By Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Let’s say your family and another are getting together for a Friday evening dinner. You both have first-graders.

The parents are preparing the meal when the children enter the kitchen. Your child wants to play with dolls. Their child wants to play a game. They both want their way.

The best response is for the adults to guide the children toward an agreement. Perhaps they could take turns with the dolls and game, or maybe find an acceptable third choice. If one child refused to compromise and demanded his or her own way, he or she would face a consequence.

We teach our children that life is about give and take, but then we approach national politics like it’s a zero sum game. If you can’t have all you want, then no one should get anything they want, including you. When your side is right and the other is evil, then gridlock is preferable to compromise.

No other issue illustrates this better than illegal immigration, which this week eclipsed all others because now we’re confronted with kids being warehoused temporarily in cages.

Under a “zero tolerance” policy initiated by President Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, about 2,000 children have been separated from their families at the border as their parents’ cases are considered. The Associated Press visited a South Texas warehouse where about 200 unaccompanied children were being housed in cages, one with 20 inside, though they could leave for a common area with portable restrooms. The overhead lights never are turned off. Under U.S. law, the children are supposed to leave the facility within three days for a shelter.

The news has sparked outrage, but the underlying illness is the longstanding failure of the immigration system. That’s especially unfortunate because the United States is a nation of immigrants. Historically, we do immigration better than anyone. And of all the difficult issues facing the country today, illegal immigration is one of the most solvable if we held ourselves and our elected officials to the same standards that we hold first-graders.

If Americans would be fair-minded for a moment, and stop all the name calling and politics playing and online posting, clear majorities could agree on some basic principles. Most of us would agree that one of government’s core functions is maintaining a border and ensuring an orderly process for entering here and staying here. Most would agree that a person brought to the United States as a child and raised and educated here at taxpayer expense – the so-called “Dreamers” – should not be forced to go “home” to a country they may not even know. They also should not be be forced to live along the edges of society here – illegal but unprosecuted. And surely most of us would agree there are better alternatives than taking children from their parents and leaving them in cages, even temporarily.

So the adult thing to do is to beef up the border, including extending the wall if need be, even if some of us think there are better, less expensive ways. At the same time, we let the Dreamers become citizens or at least permanent residents, even if some believe it sets a bad precedent. And of course, we don’t separate children from their parents and leave them in a caged warehouse. Even first-graders know that’s just mean.

More than one piece of legislation is being considered in Congress that would address some of these issues. We’ve been down this road before, only to run off in the ditch before anything arrived on the president’s desk.

Congress moves slowly, but it doesn’t have to when confronted with urgency. Let this time be different. Let’s reunite the families now. And then let’s quickly pass compromise immigration legislation that keeps this from happening again, strengthens border security, treats the Dreamers compassionately, and maybe touches on other immigration issues, but not all of them. It won’t be perfect, but it can be something we can live with, for now.

That’s how it’s supposed to work in our diverse, representative democracy. And we’re at least as mature as first-graders. Aren’t we?