It’s a little more than serendipity that my first one-and-a-half blog entry should be about The DREAM Act. The DREAM Act stands for The Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act. It is a legislative proposal that currently exists as an amendment to H.R. 1585, the Department of Defense authorization bill. Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL), Chuck Hagel (R-NE), and Richard Lugar (R-IN) are co-sponsoring the amendment, which proposes a 6-year path to permanent residence and citizenship for persons brought without visas to the United States as children.

Groups like the National Council of La Raza, the United Farm Workers, and some members of the Department of Defense support the bill. The bill would give green cards to high school graduates who came to the United States at age 15 or younger, who have not committed serious crimes and have completed two years of college or who have served in the military for at least two years. The usual suspects are against this bill — The Heritage Foundation and conservative bloggers.

What these naysayers don’t realize is that the amendment is shaping up to be similar to past laws that gave a pathway to citizenship for other immigrants who have served in the U.S. armed forces. From 1940 to 1952, the Nationality Act naturalized persons who served honorably in the military for at least three years. This is how and why many Filipinos — my great uncles — came to the United States and became Americans during World War II and the Korean War. Most Filipinos served in the navy, cleaning the decks, hashing out food and washing dishes — the work that most Americans would rather not do.

Each year, an estimated 65,000 students without immigration documents graduate from U.S. high schools. They are the children of the farm workers who pick our strawberries, grapes, asparagus, lettuce, mushrooms, watermelons, you name it. They are the children of the subcontractors who laid your bathroom tile, put the roofs over our heads, nailed the drywall to your studs. And in many cases, they joined their parents in the fields (the legal age to be a farm worker is 12).

Like the Chinese workers who built the railroads, the Filipinos who washed the navy ship decks, the African slaves who were brought here by force to build this nation, the undocumented immigrant workers here in this country are doing the work that others deign not to do. They brought their children because… well… they are their children.

I grew up in a town 15 miles east of Los Angeles, where most of my classmates were Latino immigrants or children of immigrants. If they were able to speak Spanish at one point, they weren’t able to do so very well by the end of their high school career. Immersed in American culture and education, stewed in the California melting pot, my friends, my classmates were Americans who listened to rap, punk rock, New Wave, and Top-40 music — whether born here or not. I can’t imagine what my good friends would be doing or where they would have gone if they had been deported. They can’t speak Spanish all that well. They’d be lost.

Fortunately, many of them were given amnesty in 1986. So, many of my friends were able to stay in California, work through high school and community college. Some were able to get scholarships to go to four-year schools. Now those students are doctors and lawyers, accountants and nurses. Many of my other former classmates continue to labor for low wages, doing the work that many native-born Americans refuse to do.

These days, I don’t know of many native-born Americans who would pick fruit or build houses to contribute to the family’s income as high school students. In my years as a reporter here in San Antonio, though, and as I was growing up in California, I’ve met many such immigrant kids who do that very thing.

The naysayers argue that Americans would do the down-and-dirty work that immigrants do if the wages were high enough. But, really, would they? And just who is going to pay those wages? Since the dawn of this great nation, non-citizens (slaves) have tilled and picked our fields, built our universities and plantations, done the down-and-dirty work that just needed to be done.

Slavery is illegal today. Luckily for Americans, someone is willing to pick their vegetables, clean their houses, watch their children, go to war, and build their homes for low wages.

Citizenship to the children of these workers is the least we can offer.