After throwing away their chance to help DREAMers during February's extended budget debacle, refusing to exchange President Trump's wall funding for some kind of legislative amnesty for the favored aliens here illegally whom they claim to champion, House Democrats are coming out with a big new legislative bill, H.R. 6, the Dream and Promise Bill of 2019.

According to Roll Call:

The reintroduction of the Dream Act has taken longer than other measures simply reintroduced from the previous Congress because it will include changes from prior versions. 

Among those changes are the inclusion of protections for Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure recipients.  The TPS and DED programs have protected undocumented refugees from deportation.

Basically, not only will the DREAMers get their free ride, but so will a lot of other classes of illegal aliens, such as those from undesirable states such as Sudan and El Salvador, who currently benefit from Temporary Protected Status, extended again and again.  Most troubling is the inclusion of Deferred Enforced Departure cases, which allows for multi-times-deported lawbreakers and people with multiple misdemeanors — people who don't qualify for asylum and who wouldn't be allowed in under normal immigration law.  There have been some loathsome people allowed to stay after openly breaking U.S. immigration law under that policy, and now they're grandfathered in with the DREAMers, who are a far from pristine lot, given that they're permitted to have up to two crimes such as wife-beating, drunk-driving, and graffiti-spraying misdemeanors on their records and still qualify, as the press tries to tout them all as valedictorians.

The problem is that the extended amnesty to a much larger group of people, who would number in the millions, amounts to an "illegal alien stimulus package."  Who wouldn't want to come here illegally now that another amnesty train has left the station?  Amnesties are like the subway stop: all you do is get to the station and wait for another train on this sort of setup.  Word gets around in places like Honduras, and with a pile of goodies waiting for them in the state of California and no wall to hold them back, an uneducated, indigent foreign national in need of a lot of "services" would almost feel stupid not to act on such an opportunity.  A better name for this proposed law would be the "Illegal Immigration Stimulus Act of 2019."

What Congress could do, if it were really serious about helping these people via bipartisan support, is find a way to make legal immigration easier.  Legislators could raise the numbers of foreign nationals to be allowed in, simplify immigration procedures, lower costs of applying, insist on customer service from immigration officials, and even permit people living here illegally under some circumstances to apply for legal residence.  All of that would buttress a law-based immigration system, ending the incentives to immigrate illegally.  DREAMers and anyone else they want in would benefit, yet rule of law would remain, and many Republicans would sign on.  They don't want that.  Stimulus is better in their minds; they want people to come here illegally.

The measure as it is obviously will go to a vote, and it might even pass in both the House and Senate, given the number of Republicans who continue to favor amnesty for illegal aliens.  However, Roll Call notes that Democrats from red-leaning districts who've just gotten into office are not entirely unified.  The irony of this is that at least some of the Republicans who would have been most likely to support the measure were the very ones who got ballot-harvested out of office in the last election — by ballot-harvesting illegal aliens working for the Democrats, no less.  They killed their seed corn.

In the end, it's likely to come down to just President Trump against the amnesty-minded Democrats with congressional power.  Get ready for the media sob stories and the DREAMer valedictorians to come up in the press.  It's the only inevitable thing to come of this. 

Image credit: Mark Nozell via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.