Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) GOP-friendly version of the DREAM Act will not give a special pathway to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants who pursue a college education. Nor will it provide federal financial aid or in-state tuition. But it will, he hopes, allow those children to work their way through school.
It’s a DREAM vision Rubio says will pass the test of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), the man who keeps insisting he’s one of Mitt Romney’s immigration policy advisers, to the chagrin of the Romney campaign, which has recently tried to downplay his involvement in the campaign.
On Wednesday, Kobach sketched out once again the GOP’s problem with DREAM: The proposal, supported by President Obama, would allow children who grew up in the U.S. but were brought here illegally by their parents to earn citizenship in the country they know best by serving in the military or getting a college degree.
The idea is unacceptable to Kobach — and the existing proposal is unacceptable to Romney, as well.
“I’d absolutely reject any proposal that would give a path to legal status for illegal aliens en masse,” Kobach told the Washington Post. “That is what amnesty is. I do not expect [Romney] to propose or embrace amnesty.”
Rubio is still in the process of drafting his DREAM Act proposal. But he got pretty specific about what his bill will do at a National Journal forum Thursday. One thing it won’t do, Rubio insisted, is run afoul of the Kobaches of the world.
“I don’t think that falls within that criticism,” Rubio said when asked about Kobach’s resistance to the current DREAM Act.
Rubio explained his plan:
All it does, it takes something that already exists, which is it takes non-immigrant visas and applies it to children who have grown up in this country, who we spent thousands of dollars educating … [and] allows them to continue to contribute to this country and if they eventually decide they would like to become residents and then thereafter citizens, allow that to do that the same way that anybody else in the world would be able to do it, and that is by accessing the existing route that is now in place.
That vision of DREAM has already drawn fire from Latino advocates and Democrats, who say it creates a second-class citizenship for millions of people who have spent most of their lives in America. Rubio dismissed those claims.
“There is no limbo,” he said. “The limbo is what they have now.”
