Young immigrants see DREAM killed by politics

For Trump, talking -- or tweeting -- about immigration is like making stew. DACA? Wall? Border? Drugs? Crime? Sure, put them all in. Stir vigorously. Then bring to a boil.

Still, the president is not wrong to fault Congress for its dithering on DACA. Neither party even broke a sweat the last few weeks in trying to find a solution.

It's all about fear. Republicans are paranoid that they will be pummeled by the Ann Coulter wing of the GOP, which includes the nativists that desperately want to make America white again. Democrats are just as afraid of trying to convince the beleaguered blue-collar voters they lost in the presidential election that the solution to their anxiety over lost jobs is to legalize more than a million young people who are eager to work.

How did we get here? Trump is not wrong that Democrats in Congress played a big role in undermining the Dreamers, and that goes all the way back to 2001, when the DREAM Act was first proposed. The Dreamers wouldn't be on the brink of deportation -- if that's really where they are -- if five conservative Democratic senators hadn't killed the DREAM Act in December 2010. And since then, Democratic leaders have -- one by one -- sprinted away from Dreamers who demanded a legislative fix.

It's not just that Democrats want to preserve a wedge issue, or that peeling off 1.8 million Dreamers from an undocumented population estimated at more than 11 million will hurt the chances of legalizing more people. It's also that Democrats don't want to be known as the "amnesty" party.

So when Trump laid out the terms under which he would legalize a whole bunch of young people -- i.e., an end to "chain migration" -- Democrats balked. Not because it was a bad deal for immigrants but because it was a bad deal for Democrats.

If you really think that the debate over DACA has anything at all to do with the Dreamers, then you're the one who is dreaming.

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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com. His daily podcast, "Navarrette Nation," is available through every podcast app.