Illegals is fine. It's the logical way to differentiate between those who are here legally and those who are not.
Too many people are sucked in by all the DREAM Act talk without any real idea of what that entails, or why it's even a good idea. It's not like this is a new thing where parents bring their kids in. First, it is a blanket amnesty. And while the idea is to not penalize the kids, you end up rewarding them rather than simply not penalizing them. Then, in the future as permanent residents and US citizens, they will be able to petition for the very parents that really should be verboten for life. So barring some kind of offense that gets the parents a lifetime banishment from immigration benefits, the parents end up rewarded in the end too.
Second, there is an abundant amount of fraud here. You see it when truckloads of documents containing illegal diplomas and such are seized (this has happened). The diplomas in this case are to establish eligibility for the DREAM Act. You see it with the flood of illegals coming over now in anticipation of an amnesty. It's nice to say, well, let DHS catch the fraud, but that's living in a dream world. Some of it is caught, but it's so widespread as to be impossible. It tasks all resources beyond expectations, and will create more backlogs just as it did the last couple times there was an amnesty.
Third, I reiterate what I just said, which is that this is the THIRD amnesty since the mid-80s. Reagan had his great experiment, then Clinton tacked one on at the end of his Presidency that expired at the end of April 2001. There have been calls for an amnesty since that one, starting almost immediately with Dubya. This is ridiculous. They spun the LIFE Act (2001) so successfully as NOT an amnesty that they actually think it wasn't an amnesty. Well, it was and you cannot have an amnesty every 15 years simply because you're ill prepared to deal with illegal immigration. You can cloak it up as being something nice for kids, but that's just a smokescreen. The politicians are utterly clueless about immigration, except as a source of potential votes.
The practical realities of immigration are that we need to discourage illegal immigration. We do that by beefing up enforcement (as always), not even talking about an amnesty plan, and restricting certain classes of legal immigration (notably ones based on familial relationships rather than employment). This is not the same country it was in the 1890s, eager for settlers and to expand westward. Your tired, poor, and huddled masses is a nice soundbyte, but not realistic.