After serial setbacks at home and bouts of recklessness in foreign policy, Donald Trump has emitted a signal that envisages a halfway house… in quite the most crucial sector of immigration. There may be hope yet for citizenship for the Dreamers, so-called, specifically the 1.8 million undocumented immigrants. Their prospects had been under a cloud ever since the US President’s election campaign; the uncertainty has deepened over the past year and not merely for immigrants from the six countries in the Muslim bloc.

Last Thursday’s announcement is in the nature of a quid pro quo. The path to citizenship will be offered in exchange for an end to decades of family-based migration policies, an expensive border wall skirting Mexico, and a crackdown on immigrants living in America illegally. On the face of it, the proposal appears to be fairly generous.

That description ought to be tempered with the possibility that it is a take-it-or-leave-it proposal. More immediately, White House officials are hoping that it would be accepted by “conservatives and centrists” in Congress. The plan is without question the first step in an essay towards streamlining the country’s immigration system.

Not the least because the move ought to benefit hundreds of thousands of Indian-origin undocumented immigrants. Also to be benefited are an estimated 690,000 such immigrants who were once illegally brought to the US as children. It bears recall that they had signed up for protection under an Obama-era programme, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), in addition to 1.1 million undocumented immigrants who would have qualified for the programme but never applied.

Political endorsement from the other side of the fence seems unlikely and the discord might even aggravate the legislative disconnect. The plan drafted by Stephen Miller, the President’s hardline domestic policy adviser, and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, has been immediately rejected by Democrats, immigration advocates and some Republicans.

Indeed, it has been debunked as nothing but an attempt to rid the country of immigrants and shut the nation’s borders. By that token, it could well be of a piece with the matrix of Trump’s rejectionist take on immigration.

Republican and Democratic senators are said to be working on a narrower immigration plan. They hope that if it can pass the Senate with a strong bipartisan majority, it will exert pressure on the House ~ where attempted immigration overhauls have fizzled out in recent years ~ to pass the legislation as well. Unusually reassuring was the manner in which the President couched his proposal ~ “Tell them (the Dreamers) not to worry.” This does not dilute the more hardline features of his plan of action. He may have come through as somewhat chastened after recent setbacks on a welter of issues. Yet the political