Here’s Why The Dreamers Should Be Allowed To Stay

If, for a moment, you suspend investment in all forms of socio-political categorization, and try seeing people merely as people again, you’ll find that the real war, the one being waged in the streets as well as in the hearts and minds of the people on the streets, is between the realists and the dreamers. The realists see the world as being composed of monolithic blocs of people, and these blocs as being inherently incompatible with each other; they are pragmatists, who can only believe in what they see and what they have convinced themselves works. The dreamers, on the other hand, hold that reality is only what is made and supposed of it, and that dreams and intentions are powerful enough to bend and direct the will. There is something childlike about it, and I don’t mean childlike in a derogatory sense. It is from a purity of heart that dreamers dream, whereas the realists—cynical and jaded by life as they are—can only act on the certainty that what they have seen and learned in life is universal. If, for a moment, you subscribe to the dichotomy of good and evil, you would have to admit that the dreamers are the better people, acting out of goodness rather than self-interest, for they act not on certainty of fact but on faith.

The United States of America has always been, first and foremost, and idea: that men are created equal in the eyes of God. Everything after that is only paperwork and policy in the geopolitical scheme of things. According to the American Immigration Council, there are nearly 2 million Dreamers in the United States—that is, young immigrants whose parents brought them into the country illegally and who are sympathetically called “Dreamers” after the failed DREAM Act of 2001. Today, however, newly elected President Donald Trump promises to repeal all laws that would potentially protect the Dreamers from being deported to the countries they originally came from. Understandably, this would be a nightmare for many Dreamers to have to go through.

The jury that is the American people—that is, We, the People—is out. The country has never been so divided; the red half of the country wants the Dreamers out, and the blue half says they should be able to stay. Very few are on the fence about this, and rightly so. This is a moral issue that affects everyone here, Dreamer or not. It’s not just about the Dreamers we may know in our lives, it’s about deciding what we stand for—as a country but also as individuals in this country. One should not see Dreamers as some kind of vague and faceless bloc of people, but for what they are: as individuals. And as someone who believes in the equality of all mankind, and the Golden Rule, I believe you should treat individuals just as you would like to be treated yourself.

And I don’t think you would like being rounded up with a million other people, like cattle, and deported from a country you very well may feel you have grown up in and call your home.