Michael Uwate is a partner of Uwate and Associates in Denver, Colorado. Uwate and Associates is a full service law firm handling criminal cases, immigration law, alcohol related offenses and personal injury cases

By: Michael Uwate

For those of you in Colorado who were taking up sides with the recent tuition/immigration issue, i.e., allowing illegal immigrants who are also prospective college students the privilege of in-state tuition, I have a question for you.

When State Senator Chris Romer (D-Denver) introduced a requirement that all beneficiaries of this prospective Colorado law sign a pledge to seek citizenship, how many people nodded their head and said, “Damn good idea. They should seek citizenship!”

Clearly a great many educated lawmakers and citizens agreed with Romer as the bill is up for consideration. Equally transparent was how passionately opposed some Coloradans are to the notion of illegal immigrants receiving anything but a kick in the ass back to the old country.

There is ignorance and misperception on both sides of the fence, including the old “amnesty” argument. One blogger went so far as to call it “full amnesty.”

Let’s be crystal clear about one thing regarding SB 170…It’s not amnesty, folks…not even close. If full amnesty was the Planet Earth, that bill is that other planet in Stargate.

Myself, I read that self-serving, ridiculously ignorant requirement that was tagged onto SB 170 and thought…”Great idea…but how, under the current immigration laws will these people ever get citizenship?”

Sad as it sounds, immigration laws are quite straightforward…If you are over 18 and have been unlawfully in the United states for between 6 months and a year, before you apply for a visa, you have to leave the country and wait three years before applying. If you have been in the U.S. for a year and a minute, you need to leave the country and wait TEN years.

Yes, you read correctly…a decade!

Clearly that’s not option for people who have lived and worked in Colorado for years. And it’s heartbreaking for anybody who has been at ICE on Paris Street and seen three-year-old kids crying for their mom as two big Homeland Security officials escort their mother through a door and out the of the country. All the while the husband is saying, “I’m an American. She’s my wife.”

As if any of that matters.

It does to me. And it does if you have an ounce of compassion. However, immigration law is dispassionate.

The solution?

There isn’t one.

At least not for everybody.

Congress has been considering an option since 1981 now termed the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM). In simplest terms (because little in Immigration law is simple), the last version of the DREAM Act to die in the Senate (2007 by a mere 6 votes) would have granted a conditional green card to illegal immigrants who:

• Had proof of having arrived in the United States before age 16.
• Had roof of residence in the United States for a least five (5) consecutive years since their date of arrival, compliance with Selective Service laws and an absence of fraudulent information in documents
• Were between the ages of 12 and 30 at time of bill enactment.
• Graduated from an American high school, or obtained a GED.
• Had “Good moral character”

These immigrants would receive “conditional” status and, upon completion of a two-year community college degree, two-years towards a bachelor degree or two years in the U.S. Armed Force, they could receive permanent resident status and a path to citizenship.

Sounds good, eh?

It relieves the immigration issues for kids you probably know whose only “crime” was coming to America illegally when they were too young to know any better.

Kids who have now become adults and live in fear of removal daily.

So what killed the DREAM?

Some senators considered DREAM a form of amnesty that would only encourage more illegal immigration (wouldn’t a one year window have eased those issues?).

Others felt DREAM, which was being added in 2007 as an amendment to a Defense Department Authorization Bill because two Comprehensive Immigration Reform Acts (2006 and 2007) died, should be part of a immigration reform bill and not an amendment, as if semantics actually mattered.

And, there was the in-state tuition ruse, where several people felt DREAM required states to offer lower tuition rates to illegal, when language of that effect was absent.

Of course, despite the bipartisan sponsors (Richard Durbin, Charles Hagel, Richard Luger), Democrats were also concerned that in return for allowing DREAM to be part of the Defense Bill, Republications would require amendments to other bills and…yada, yada, yada…Washington politics killed the DREAM.

And the nightmare known as U.S. immigration continues.

With no wake-up call in sight.

Michael Uwate
Attorney
Uwate & Associates, LLC
1776 South Jackson Street
Suite 210
Office: 303-321-8200
Direct: 720-897-6710
Mobile: 303-217-6669
Fax: 303-731-4885
E-Mail: uwate.associates@yahoo.com