PD Editorial: Keep the dream alive for young immigrants

President-elect Donald Trump has an opportunity to show some compassion for undocumented immigrants without breaking his promise to step up enforcement.

Here’s how: Trump can get behind a four-year-old program that allows undocumented youths and young adults brought to the United States as children to stay and work or study.

If he is serious about uniting the country, this gesture would reassure some of those most frightened by the prospect of a Trump administration.

And it would be consistent with his most recent comments on immigration.

“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records - gang members, drug dealers. … We’re getting them out of our country, or we’re going to incarcerate,” the president-elect said in a post-election interview on “60 Minutes.”

That’s the right approach, especially with immigration courts already struggling with large caseloads and big backlogs. In fact, it’s basically the Obama administration policy, though Trump might devote more Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Justice Department resources to identifying and deporting criminals.

His comments on “60 Minutes” marked a retreat from past vows to rapidly deport all illegal immigrants. In changing his tone, he offered reason to hope that he will carefully consider the plight of a group of undocumented immigrants many of whom don’t remember living anywhere but the United States and speak English as a first language.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program allows these young people - often called Dreamers - to apply for a renewable, two-year permit to work or study in the United States. The program doesn’t give anyone amnesty, and it includes no promise of citizenship. Only Congress has that authority. Participation in DACA is limited to youths and young adults who are students, high school graduates or veterans of the American armed forces who served honorably. Permits can be revoked for those who commit crimes. Students must pay their way; they aren’t eligible for Pell grants and other federal financial aid.

This week, the chief executives of California’s three systems of higher education sent a joint letter urging the president-elect to retain the temporary protection from deportation now enjoyed by about 720,000 people, almost a third of them in California.

“These sons and daughters of undocumented immigrants are as American as any other child across the nation, in all but in the letter of the law,” said the letter signed by UC President Janet Napolitano, CSU Chancellor Timothy White and Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor-designate of California Community Colleges. “They should be able to pursue their dream of higher education without fear of being arrested, deported or rounded up for just trying to learn.”

One of those student is Noe Felix, a senior studying communications at Sonoma State University who described his fears of deportation in a Close to Home column last month (“I went to college on a promise soon to be broken,” Nov. 20). “On Nov. 8,” he wrote, “my whole world, along with the world of many other undocumented immigrants, came crumbling down. What I feel isn’t anger or hate but rather pain, heartache and sadness.”

The U.S. economy needs more educated workers. Allowing Dreamers like Noe Felix to stay and study and contribute would be more than a gesture of goodwill. It would also help meet the needs of this country.