"We will not kill innocent people in exchange for Green Cards"

Camilo Mejía is a Nicaraguan American who was the first public Iraq war resister.

I just read a bracing indictment of the DREAM act, which I didn't realize used to contain a provision for 2 years of community service, or military enlistment, or college. The community service option was stripped away before Congress stuck the act on to the great rotting corpse of the national Pentagon budget.


Don'tAsk, Don't Tell repeal was used in a similar fashion.
Rep. Chellie Pingree told a group of us back in May that she had voted ought to pass for the "defense" funding bill both on the House Armed Services Committee and in a preliminary floor vote because DADT was appended to it, and she would have plenty of time to vote "no" on it later. I pray that she does so.

This prostituting of worthy legislation to pass military funding is what we are all about these days. Among other things, it provides a pretext to mobilize supporters of equal rights for all, or supporters of immigration reform, to lobby their reps and senators to vote yes on an even bigger slice of the federal budget pie for weapons and wars.

Here's more from VAMOS Unidos Youth on the feasibility of an undocumented migrant youth being able to exercise the education option in the DREAM act:

..the cost of each year in school without the aid of PellGrants or Financial Aid for attending two years of a four years University; our calculations were the following for a university in Ohio, which does not allow in-state tuition for undocumented students: Cleveland State University: Out of State

* 12 Credit Hours – $7,884.00 X 2 = 1 Year = $15,768.00 X 2 years = $31,536.00

* Expenses for Students Living at Home with their Parents = $6,568.00 X 2 years = 13,136.00

* GRAND TOTAL = $44,672.00

Only 10 states allow for undocumented students to pay for in-state tuition...

Young people in the U.S. are struggling and will struggle under the enormous weight of unsustainable military spending, and unsustainable environmental destruction. Undocumented youth have the additional burden of being non-persons with limited rights dangled only when they sign on the recruiter's dotted line.

Shame on us for treating them with such disrespect. Shame on the richest country in the world for not providing everyone with the right to a decent, affordable education.

These are the conditions that scholars and the Army's own handbook on counter insurgency would identify as breeding violence and terrorism, by the way.

The best thing we could do on behalf of the world's children, grandchildren, and beyond would be to bring our war dollars home.