He almost certainly lacks the power to end it, and doing so would swell the illegal population.
In an interview with NBC News that aired Sunday, Donald Trump said he wanted to work with Democrats in Congress to “do something” about the legal limbo of so-called Dreamers, the name given to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and have lived most of their lives here.
“Republicans are very open to the Dreamers,” Mr. Trump said. “Many years ago, they were brought into this country. . . . Some of them are no longer young people. And in many cases, they’ve become successful. They have great jobs. In some cases, they have small businesses. Some cases they might have large businesses.” The president-elect said that he wants them to stay here. “I want to be able to work something out, and . . . I think we can work with the Democrats and work something out.”
It isn’t the first time that Mr. Trump has voiced sympathy for this blameless subset of our illegal-immigrant population, who number an estimated 600,000. During his first presidential term, he said that Dreamers “shouldn’t be very worried about being deported,” and he publicly supported putting them on a multiyear glide path to citizenship. “We’re going to morph into it—it’s going to happen,” he told reporters at the White House in 2018. “It’s a nice thing to have the incentive after a period of years, being able to become a citizen.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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