To solve the dilemma, President Barack Obama presented the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act--or the DREAM Act for short. The bill would provide legal residency to any illegal immigrants as long as they could meet certain requirements, like living in the U.S. for five years, graduating high school, and arriving in the country as minors.
The bill was originally proposed in 2001 but wasn't put to a vote until 2009 where it still failed to pass.On The Daily Show, Stewart sums up the 2012 year and Obama's immigration efforts into one video.
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This is a good example of what we've learned in class and why we need to be "media smart." In the video, Stewart only shows fragments of speeches that alter the truth and shows how stories can be framed. Stewart also shows how people can forget what they know by digging up older clips that show that Obama isn't the only president to push a new immigration policy.
With the second term of Obama's administration starting, talk on the issue is beginning once more, since we've yet to find a suitable fix. To read more about the bill and the recent happenings, click here.
Marco Rubio, a Florida senator has had issues in the past with Obama drafting bills through the White House. Just a few weeks ago, FOX aired a recent interview with Rubio and why again there is gridlock with Congress. Watch the video here along with a segment that was a precursor to the interview.
Did FOX news accurately report?
Surprisingly, yes.
Rubio says that he won't sign a bill until there's a way to track and enforce visas throughout the country. The same problem occurred in 1986 when immigration was last approached. While both sides see eye to eye on two points of the bill, border security and workplace enforcement, the problem won't get better until they have a way to track visas. Both Rubio and FOX news through out some facts that there's 11 million illegal immigrants in the country right now and that most of them have been here for over ten years.
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While neither FOX or Rubio stated where they were sourcing these numbers, our facts did. Homeland Security, the U.S. Census Bureau, and The Center of Immigration Studies all pinpointed that the number of immigrants in the country is somewhere between 9 million and a peak from last year of about 12 million. They continued to say that many of these immigrants have been living here since 2002 give or take a couple of years. While only 59 percent of immigrants are from Mexico, Rubio did a good job of stating good facts. He also was able to be fair in his argument and use past events to further credit his logic. Though FOX news seemed a little bias towards the Republican side in the questions they were asking.
