Ryan gets it: Sudden expulsion of 'Dreamers' would hurt us all

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Wednesday that President Donald Trump "made the right call" when he placed the fate of some 800,000 so-called Dreamers in the hands of Congress.

An immediate action from the Oval Office might have led to chaos, he added.

We couldn't agree more.

Ryan went a step further and said the deportation of close to 1 million immigrants with work permits under former President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, would not be "in our nation's best interest."

Right again, Ryan. To suddenly remove that many from our workforce and simultaneously lose their purchasing power as consumers would be a recipe for economic disaster, not to mention the cost of the deportation process.

Of course, recently ousted Trump strategist, and loyalist, Steve Bannon said this weekend in a "60 Minutes" interview with Charlie Rose that most of the immigrants protected under DACA would self-deport once their work permits expired if the program were to cease to exist, but we doubt that along with most of everything else Bannon says.

No, stripping away the work permits and throwing the lot out of the country would be unwise, inhumane and political suicide for the already fractured Republican Party.

Better would it not be to keep the Dreamers here, working, buying homes and cars and goods and paying taxes? Certainly illegal immigration is wrong. The laws are broken, the agencies charged with enforcing them are undermanned and underfunded, and deportation rarely sticks.

Another president, Teddy Roosevelt, famously supported immigration, but on the contingency that those who come to America fully assimilate -- no hyphens, no foreign allegiances and no flags other than Old Glory need remain.

"... for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace or origin. But this is predicated upon a person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American," Roosevelt said.

And haven't the "Dreamers" done that? Keep in mind, these are not the drug runners, the cartel kings and their minions, these are not the Russian and eastern European mobsters and the Middle East's rejected radicalists. Immigrant doesn't equal boogeyman any more today than it did when signs in port cities in the mid-1800s read "No Chinese" and "Irish need not apply."

No, these are college kids, young professionals, police officers, hair stylists, entrepreneurs, laborers, farm workers, tech and innovation researchers and developers, medical professionals and others whose only crime was being brought to this country illegally or improperly by their parents through no fault of their own.

Should they naturalize and become Americans if they wish to stay, absolutely.

But neither is the red tape they face in attempting to do so their fault any more than how they got here.

So Ryan, yes, you were right on Wednesday. You've got (now less than) six months to convince your colleagues and get it right on paper, too, so that we might move the nation forward.

We'll wait.

Published in Editorials on September 13, 2017 9:24 PM