Last Fri­day, Pres­i­dent Obama announced a new pol­icy that addresses many of the issues raised in the pro­posed DREAM Act. The Pres­i­dent seems to have decided that wait­ing ten years for Con­gress to act is long enough.

What the DREAM Act (Devel­op­ment, Relief, and Edu­ca­tion for Alien Minors) would do is to pro­vide per­ma­nent res­i­dency to young peo­ple who were brought to the United States ille­gally as chil­dren, and who are of “good moral char­ac­ter,” who have grad­u­ated from high school, and who sat­isfy a series of other con­di­tions. The Act was orig­i­nally pro­posed on August 1, 2001, by Sen­a­tors Dick Durbin (D-​​IL) and Orrin Hatch (R-​​UT), and has had bipar­ti­san sup­port ever since.

This seemed pretty much like a no-​​brainer, an easy first step toward com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform. (more…)