Should we reconsider whether we should take the wall-for-DACA trade?
The wall is symbolism - it's security theater. It wastes a bunch of money, it employs construction workers in Texas and Arizona and New Mexico in a make-work program, it pisses off landowners in the border area, but it doesn't make border enforcement any more effective or brutal. It's a sop to conservative vaguely Freudian psychology about the country being figuratively penetrated by outside forces. It doesn't affect anything that matters on a national scale.
And DACA is, well... 800,000 kids and young adults who are living in legal limbo and delaying trips home and applications to college and everything else until things get sorted out, wondering whether they'll have to return to a home they can't even remember. It's real shit. It's a lot of people. And, incidentally, if you've been bitching about democrats not taking power plays seriously, it's nearly a million new voters in a blue-leaning constituency.
I don't have a dog in the DACA fight; I'm not a recipient and I don't personally know anyone who is. But I do have a pre-existing condition, and I have to say that if Democrats were unwilling to trade the wall for protecting my health care, and in the long run my life, I would be fucking livid.
