Make The Deal!

I had a chance to actually meet and talk with a 'Dreamer' a couple of weeks ago.  He was a young man, oldest of three children from Mexico whose parents are migrant farmers.  They arrived in the US as undocumented, spent years following the crops with their young children who spent the same amount of time as their parents in the fields picking tomatoes or lettuce or whatever was being harvested.  His parents are still doing that, and he is now 20 years old.  They struggled for him and his siblings, eeking out a living so their children could have a better life.

Today, their son is in his second year of college with a scholarship studying biomedical engineering, proud of his heritage and proud of the only country and home he has ever known.  His DACA registration is about to expire and he is scared.  Uncertain about his future, suddenly put at risk by an ignoramus in the White House who arbitrarily and flippantly decided to undo Obama’s executive order just because he could, without any thought to the chaos and anxiety he would cause for almost 800,000 young people, to say nothing of their families.  Please explain what ‘good’ this does for our country.

So legislators have been trying to scramble to figure out a deal that would save these young people from further heartache and uncertainty.  Trump set an arbitrary deadline for this, and as the Congress tried to come up with a bipartisan solution, Trump opened his foul mouth and has now probably queered the deal.  Democrats are incensed, Republicans are being intransigent on the wall and meanwhile the Dreamers—800,000 young people who through no fault of their own are pawns in this political melodrama—suffer in silence waiting for a bunch of elitist legislators to ‘unpuff’ themselves and accomplish a solution.

Democrats are threatening to vote NO on a budget resolution that would shut down the government unless the Republicans relent and accept a clean DACA bill or some compromise they can accept…..all of this provoked by our racist President for no other reason than he wants to reverse everything “Obama”!  Good Lord, what a shitshow!

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I say to Democrats, relax and give the goonies their stupid wall money and take the heat off the Dreamers.  Then you can take the ‘high road’ and save the future of these productive and innocent young people for our country.  Republican rule will pass away over the next several years and you will be able to undo much of the horror that has been visited upon us over the last year.  If you balk, and the government shuts down, then you risk being tarred with the blame and it does nothing to fix the real problem, which is the short-circuiting of almost a million young lives.