Just get on with it, politicians, and give Dreamers their documents
About 700,000 people are currently enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provides immigrants who were brought to this country as children with provisional legal protections on a renewable basis. What we as a nation are doing to them, at the moment, is nauseating. I say that, for context, as someone who has always been in favor of the DREAM Act but has never believed that the president can legislate via executive order, or been receptive to the notion that Barack Obama was morally compelled to try, in this case.
Like him, I had hoped that Congress would pass a standalone DREAM Act during his first term, even if it couldn’t manage comprehensive immigration reform. The DREAM Act has always elicited bipartisan support, which makes sense. It’s a sound idea, and one that would serve our national interests. And it’s easy to sympathize with Dreamers, even if you’re a stickler about rules. If you think about it, Dreamers are, too. They didn’t choose to come to this country, and in order to have a chance at staying, they have to stay out of trouble and in school.
Still, Congress is the legislative branch of the federal government, not the president’s steno pool. The Democrats who defended Obama’s executive overreach on the basis that they felt strongly about the issue could have anticipated the risk that his successor might also have strong feelings, in addition to a pen and a phone.
And since that successor turned out to be Donald Trump, I honestly do not understand why so many Democrats are still up on the soapbox at the moment. I can believe that DACA was wellintended. I know it’s been good for hundreds of thousands of young people who might reasonably be described as Americans, because they are, except in the technical sense. But a program
created by a president’s executive order can be ended the same way, presumably.
Congressional Democrats should be relieved that when the current president decided last September to end DACA, he chose to phase it out over six months. Trump said, at the time, that he wanted to give Congress time to pass legislation providing permanent legal protections for Dreamers; they have until March 5 to come up with one.
There’s reason to be skeptical of whether Trump would sign such legislation, granted. But Democrats really can’t afford to make that assumption. They may be more enlightened than Republicans, in general. But the latter haven’t provided the Trump administration with the names and contact information for 700,000 people who have done nothing wrong, and who some of the president’s advisors would clearly like to deport.
Terrifying prospects
There are honestly not many situations that I would find more terrifying than the one DACA recipients are currently facing. And their position has become even more precarious over the course of the past week.
On Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators met with Trump at the White House and presented him with the proposal they had been working on, in an effort to fix this mess. The “Gang of Six” proposal would have extended permanent legal protections to Dreamers, in addition to other things. It was a good proposal.
But the president recoiled at some of its provisions, and reports about the concerns he raised, behind closed doors, have plunged us into a heated national debate about whether it is racist to assert that nations like Haiti and El Salvador, or those located on the continent of Africa, are “s---holes.”
Meanwhile, Congress is trying to pass a measure funding the federal government’s operations for a little while longer. If they don’t do so by Friday, we’ll have a shutdown, which doesn’t necessarily sound like a terrible idea, until you remember that the politicians involved in it would still have access to Twitter.
Republicans need some Democratic support to pass a funding bill, and as a result of Trump’s tantrum, it’s become harder to scrounge up the necessary votes. Some Democrats have decided that they will only consider that if a “clean” DACA fix is part of the deal. Some Republicans, however, are insisting that they would only consider agreeing to a DACA fix if Democrats agree to cough up enough money to build a border wall.
Some members of Congress are also insisting that the continuing resolution include funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), or disaster relief; which are also worthwhile priorities, and ones that the federal government really should have addressed already, because doing so would actually be quite easy.
This is the United States of America, not some — look, we’re not a full-time farce of a country or one that can go on this way. It’s been an ominously long year, considering that it’s only mid-January.
And the clock is ticking for DACA recipients, some of whom would probably be regretting their decision to come to this country, if they had made such a decision in the first place. But they didn’t, really.
That’s why an overwhelming majority of Americans sympathize with Dreamers, and believe they should be allowed to stay. They might be here illegally, but they were children when their parents brought them here, and children shouldn’t be punished for the decisions made, on their behalf, by adults.
Trump’s ‘bill of love’
Shortly after Trump rescinded DACA, in fact, a Fox News poll found that 63 percent of people who voted for him support the idea of giving Dreamers a path to citizenship as an alternative.
That’s a heartening result, in a sense; it suggests that even in our era of polarization, Americans have enough compassion to put people over politics, at least from time to time. And Trump, incidentally, deserves some credit for it. He’s consistently expressed sympathy for Dreamers. Last week, while meeting with lawmakers, he said that he hopes to sign “a bipartisan bill of love.”.
“We can do it,” Trump added, encouragingly.
To that end, let me add that although I’m glad we all agree that Dreamers can be forgiven for flouting the laws of this country, I don’t think it’s technically correct to say that they came here illegally. What distinguishes Dreamers, in this context, is that when they came to America there were not yet adults. Some of them might have been pretty mischievous, I suspect. But you can’t violate the civil code unless you have the legal capacity to do so, and technically speaking, minors don’t.
That being the case, Republicans who vote for a DACA deal wouldn’t actually be supporting “amnesty.” They would be voting to allow a group of immigrants to remain in this country, which is now their home, without having to worry about being deported.
Dreamers don’t need our forgiveness. They need documents. And they deserve them, surely; they’ve been insisting, for years, that America can and should be better than this.