Mitt Romney has said he will honor President Obama’s DREAM Actions — offering specific classes of undocumented immigrants the benefits they would have received had Congress done its job and passed the DREAM Act. But what the Romney campaign has now also revealed is that once the two-year DREAM Actions President Obama instituted expire, Romney will implement his own immigration policy — which he has yet to define, like every other policy he “has,” supposedly.
“I’m not going to take something that they’ve purchased,†Romney told The Denver Post, as Think Progress reports:
He added that before those two-year visas expire, “we will have the full immigration reform plan that I’ve proposed,†although he gave no details about his immigration plan.
Today, his campaign confirmed to the New York Times that Romney would end the program to grant deportation deferrals to young undocumented immigrants who qualify.
As many as 1.7 million DREAM Act-eligible undocumented immigrants could benefit from the policy, which gives them temporary legal status to work in the U.S. More than 80,000 people have applied for deferred action since the policy went into effect on August 15, but the Huffington Post reports that the wait time for the process can take up to four to six months. In the first month, 29 undocumented immigrants received deferrals, so it is likely that most of the applicants will not receive an answer before the inauguration in January.
Again, Romney has not declared what any of his policies actually entail — aside from firing Big Bird —  although he has said he would make life so miserable for undocumented immigrants they would want to “self-deport.”
And the obvious problem for the up to 1.7 million undocumented immigrants who register for a two-year temporary visa is that once it expires, if Mitt Romney is president, the government has a record of all these people and can just send them to their country of origin.