Students advocating for the DREAM ACT recently advised other supporters that when Senator John Cornyn was asked if he would vote for the DREAM ACT, he responded by saying "Doesn't Texas already have a DREAM ACT?"
Texas has in-state tuition - which was almost eliminated in a nasty legislative fight this past spring. There is no DREAM ACT here... Undocumented college graduates cannot work professionally, get federal student aid - and most importantly they cannot regularize their immigration status once they graduate. For the moment they are lucky that they have in-state tuition.
Is Cornyn really that uninformed? Or was he passing on mis-information for his anti-immigrant supporters? I keep hoping that he really has ethics and respect for other human beings (that are not necessarily his color or from his social class). Maybe he secretly wants to support the DREAM ACT but some big financial supporter has told him that any campaign donations will stop if he shows he is pro-immigrant.
This is a common occurrence in politics. Lyndon Johnson was told the same thing by Brown & Root when he advocated for a Latino WWII Veteran to be buried by a white funeral home (funeral parlors in Texas were segregated until the 1970s). He had to shift positions or lose his most important backers.*
Who could be saying this to John Cornyn?
*read Robert Caro's volume III of LBJ's biography. Its an eye opener about Texas politics.
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