As reported by the DREAMActivist blog this morning, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is looking to take another whack at the DREAM Act.

Hutchison voted against the DREAM Act — which would have given some undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children or young teens a path to citizenship through college study or military service — in the lame duck session. At the time, however, she indicated that she might be able to support it if it was limited to “the intended group of children who grew up in the U.S. and attended primary and secondary schools here.”

That was then. Now she’s taking a different approach.

It is, Hutchison says, “a clear-cut issue that we should not deport young people who have been educated in our schools, who many times have a college education, who we encourage to go to college.” But that “we should not deport” has a catch. She doesn’t want to deport them, but she doesn’t want to give them access to citizenship either.

Instead, she wants to allow people who were brought to the United States as children — in some cases as infants or toddlers — to work toward permanent residency, but no more. Under her proposal, someone who had lived their entire life in the US, someone who knew no other home, would have no path toward becoming an American citizen.

Because that, apparently, would be “amnesty.”