Contained within the broader amnesty proposal is a version of the DREAM Act, which would give legal status and eventual citizenship to those who came to the country at younger ages. It has always been the most popular type of amnesty with the public. Every week in which Rasmussen asked the question, a majority of the public strongly or somewhat favored “giving lifetime work permits” to “illegal residents” who came as minors (Figure 3). However, since the start of this year, support for the DREAM amnesty has fallen precipitously, while opposition has risen. The 50 percent who now support the amnesty is still higher than the 43 percent who oppose it, but the current gap is much smaller than the 58–36 advantage right before Christmas.

This huge decline in support for the DREAM Act is perhaps the most difficult to explain because it is hard to find any stories in the mainstream media that mention the cost of the bill, even though CBO estimated the net fiscal impact in 2017 and again 2019 and both times found it would create a large net fiscal drain. Moreover, virtually every story on the “Dreamer” population portrays them in a very sympathetic light. Yet the public has become dramatically less inclined to give them legal status, perhaps because they increasingly sense that the Dreamers are being used as props to secure a much larger amnesty that covers all illegal immigrants.