1. If you are an honest Dreamer, you should oppose a clean Dream Act because if Dreamers get a path to citizenship, that takes them out of the immigration reform debate and Dreamers are the most presentable face of the pro-immigrant case. If you accept a clean Dream Act, you help those who want to slam the door on the face of all the other undocumented immigrants. This is what some politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, want to cowardly sell us, as was wisely put this week by Trevor Noah. You would be saving your own skin and helping those who want to unleash the wolves on the rest of undocumented immigrants. This is precisely the piece-meal approach proposed by Republicans the last time an immigration bill was debated, approach that was so widely repudiated and that turns the Dream Act into the ceiling, not the floor, of any immigration debate.
So, what you should advocate for is an extension of DACA and other protective status in exchange of the smallest possible appropriation for Trump’s stupid wall; in other words, buy time. I would only be in favor of a clean Dream Act under certain circumstances: Trump survives Mueller’s investigation and looks strong for 2020 and you have made a serious effort to set the record straight on immigration. If that happens, I would agree on saving at least the Dreamers because at that point all bets are off but we are not yet at that point. And to meet the second part of this condition you have to abandon the ridiculous idea that your activism has to be colorful and cute. So far, the times conditions have been ripe to position new ideas, you have only danced around walls of cloth and told ethnic stories. How do you want the despair of immigrants to be taken seriously when you present yourself pretty much as a different species, one that is happy to incarnate an ethnic caricature? If I say that illegal immigrants are those who jump they place “in the line,” don’t speak English and don’t pay taxes, even our allies at the Left take these falsehoods as truths because your stupid colorful dances have done nothing to set the record straight and, even if politics is normally an emotional business, rationalizations are made of ideas, either truthful or false. And, so far, you have allowed the opportunities to position your ideas to pass by fruitlessly. That’s why you are now forced to engage in a debate framed in the terms of your enemy, the xenophobic right. Your communication is so poor that even when it’s based on demanding pity for your ethnic stories, you have bizarrely succeeded in presenting yourselves as different. So, how do you want the average American to feel your pain or to at least feel empathy when you yourselves have accepted a condescending portrait of the undocumented immigrant as a semi-illiterate, “humble, who comes to do the jobs Americans won't do” (= with barely a sense of human dignity), with a life limited to typical dishes and tropical music? To that caricature, the average American would deport and then send him a taco to Mexico so he can be happy again, something that would be unacceptable if we were talking of a person who has dreams and sorrows, whose only fault was to have been born in the wrong country or family.
2. When I used to be a volunteer in political causes, it was shocking to me that Hispanics, as organized groups, where convoked only when the activism was about immigration, and in a kind of activism that was symbolic at best (like participating in phone banks to call a very red district to ask them to demand their Tea Party representative to have pity for immigrants), the kind of activism reserved for those you don’t take seriously. And even though I met many Hispanics when the activism was about other issues, in these cases I can’t remember a single instance in which they were convoked as an organized group.
For those who have read my previous entries, my predictions (and the information on which they were based) about a long dark night on immigration have been unfortunately accurate. So, what other thing, besides setting the record straight on immigration (instead of the endless dancing marches and ethnic stories), could an honest Dreamer do in the short term, until we can assemble a new reasonable plan (The time for the one I once proposed has passed)? Use your organizations to launch ballots and lawsuits against gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is what makes members of Congress side with the xenophobic Right because they are more afraid of a rabid Alt Right challenger in the primaries than of a Democratic challenger in the election itself.
3. Politics is marketing. And you can’t have marketing without a product. Worse, if you don’t have a product, you will soon find your enemy’s product as the dominant or only one product in the market of policy ideas. Among my old contributions, there is a legislative proposal based on the Kennedy-McCain bill. The current conditions of the debate (for instance, the false dichotomy between family-based immigration and merit-based immigration) are addressed there. Adopt it or use it as inspiration for a better product, that is always possible. But please stop the stupid, corny dances, festive marches and ethnic tales you have taken for activism. It’s because of that poor marketing that you are not taken seriously and that we have ended up in this terrible situation.