As my colleagues have noted below, the DREAM Act has finally been put out of our misery. (Here's how everyone voted, and see analysis of the vote from Roy Beck and Mickey Kaus.) But it's bigger than that. The vote was the capstone of 10 straight years of successful defense against amnesties, following the passage of seven amnesties from 1986 to 2000. Only twice in the past decade did amnesties even get the approval of one chamber — the overall amnesty passed by the Senate in 2006 and the DREAM amnesty by the House earlier this month — but neither time did the amnesty reach the president's desk.
This decade-long perfect record of stopping amnesty came despite the fact that the pro-amnesty side has held all the commanding heights of the economy and society: Big Business, Big Labor, Big Religion, Big Academia, Big Media, Big Philanthropy, and of course, Big Government. The open-borders side is backed by billionaires like George Soros, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Bloomberg, plus scores of millions from mammoth foundations like Ford, Carnegie, and MacArthur, plus 98 percent of groups lobbying Congress on the issue.
But we had the public.
Now, the next phase of the immigration struggle begins. Next month, the new Congress will be a very different animal. Fifty-three members of the House of Representatives who voted for the DREAM amnesty will not be returning in January. And it will finally be time to go on the offense. Among the goals: making E-Verify a standard part of the hiring process for all new employees, Rep. Steve King's idea of denying the deductibility of all wages paid to illegal workers, ending the egregious Visa Lottery, and closing down the chain-migration-driving immigration category for adult siblings of U.S. citizens.
