Author: Brett Fujioka
It’s been almost five months since the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act) failed to gain closure on the Senate floor. Since then, the legislation has remained in a state of political limbo and the legislature has yet to reach a consensus on how the bill will progress in years to come.
The DREAM Act is a bill that would allow illegal immigrants, who entered the United States at or before the age of 15 to gain legal status through the completion of both a high-school diploma and either two years of military service or four years of college education. Predictably, this act has faced opposition from conservative factions in the political world that believe it would empower people who have no right to live in this country. The Bush Administration itself opposed the bill, believing that the act would provide an incentive for foreigners to enter the country by illegal means.
Although I support the empowerment of illegal immigrants and I believe that helping them overcome their plight is necessary to preserve the American Dream, I feel that this bill was too ambitious. It should have been divided into two separate acts: one for education and the other for military service.
I believe that military service and education should have been addressed in separate bills not because they’re unrelated, but because by separating the two issues into two bills, one of them would be more likely to pass.
While legal citizenship through education falls under conservative scrutiny for being too liberal, citizenship through military service settles among more moderate grounds. The left would embrace the idea because it would empower minorities, while the right would be unable to deny it, as doing so would be considered unpatriotic.
Currently, there are about 350,000 non-citizens serving in the military, and 8,000 more enlist every year, according to the Army Times website. Though they weren’t born in this country, every one of these men and women is more American than the citizens of the United States who refuse to enlist out of a multitude of selfish reasons. These non-citizens put themselves at risk on a daily basis with scarcely any acknowledgement of their rightful legal status as citizens. Endowing them with the right to vote is the least that our citizens and politicians could give them in return.
There are already steps that non-citizens can take to gain legal status while serving in the military, but my proposed bifurcation of the DREAM Act would rush this tedious process. Two years in the active service is an ample amount of time to train someone to serve overseas. In a place like Iraq or Afghanistan, both the lives and well-being of these soldiers are in a state of constant uncertainty. If these people are to die on foreign soil, we should at least grant them the dignity of dying as legal Americans and not as second-class citizens.
I would also support a bill granting legal status to the parents of those serving in the military. I know that this sounds like a radically liberal venture, but the reason I support this notion is because there have been instances in which the military seized possession of the medals of deceased soldiers from their families, due to their illegal status.
Allowing illegal residents the chance for citizenship through active service would finally transform the army’s slogan, “Freedom isn’t free,” from an Orwellian quote of doublethink to a sensible adage. Not only would they be fighting for the freedom of America’s citizenry, they would be fighting for their own.
Brett Fujioka is a senior ECLS major. He can be reached at bfujioka@oxy.edu.
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