On Tuesday evening, in his first State of the Union address, President Trump defended the “American way” and offered a four-point plan on immigration.

Trump’s proposal “offers a path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants who were brought here by their parents at a young age,” known as DREAMers; includes implementing his signature campaign promise to build a wall on America’s southern border, ending the visa lottery, and ending chain migration.

Trump unequivocally extended a hand of bipartisanship. But Democrats were furious over the president’s words, saying he has only made a bipartisan deal harder to reach. 

Given the remarks of legislators interviewed after the State of the Union address, some appear to be fixated on words used in Trump’s speech and tonality, rather than on actions that could serve the interests of the American people and DREAMers they say they care so much about.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) criticized Trump’s speech, saying, “The tone was of a divider-in-chief.” Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ) called the speech, “a lot of empty rhetoric,” adding that his words won’t “get him a deal from Democrats.” “Really stoking the fires, from my perspective, of bigotry," said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ). 

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) felt Trump did not address the DREAMers issue enough: “He had opportunities to heal. I’ve never seen a president that cares nothing about reaching out to people that didn’t vote for him.”

When I served as U.S. diplomat in Iraq (2006-10), and later at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan (2010-15), many American consular officials -- those who are responsible for vetting and ultimately approving or denying U.S. visas to foreigners around the world -- would privately lament that our country’s immigration policy was flawed because it is based on uniting families. The policy is what allows for chain migration, rather than prioritizing that visas be issued to persons of desirable skills needed within the U.S. workforce. This is precisely what the president has stood for, and exactly what the Democrats, like Nancy Pelosi, are rejecting.

Some critics write that Trump’s plan “is out of touch with American ideals” -- yet it is the Democratic Party that appears to be out of touch with what the majority of Americans want.

Nearly 80 percent of Americans believe that DREAMers should be given a pathway to citizenship, and a recent Harvard-Harris poll shows that 65 percent of voters across party lines are in agreement with Trump that any bill granting protections for them should be accompanied by funding for a wall, ending chain migration, and putting a stop to the visa lottery.

Democrats appear to be short-sighted, if not tone deaf. They have made caring for undocumented, or illegal, immigrants the priority issue going into the 2018 mid-term elections.

Let that sink in for a moment. Elected U.S. officials have put an issue that concerns less than 1.2 percent of the official U.S. population -- persons who are technically not Americans -- at the top of their agenda.

This is a strange reordering of priorities, if not legislatively at least in terms of public relations and spin. As late as 2016 “the crisis of student debt” and “crumbling infrastructure” were considered key matters for the party. These are two issues on which Democrats and the president can find common ground. During his Tuesday night speech, Trump even called for $1.5 trillion infrastructure spending.

When issues that concern American citizens, like debt and infrastructure, are secondary to those of non-citizens, one of two things is happening: Either the U.S. is doing exceptionally well, and we are a nation whose angst merely lives in our heads; or the Democratic Party has lost its sense of what matters to the majority of America’s citizenry.

A lost sense of what matters to the average American is precisely what post-mortem analyses of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat determined opened the door for then-candidate Trump to win. An anti-Trump platform, absent of any hard lessons learned from the election, might serve the Democratic Party in the short term. But staying fixated on rejecting President Trump based on his semantics, tone, and tweets should long ago have proven an unfruitful strategy.

Immediately following Trump’s speech Tuesday evening, Congressman Joe Kennedy spoke directly to the millions of DREAMers, who speak fluent American English, in Spanish, saying, “We will fight for you.”

Fight, the Democrats have.

And the GOP is ready to make a deal. The Democrats should jump on board and not miss an opportunity to put the minds and fate of DREAMers at ease while staying in tune with the majority of the American electorate.