going to change their behavior based upon what incentives are dangled in front of them, and it's going to change enormously when it gets to be implemented.
I mean, you know, you know how this works.
So, under military considerations, let's have a look at this.
How's that? Well, according to Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Paul Haverstick, and I quote, There are less than 900 individuals currently serving in the military or have signed contracts to serve who are recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival, DACA authorization. These individuals are part of the military accessions vital to the national interest, or MAVNI, pilot program.
Since 2009, MAVNI has led to U.S. citizenship for 10,400 people.
The program was opened to DACA recipients in 2014.
Despite the vital-to-the-national-interest verbiage, the program has also been used for the hiring of cooks, drivers, mechanics, etc., whose specialized skills are questionable.
And remember, these are people who are bumped aside.
These are Americans who don't get these positions.
Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Paul Haverstack again says...
The Department of Defense is conducting a review of the MAVNI pilot program due to potential security risks associated with the program.
Representative Steve Russell says, The lack of discipline in implementation of this program has created problems elsewhere.
The program has been replete with problems to include foreign infiltration, so much so that the Department of Defense is seeking to suspend the program due to these concerns.
See again, there's what's promised, there's what's actually delivered, what's actually implemented and how.
You can write everything you want in your ideal platonic piece of paper.
Flawed human beings with their own particular agendas and their own particular skewed incentives are going to be implementing it.
The program is still active, but new applications are presently suspended due to ongoing investigations.
The Department of Defense has also been sued by several persons who became naturalized U.S. citizens through the program, but are impacted by new restrictions and guidelines.
Everyone's going to sue about everything.
You can say, well, you know, we're going to carve off this exception for this group of people, but then all the lawyers in the world, all the immigration lawyers in the world swarm it, say, well, you're treating people differently, that's not allowed under the law, equal treatment.
Boom. It's all going to get sanded down by lawyers and activist judges.
According to Fox News, quote, Retired U.S. Army General Jack Keane said ISIS has always had desire to use migration as a way to penetrate into countries.
They have done that successfully in Europe because of open borders, mass immigration, with no vetting.
In the U.S., he said, we haven't had any record of their penetration, and certainly if this program is compromised and there's a possibility of that kind of penetration, it's got to be thoroughly investigated.
This is just a tiny example of how the words and the deeds don't match.
Don't listen to what they say.
Look at the history of what's been done.
So, criminality.
How can you be restricted through criminality under the DREAM Act?
The Senate Bill 2017 would exclude those convicted of Or more.
Now, green card and temporary visa categories actually have stricter requirements for good moral character and criminal behavior.
So here's your rule.
So, you of course could say, well, everything was related to my immigration status.
I was stopped because I was targeted because of my ethnicity and that makes it part of my immigration status or whatever.
And really? You have to be convicted of three or more separate offenses on separate dates?
Because two is fine, right?
Well, and of course, lack of respect for law has already been shown by coming into the country illegally.
Jessica Vaughan from the Center for Immigration Studies has said, and I quote,"...it would grant status to illegal aliens who have been convicted of felony ID fraud or other crimes that could be considered to be related to their immigration status." You could say human smuggling, document fraud, benefits fraud, false claims to citizenship, illegal voting, and many other felonies have an essential element that involves immigration status.
These standards are significantly more lenient than other legal immigration categories, right, such as green card and these temporary visa categories.
Isn't that astonishing?
You can vote illegally, but that won't be counted against you when it comes to legal status in the future.
The phrase for which the alien was convicted on different dates for each of these three offenses means that the applicant would need to be convicted of crimes on three separate occasions before becoming ineligible for legalization.
The Senate Bill 2017 also allows the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any denial of legalization, quote, for humanitarian purposes or family unity or if the waiver is otherwise in the public interest, effectively allowing anybody to be legalized on a mere subjective whim.
In the public interest generally means there's no rules.
Because who knows what the public interest is?
Who defines it? Generally, the public interest is whoever's going to organize most against me and make my life most difficult, I'll comply and obey to their dictates.
So, the rules, I mean, that's not even a loophole.
That's like a fire hose on a white erase board, right?
I mean, that's just... forget it.
There's no rules. No rules.
Anybody can be legalized.
Hardship exemption. If the illegal alien, quote, has been continuously physically present in the United States since the date that is four years before the date of the enactment of this act, and, quote, was younger than 18 years of age on the date on which the alien initially entered the United States, end quote, they may qualify for a hardship exemption and permanent legal status.
Now, naturally, of course, there's no definition of Of what a hardship exemption is.
That's even remotely objective.
According to the DREAM Act,"...the secretary shall remove the conditional basis of an alien's permanent residence status and grant the alien status as an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence if the alien demonstrates that..." 1.
The alien has a disability.
2. The alien is a full-time caregiver of a minor child.
Or 3. The removal of the alien from the United States would result in extreme hardship to the alien." Or the alien spouse, parent or child, who is a national of the United States or is lawfully admitted for permanent residence.
There's no definition here.
If the alien has a disability, do you know how easy it is to get disability status these days in America?
Full-time caregiver of a minor child.
Oh, so I can stay if I have a child.
Hmm, I wonder if that will change anybody's decisions about birth control.
The removal, they say, of the alien from the United States would result in extreme hardship to the alien.
Well, if nobody wants to be deported, of course it will result in extreme hardship.
No, it's very hard for me.
That's the law now. It's hard for me.
And they're bureaucrats. Approving everyone never gets you in trouble.
Rejecting people gets you in trouble.
We all know how this works.
Now, this text is from the Senate version, but it's nearly identical in the House version.
Now, again, since the date that is four years before the date of the enactment of this act, right?
So let's say that you're just one day shy of that standard.
Are you going to go, well, you know, close, but no, no, you're going to change things.
You're going to lie. I mean, come on.
People think that there's some magic net of rules that's going to land on people who are always going to be perfectly honest.
They can lie about their entrance date, they can lie about their age, and they're going to rely on paperwork documentation from the enormously corrupt Mexican government that hugely benefits from remittances.
They can jump into a sham relationship.
They can get pregnant in order to stay in the country.
And of course, the child has full citizenship through birthright citizenship.
They can...
I mean, of course, there's nothing in here about hardship to the American taxpayer.
Of course not. There's just livestock there to serve up money in order to allow the Democrats to buy votes.
The proof required to receive a hardship exemption runs as follows.
The alien shall submit to the secretary at least two sworn affidavits from individuals who are not related to the alien and who have direct knowledge of the circumstance that warrant the exemption, that contain, one, the name, address, and telephone number of the affiant, and two, the nature and duration of the relationship between the affiant and the alien.
So, yeah, don't worry.
Everyone's going to be honest. No one's going to lie.
Everyone's going to be vetted. And people are going to be really scared of putting forward a false statement.
And I'm sure their lawyers will advise them to that direction.
Let's look at the health care costs of this.
When the DREAM Act was proposed in 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would reduce budget deficits by approximately $1.4 billion over the next 10 years.
I guess they forgot the vertical on the minus.
This older version of the DREAM Act and President Obama's unconstitutional DACA executive order did not allow beneficiaries to receive health insurance subsidies.
Nothing spells free market like being forced to purchase something at gunpoint.
Unfortunately, this is not the case in the latest version of the DREAM Act.
And those able to apply for the program would be eligible for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.
You see how all this works? You see how all this works.
If you keep dangling free stuff, it incentivizes more people to come across the border.
And then what happens is you say, well, the free stuff's never going to be available to the illegals.
Next thing you know, oh, well, we're going to give them some amnesty, and now they get the free stuff.
You see, this is a very soft net that's closing around you.
You understand? Don't wait till it's too late to fight this now.
An analysis from John Carney at Breitbart News calculated that additional health care subsidies, even after accounting for taxes paid by legalized workers, quote, would raise federal outlays by $115 billion, end quote, over 10 years, and that, quote, nearly all of that would be paid for by additional deficit spending.
So you get to virtue signal or avoid being called a racist, or you get to import a bunch of people who are going to vote for bigger and bigger government and more and more left-wing policies and more and more open borders and more and more immigration and more and more submerging of groups who want freedom in America.
And your kids will pay the bill.
Or if you don't have kids, other people's kids will pay the bill.
John Carney said, they might call it the DREAM Act, but in terms of the federal budget, it is a nightmare.
So, if this passes, you understand.
It's the end of America, as it stands.
Basically, everybody gets in.
Everybody gets in.
And you have to pay for everyone.
Whatever restrictions you try to put on it, lawyers are going to tear it apart and open the floodgates.
And the activist judges are going to vote, as they generally do, for open borders.
And if this passes, everybody who points out the facts or pushes back or opposes it is going to be attacked as a racist.
Isn't that great? Don't you just love diversity?
Deficits are going to go through the roof.
Taxes are going to go through the roof.
If this passes, the wall doesn't matter.
Chain migration doesn't matter.
Birthright citizenship doesn't matter.
It is going to result Overtime in amnesty for the tens of millions of either coming in or already in America illegal immigrants.
They're all going to vote. For Democrats.
That's why the Democrats care about this.
It's why they want this.
So desperate. It's why they keep returning to it.
They can't make the case to the American public anymore.
Not since the failure of socialism as a whole around the world has been generally accepted.
China left it behind.
Russia left it behind.
Cuba's hanging on. Venezuela is currently dissolving into a socialist hellhole.
It was a great tweet the other day. Where somebody said, socialism always begins with the question, why can't we just provide free healthcare for everyone?
And it always ends with the question, this came from a newspaper in Venezuela, why can't we eat our pet rabbits for food?
It's the way it always goes.
Socialism is a nightmare, as the saying goes, eventually you run out of other people's money to spend and everything collapses.
So they can't make the case rationally, economically, historically, they can't make the case.
So they're just stuffing the bell.
With truly low information voters.
You know, a country is nothing more or less than the sum of the beliefs of the people who live in that country.
If you scoop everyone out of Japan and you replace them with Mexicans, you have Mexico on an island.
You understand? It all comes down to this.
If you get tens of millions of additional Democrat voters, you will never.
I mean, you may have some vestigial appendix between the cheeks, tailbone of a Republican party, but it will mean nothing.
Because the free market will be done.
You'll get bigger and bigger government, more and more regulations, more and more amnesty, more and more immigration.
From people who have no interest.
In the cultural history, in the economic history, in the political history, in the sacrifices of your ancestors to build a free country, they're no interest in that.
They want free stuff. If you want freedom, that's one thing.
If you want free stuff, that's the other.
It's the opposite. You get freedom or you get free stuff.
You can't get both.
And what's going to happen?
Well, smarter people are going to see the demographic riding on the wall and they're going to stop having kids.
I mean, it's the ultimate castration of smart people.
And people will greedily grab it more and more from a diminishing public trough.
The economy will collapse.
The food supply will be interrupted.
The cities will turn to chaos.
And if you're unlucky, you end up with full communism.
The luckiest option if this passes...
It's the slow living hell of something like Venezuela.
So now share this, like this, subscribe.
Go talk to people.
Go act. Do something.
Now is the time. Nobody's asking you to march to war as yet.
But to avoid it, we need to fight the battle of ideas.
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