The GOP Should Join Trump in Solving the DREAMers’ Quandary

Donald Trump said last Saturday that he’d like to work with players in both parties to secure the future of the so-called “Dreamers” – immigrants to the U.S. who entered the country illegally at first, but grew up here and now live as de facto citizens.

“These are people that have been brought here at a very young age, and many of these are middle-aged people now, they don’t even speak the language” of their country of origin, Trump said on Meet the Press. “Republicans are very open to the Dreamers. … They have great jobs. In some cases, they have small businesses. In some cases, they might have large businesses, and we’re going to have to do something with them.” He also said he’d work with Democrats to solve the problem of the Dreamers’ lack of legal status.

He’s exactly right. In plain, simple terms, he captured the situation of these people accurately in a way that political overthinkers in a decades-long rut have embarrassingly failed to do. As I’ve written numerous times, Dreamers are already Americans in fact, and it’s high time we make them so under the law.

A Real Demographic of Americans

According to the most recent estimates, Dreamers make up a surprisingly large portion of the U.S. population – more than two million. But those estimates only count heads. If you consider them more attentively, you’ll realize Dreamers’ presence has a much, much larger footprint. Imagine how many of us know people without legal status, do business with them, attend church with them, and partner with them in school and social activities like Scouting events and ballet recitals with our kids.

I’m a white Midwesterner and lifelong Republican, and I have not only friends but relatives by marriage who lack legal status as citizens.

These people have mingled with our nation’s culture and economy as much as anyone – and more, by a long shot, than the average child of a Washington, D.C., career politician of either party.

Trump Is a Sane Centrist

The rhetoric has been swirling in the halls of power ever since Trump’s comments last weekend, but I’m confident his approach has already undercut and deflated all the empty talk.

In comparison to his honest, observational comments about Dreamers, any sentiment that nativist eccentrics on the right or breathless open-borders Leftists might muster will only sound like political grandstanding, detached from the reality at hand.

After all, Trump won a historic number of Hispanic votes last month in one of the most dramatic political realignments of the cycle.

As CatholicVote reported the week of the election:

Trump’s percentage share of the Latino vote was in fact the highest on record for a Republican presidential candidate in American history. … Trump’s performance among Latinos also represents a 15-point improvement over his 2020 campaign, which lost the group to the Biden-Harris ticket by 21 points, according to the Pew Research Center. … Going back to 2016, Trump lost Latino voters by a landslide 38-point margin – with failed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton winning 66% of the Latino vote to Trump’s 28% – again per Pew.

So “in just eight years, Trump was able to close his gap with Latino voters by a stunning 32 points.”

From a Republican perspective, Trump’s numbers were absolutely mandate-making for his agenda. Thanks in no small part to Hispanic voters’ support for his campaign, he did what no other Republican has been able to do: break up the so-called “Obama coalition,” deliver every single swing state for the Republican ticket, and forever put to shame the snooty upper classes and their political representatives in the Democratic Party.

Empty Leftist Rhetoric vs. Common Sense

The ruling class’s plan was only to talk the vague talk of “welcoming the stranger” for decades longer, never making meaningful efforts to give hardworking and upright Dreamers the break they need. They’d only preen about their own great compassion in putting Dreamers in a legal limbo, while race-baiting the political right against them by shaming anyone who called for the commonsense border security measures that Trump and his supporters champion.

But according to CNN’s exit polling, Trump beat Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris among Hispanic men 55%-43%. He also won married Hispanics 51%-48%, Catholic Hispanics 53%-46%, and Christian (but non-Catholic) Hispanics by a whopping 64%-34%.

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It’s impossible to miss how all of that applies to the question of Dreamers: Latino citizens cast their votes after hearing Trump’s tough-on-crime rhetoric and his promises to deport violent criminal immigrants while also attacking the human-trafficking cartels that have overrun the border.

In other words, Trump’s victory has already proved that Hispanic citizens (and no doubt massive numbers of their Dreamer relatives and neighbors) have no qualms about border security.

In fact, if anything, when the GOP follows Trump’s leadership in securing a path to citizenship for Dreamers, they will also be securing a path to an even greater political and social mandate for a commonsense, conservative approach to border security.

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, activist, and human rights worker. He is also the author of three books, the latest of which is The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset.