Last week, the Ventura County Star, the hometown paper of the notoriously anti-immigrant Elton Gallegly, editorialized in support of California’s new DREAM Act:
Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law last Monday a bill the Legislature passed to allow students who are in the country illegally to receive private financial aid at California’s public colleges.
Like so much else related to immigration, Assembly Bill 130 ran into fierce criticism; however, there are compelling grounds for accepting the new law as a sensible public policy. It’s the proper approach for several reasons.
The editorial also noted that this issue requires a federal solution:
The California Dream Act is different from the federal Dream Act, which would include a path to citizenship for those brought to the country illegally as children. Citizenship is a federal issue, just as it’s a federal responsibility to control the U.S. border and provide a system to verify eligibility for employment.
But wrecking California college students’ education is no remedy for federal authorities’ failure to carry out their duties many years ago.
Rep. Gallegly is one Congressman who consistently blocks the remedy for the problem. Last year, he voted against the DREAM Act. This year, he is the Chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, and in that role, he’s pushing a mass deportation agenda. Basically, he’s spear-heading the effort to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, which is unfeasible and costly — something this country certainly can’t afford in this economy. But hopefully, this is going to be his last term.
California’s Redistricting Commission is finishing its work and it appears likely that Gallegly will find himself in a much less friendly district. Kyle at Citizen Orange wrote about this in June — and we agree with his conclusion:
It’s only fitting that demographics push some of the last hard-core nativists in California out of the U.S. House of Representatives.