The president pulled an “All Lives Matter” on DREAMers

Swim19 · 01-31-2018, 01:50 PM

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President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union was, for the most part, scripted and sedate. At times, he almost looked bored with himself. But when he talked about immigration — the issue at the core of his political career — he was having fun.

He clearly enjoyed ad-libbing about the monstrousness of the MS-13 gang and the heroism of American law enforcement officers who fought them by being “tougher” (complete with an inexplicable and unverifiable claim about putting “thousands and thousands and thousands” of MS-13 members in prison or on deportation flights).

He enjoyed giving his spiel about how the diversity visa lottery randomly selects immigrants, and about how “chain migration” allows immigrants to bring “virtually unlimited” numbers of family members to the US. Neither of those claims is true, but both have become Trump standbys in recent months.
And he even enjoyed tying all of this together to make the case for Congress to turn the immigration framework his White House presented last week into a bill, addressing border security, restrictions on family-based immigration, and the diversity visa, in exchange for allowing 1.8 million young unauthorized immigrants to get legal status and eventually US citizenship.

But he never actually addressed why Congress is discussing immigration to begin with, or why it includes the legalization proposal. He never mentioned the fact that he himself ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in September, winding down deportation protections and work permits for 690,000 unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children — and put Congress on a six-month timer to address the fate of those unauthorized immigrants and their peers.

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This isn’t the first time the president has drawn the connection between Americans being “dreamers” and DREAMers as a group whose status in the US is an urgent policy issue. Trump used the line on the campaign trail, when he capped pleas to turn attention to poverty at home with “let our children be dreamers too.” And he’s done it as president, in his official White House statement after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the end of the DACA program: “Above all else, we must remember that young Americans have dreams too.”

Quote:

But the moniker “DREAMers” persisted. Because at this point, it describes not just the hoped-for effects of a bill, but a set of shared experiences. DREAMers represent the only generation of immigrants in US history to grow up, by the hundreds of thousands, alongside US citizens and often believing as children they would have all the same opportunities as US citizens did — then learning, as teenagers, that wasn’t true.

They’re called DREAMers because the distinction that’s marked their lives is that they learned too late that they wouldn’t have the same opportunity as other Americans to pursue those dreams: to get college scholarships, launch careers, live fearlessly.

To say that “Americans are dreamers too” misses the point of all that. It only makes sense under a misunderstanding of what DREAMers are actually asking for — a belief that they’re getting free college, for example — or under the zero-sum logic of status anxiety, in which any attention paid to a marginalized group must inherently mean that some other group must be losing ground.

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No one has ever told those Americans that they have no right to dream. And most likely, few of them, when they hear the term “DREAMers,” see it as immigrants stealing dreams from native-born Americans. But to Donald Trump, the power to use positive language to label yourself isn’t one that immigrants have either.

https://www.vox.com/2018/1/30/169537...ion-dream-daca

IamAman · 01-31-2018, 02:23 PM

That's a great analogy.

Alfredo93 · 01-31-2018, 02:57 PM

All lives do matter and everyone in the U.S. (legal or illegal) are all dreamers too.

Swim19 · 01-31-2018, 03:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alfredo93

All lives do matter and everyone in the U.S. (legal or illegal) are all dreamers too.

And you completely missed the point of the article.

Erik1421 · 01-31-2018, 03:11 PM

Except us dreamers can't legally work here until our EAD's expire. What a fallacy.

2MoreYears · 01-31-2018, 03:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IamAman

That's a great analogy.

Indeed. Great post by op !

Carpenter86 · 01-31-2018, 03:27 PM

Many Americans take this country for granted, and now they feel left out because a bunch of immigrant teens and young adults are doing better than most.

Alfredo93 · 01-31-2018, 03:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Swim19

And you completely missed the point of the article.

I think his comment was to ease tension off of him from the republicans for granting us citizenship. Sort of to remind the rest of the country that hes thinking of them too.

I didnt see a problem with his comment, and I feel like the author is reaching.

Alfredo93 · 01-31-2018, 03:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carpenter86

Many Americans take this country for granted, and now they feel left out because a bunch of immigrant teens and young adults are doing better than most.

True, American citizens are babied by everybody

Swim19 · 01-31-2018, 04:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alfredo93

I think his comment was to ease tension off of him from the republicans for granting us citizenship. Sort of to remind the rest of the country that hes thinking of them too.

I didnt see a problem with his comment, and I feel like the author is reaching.

Of course that comment was for his base. It's quite a popular argument for those against DACA. They can appear less racist by arguing that they care about 'American's dreams', but it's false to think that by helping one group (DREAMers) another group must suffer (USCs). Personally I think the author was right on point.

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The president pulled an “All Lives Matter” on DREAMers