This 'DREAM' is a deadly nightmare for security

Recruit illegals to fight our wars?
By: DAVE PATTERSON - Commentary
July 1, 2007
Article Source North County Times

If the reader was wondering why our congressmen won't do what's necessary to get their hands around illegal immigration in this country ---- that is, to go after the employers ---- it's because our congressmen are working to do the same at the federal level. Congress wants to hire illegal aliens to do our dirty work and fight for us in Iraq.

A little known provision of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act being pushed by Congress, as part of the latest immigration legislation, allows illegal aliens who enlist in the military for two years a direct path to legal residency and citizenship.

Traditionally America has assimilated people with open arms, those that contribute to our nation's economic progress. However, to ask someone else's kids to go fight a war that American kids won't fight is unconscionable and must be stopped now. There are many reasons that we shouldn't ask foreign citizens to fight our wars, including the question of their true allegiance. The Defense Department is already having trouble controlling some foreign enlistees that have formed gangs in Iraq. Imagine what we will do with combat-trained specialists in counterinsurgency leading new gangs in our inner cities.


There also are valid reasons that our own children aren't volunteering to fight in Iraq, such as no connection between Saddam and 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction and to prevent Iraq from becoming what it has now become, a training ground for al-Qaida. Thus our American children are not enlisting to fight in Iraq because few of us now believe the war to be the noble cause that President Bush and Congress portrayed it to be. With the passing of the DREAM Act, America will offer citizenship to illegal immigrants willing to fight for us, while our children enjoy the pool, barbecues and beaches.

While our military recruiters cruise the streets of Mexico City, Tijuana and Laredo looking for candidates to serve and die in Iraq, the cost of recruiting has almost doubled to $2 billion since 2002. Our military is stretched to the breaking point, our soldiers stop-gapped into serving three and four times in combat and our National Guard and reserves depleted. At our current military manning levels, the Iraq war becomes unsustainable in April 2008. Congress is so desperate to fill the military ranks in Iraq without instituting a draft that they are willing to give away American citizenship to do it. The DREAM Act is designed to get Congress off the hook for the Vietnam repeat that the Iraq war has now become.

We should be ashamed that any American would be willing to ask someone besides American youth to fight an American war. Before we hit the moral bottom, we must act by contacting our congressmen to demand that they strike this provision in the DREAM Act. It is my belief that if this provision of the DREAM Act passes, America will have plumbed the depths of hypocrisy, and

we will have surrendered our status as a good and upstanding people.