I’m sure that in some corner of Republican lawmakers’ hearts there is a bit of sympathy for DREAMers, the young people brought here as children who have done everything right and now face the prospect of deportation. President Trump, for instance, has talked many times about how he’ll treat those terrific kids with compassion. But he also cancelled the DACA program. And he has lamented the fact that we get so many immigrants from “shithole countries,” arguing that “we should have more people from places like Norway.” His chief of staff, John Kelly, says that the trouble with undocumented immigrants is that they’re “not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society.”

The very fact that Trump is president shows why his party is incapable of reforming immigration, or ever coming to some sort of grand bargain of the type that has often been suggested, in which he’d get funding for his border wall and Democrats would get protection for DREAMers.