The North American Integration and Development Center at UCLA has released a new report highlighting the economic benefits of enacting the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. The report, entitled “No DREAMers Left Behind: The Economic Potential of DREAM Act Beneficiaries” states:

Passage of the DREAM Act is not only a question of individual fulfillment; it is a practical step toward realizing a return on the U.S. public education system’s investment in immigrant youths. DREAMers make up a highly-educated and potentially high-income earning group that can contribute billions of dollars to the U.S. economy across diverse industries. The DREAM Act offers a moral solution to the trap of being a young, motivated, undocumented immigrant in the U.S. It is also an economically sensible piece of legislation that advances the interests of U.S. society as a whole.

More specifically, the report concludes, “In the No DREAMers Left Behind scenario, 2.1 million undocumented immigrants would become legalized and generate approximately $3.6 trillion” over a 40-year period. Another positive effect of the DREAM Act would be that “[a] higher supply of skilled students would also advance the U.S. global competitive position in science, technology, medicine, education and many other endeavors.”

These findings are especially significant given the nation’s falling level of educational attainment. As Wonk Room economics blogger Pat Garofalo notes, “By 2025, according to estimates by the Lumina Foundation, our nation will be short 16 million college-educated workers. This will have real consequences for both the economy as a whole and for individual workers.”

In the past, the College Board has indirectly supported the report’s conclusions, stating, “In strictly economic terms, the contributions that DREAM Act students would make over their lifetimes would dwarf the small additional investment in their education beyond high school, and the intangible benefits of legalizing and educating these students would be significant.”

The reasoning behind the report’s findings is pretty straightforward. The DREAM Act provides young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. through no fault of their own with the opportunity to get on a path to legalization by attaining a college education or serving in the military. As a result, those who qualify for the DREAM Act will also have access to better economic opportunities than they would if they were working without a visa in the shadows of the economy.

Even former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AK) agrees with that logic, saying, “the economy will be better when that [undocumented] kid is able to fully realize his potential and break the pattern of his parent’s illegal activity.” Polls show that 70 percent of Americans support the DREAM Act.

Yesterday, after a meeting between the President and Latino congressional leaders, the White House issued a press release stating, “The President and the CHC [Congressional Hispanic Caucus] leaders believe that, before adjourning, Congress should approve the DREAM Act.” The question is whether Rupublicans will join or obstruct the effort to allow undocumented students to improve their lives and the U.S. economy.

Yesterday, USA Today reported that Arizona’s immigration law — SB-1070 — may be straining U.S. relations with Latin America. The article notes that ten Latin American countries signed on to a brief opposing SB-1070 in the Department of Justice lawsuit challenging the law. The piece then goes on to quote several noted Latin America experts who express concern over the law’s foreign relations implications:

State Department spokesman Charles Luoma-Overstreet said the law has impacted relations between the United States and Latin American countries, becoming a topic of discussion “in all our interactions” with those nations.

“The countries in Latin America are already perceiving some distance and disengagement from the U.S.,” said Mauricio Cardenas, director of the Latin American Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “(The Arizona law) makes Latin America more and more interested in developing stronger relations with other parts of the world.” [...]

Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, worries that Obama’s stance on the law may not be enough to soothe other countries. “I’m sure that Mexico is happy that the Obama administration is challenging these laws. But I’m not sure they’re persuaded that the Obama administration is in control,” Alden said. “The worry is that the states are going to start driving the bus, too.”

Alden said it’s the latest in a long line of slights to the region that started with the Bush administration and has continued under Obama. [...] “If you put (the Arizona law) on top of all that, it’s the latest in a pretty long series,” Alden said.

Alden makes a compelling point. Americans weren’t the only ones hoping for change in 2008. In testimony before Congress delivered earlier this year, Peter Hakim of the Inter-American Dialogue noted that “no event since John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 was more welcomed in Latin America or held out greater expectations for improving the region’s ties with the U.S. than Barack Obama’s electoral victory in November 2008.” Nonetheless, Hakim also noted, “U.S. policy remains largely unchanged and it is hard to identify a single Latin American country that has a better relation with Washington today than it did during President Bush’s tenure.”

Hakim explicitly pointed to the absence of immigration reform. A similar criticism was put forth by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) when George W. Bush was still president in 2008. In its report, “U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality,” CFR wrote that “the failures of U.S. immigration policy have become a foreign policy problem.” CFR noted that though the U.S. tends to think of immigration as a domestic policy issue, it inherently has a “profound impact” on Latin American nations. “The tenor of recent immigration debates and the failure to pass meaningful immigration reform have hurt U.S. standing in the region, as many Latin American nations (including those without large populations in the United States) perceive current laws as discriminatory and unfair toward their citizens,” explained the report, two years before Arizona passed the harshest immigration law in the country. The CFR Task Force recommended enacting immigration reform to meet U.S. security, economic, and foreign policy interests.

The Task Force also pointed out that while the U.S. lags in its response to 21st century migration patterns, Latin American governments are ahead of the curve. “Latin American governments are pushing forward concrete policies to address the accelerating movement of people within the region as well as capitalize on migration to the United States,” wrote CFR. “U.S. policies lag far behind those of Latin American governments in adapting to the realities of increased human mobility.”

Appearing on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell today, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) attempted to justify the threatened Republican obstruction of the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. But in doing so, he wrongly called Russia the Soviet Union — not once, but twice. Watch it:

While Barrasso may say this was a slip of the tongue and that he knows that the Soviet Union collapsed nearly twenty years ago in 1991, this is not the first time far-right senators have made this mistake when talking about START. Barrasso also tellingly concluded his remarks by asserting that he disagrees “with the component [of START] that weakens our own missile defense against all enemies, not just the Soviet Union.”

Grouping the Soviet Union (meaning Russia) with other “enemies” of the U.S., is reflective of an outdated Cold War mindset that can only lead to renewed tensions with Russia.

Should Republicans kill the New START treaty, the “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations may collapse. This could endanger U.S. troops in Afghanistan, who depend on supply routes through Russia, and could derail Russian cooperation on Iran sanctions. Perhaps most worrying is that without New START, the U.S. will be unable to monitor Russia’s nuclear arsenal as it has since the end of the Cold War, potentially creating significant nuclear instability. As Andrea Mitchell explained to Barrasso:

With all due respect senator…if you believe in trust and verify this enables us to put people back on the ground there and verify what the Russians are doing where as right now we can’t.

Barrasso’s claim that the treaty undercuts missile defense is also just flatly untrue. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly the head of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency — who was appointed under President Bush — said that New START would “reduce the constraints on the development of the missile defense program.” This is why the U.S. military stands in unanimous support of the treaty and is calling on Senate Republicans to support it as well.

Speaking at the National Press Club this morning, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called Iran “a danger to every nation in the world,” and claimed that, according to “intelligence,” “we know that they [Iran] already have a nuclear capability.”

This is at odds with the CIA’s March 2010 report (pdf) to Congress, which did not state that Iran had already achieved a weapons capability, but that:

We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that bring it closer to being able to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.

Bachmann may have been misled by a sensational(ly dishonest) Washington Times headline that screamed “CIA: Iran capable of producing nukes.” In the body of that story, however, reporter Bill Gertz acknowledges the CIA report actually states nothing of the kind, but rather “reflects the published conclusion of a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that stated Iran had halted work on nuclear weapons in 2003.”

The promotional materials for this morning’s event, hosted by the right-wing organization Freedom Watch, condemned the Obama administration’s policy of “appeasement” and stated that, as Iran “introduces nuclear weapons into the Middle East… the Islamic regime of fraudulently-elected President Ahmadinejad must be removed now, before it is too late.”

Bachmann also called for the U.S. to support the People’s Mujahideen of Iran, also known as the Mujahideen Khalq Organization (MKO), an organization previously supported by Saddam Hussein and listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization since 1997 for alleged attacks on Americans.

Referring to the People’s Mujahideen Bachmann said, “We have shackled this freedom-seeking group which has the ability to help Iranians rise up against that tyrannical regime.”

I predicted last week that we should expect to see conservative calls for the U.S. to support the People’s Mujahideen — which, like the Iraqi National Congress, enjoys little actual support among the people they propose to lead in revolution — though I’m actually a bit surprised to see it come so soon.