Brooks: Trading Wall Funding for DREAMer Citizenship ‘a Good Deal’

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that while a border wall isn’t a great investment, trading wall funding for a path to citizenship for DREAMers “would be a good deal.”

Brooks said, “I think there’s a solution here, and people in the Senate are talking about it, which is that they exchange some money for a wall of some sort in exchange for a path to citizenship for the DREAMers, for the DACA kids. And that’s something that was talked about last year, at much higher rates than — $25 billion for the wall, not 5 billion, and there was a lot of momentum for it then. And so, I think, substantively, that would be a good deal.”

He added, “I don’t think the wall is a particularly wise investment. And it’s really not where illegal immigration comes from. It’s not where drugs come from. It comes from people overstaying their visas. But it’s what Donald Trump wants. He runs on it. Giving him a little of what he wants doesn’t seem to me like a moral issue, and building a little more fencing on the southern border doesn’t seem to be a big moral crime.”

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