Amnesty Never

It is understandable that people of goodwill can differ on immigration policy. Our national immigration policy has been inconsistent over the years and has been racist as often as not. It is a rational fear that, if the U.S. literally welcomed all comers, we would be overrun, if not by scoundrels, at least by numbers. But draconian restrictions favored by President Trump are clearly excessive. Honestly, though, were I given the task of devising an immigration policy, I hardly would know where to begin.

It is a no-brainer, however, that a good place to start would be consideration of the status of people brought to this country as children by adults responsible for their care. Even in cases where such children may have had some influence over their immigration, they surely cannot be held responsible for it. Children brought here very young have grown to adulthood in America and may have no memory of their putative homeland and little or no facility in its language. These people are culturally American, even if they are not legally American.

President Obama’s DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) provided some modicum of regularization of the status of children brought illegally to this country, but it failed to relieve their well-founded anxieties or to provide concrete hope of ever become full citizens of the United States of America.

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump’s termination of DACA ultimately will work to the benefit of those the program sought to help or whether it will result in shipping its former beneficiaries off to alien domains. Absent favorable court decisions, the fate of so-called Dreamers is in the (not so capable) hands of the Congress. Both Democrats and Republicans have expressed interest in saving Dreamers from deportation, but, since anything that can be called amnesty is anathema to the GOP’s ultraconservative base, Dreamers can hardly be sanguine about their continued residence in America, much less their prospects for actual naturalization.

Fundamentally, the Dreamers are as American as any of us. They don’t deserve deportation, and they don’t deserve any kind of amnesty. What they deserve is citizenship, and they deserve it now. Members of Congress, are you paying attention?