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Imagine your parents taking you to a foreign nation as a child.
You have no control over the situation. You grow up there as part of the culture. You speak the language. You go successfully through the school system. You're on course for a productive life. Then you're told you're in that nation illegally. Suddenly enormous obstacles threaten your efforts to get a higher education and secure gainful employment. You're regularly threatened with deportation to a country you hardly know.
Such is the reality for perhaps hundreds of thousands of undocumented children in the United States.
As with Senator Orrin Hatch, KSL doesn't advocate "granting unchecked amnesty to illegal immigrants." But we applaud the senator's idea "of providing children – the children who did not make the decision to enter the United States illegally – the opportunity to earn the privilege of remaining here legally."
Senator Hatch's DREAM Act, as he calls it, would remove federal obstacles that prevent States from granting in-state tuition to undocumented aliens. And it would offer those undocumented youngsters who've lived here for years the opportunity to earn conditional resident status once they graduate from high school, move on to higher education, enter the military or engage in community service.
The measure deserves support. In KSL's view, only the most callous of anti-immigration proponents would not share Senator Hatch's "dream."
