Many of the so-called Dreamers worried about their immigration status are starting to reconsider their opposition to a possible wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a report Friday from the San Francisco Chronicle.
President Donald Trump’s wall at the border wouldn’t be so bad, some groups are now saying, so long as it means citizenship for the nearly 700,000 people brought into the country through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
“If building a wall leads us to having citizenship, then I’m all for it,” Ana Rodriguez, who works at a daycare center in California, told reporters at the Chronicle. “The U.S. is what I know and that’s where I want to live my life — I want to be a part of it in full.”
Rodriguez and others like her are arguing about accepting a trade-off — giving Trump his wall in exchange for retaining DACA. The Trump administration proposed a bill earlier this month offering citizenship to 1.8 million illegal immigrants in exchange for $25 billion for a border wall.
Activist organizations have also noted that DACA recipients are making recalculations about their opposition. Marissa Montes, co-director of the Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic in Los Angeles, noticed in recent weeks that they are sounding more and more likely to back a wall in exchange for citizenship.
“It’s coming from a point of exhaustion — they’ve tried everything,” Montes told reporters. “Their instinct is survival and as human beings, how much longer can they endure this? They’re ping-ponging back and forth.”
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Recent polling shows Hispanics are evenly split on whether to combine a DACA deal to the building of a wall — 42 percent of Hispanics oppose it and 42 percent support it, according to the Quinnipiac poll conducted Jan. 18.
(Excerpt) Read more at westernjournal.com ...
