Newspapers this time of year fill up with good-news stories, often telling of heroes and heroic acts that happened during the past year.

In Warren, Ohio, where I was metropolitan editor, we published a Christmas edition wrapped in a four-page section of only “good news.”

And this week, The Sun Journal featured Arthur Pleau, who sounds like the glue that holds together the Trinity Jubilee Center. And The Bangor Daily News told of a woman looking to thank the man who helped her 26 years ago after a black ice crash sent her to a hospital.

One place not to look for such heartwarming tales is Congress. When it comes to immigration, the issue that, arguably, elected Donald Trump and brought our democracy to the brink. Congress is a cache of cowardice. There may be 535 stories there, none a profile in courage.

Immigration is both our triumph and, of late, our tragedy. Our most recent significant change was in 1986, when Democrats and Republicans compromised — recall when compromise wasn’t a dirty word? — on reform. The compromise required employers to prove workers weren’t illegal immigrants and gave illegal immigrants a path to citizenship if they had been here for five years.

To be sure, some in Congress have tried to fix immigration. The McCain-Kennedy bill of 2005 set a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, increased border security and suggested ways to ease the labor shortage. It never got to a vote. Reforms failed in 2006 and 2007, too.

The pattern repeated in 2013 and 2018. Reform came closest in 2013 when a bipartisan “gang of eight” got its bill through the Senate, 68-32. But the bill never came to a vote in the House of Representatives. Therein lies the key. The House seems always ready to make things worse by not changing them. With Republicans set to take over in 10 days, don’t expect an awakening.

We have to ask: Who benefits from not reforming immigration policy? Hard to know who all of them are, but here are a couple. Perhaps the key group is employers, many of them owners of large farms out west, who can hire illegal immigrants for less than the minimum wage, knowing the workers won’t complain, let alone rebel. Remember that when you buy lettuce from Arizona rather than from a farmer with a greenhouse in Topsham, say, or Vienna.

Then there’s the House Freedom Caucus, a knot of 40 Republicans who pushed Republican Speaker John Boehner out of the job, at least partly over immigration, and their constituents.

The constituents first.

On Wednesday, Cal Thomas, in the Sun Journal, created a metaphor for the “replacement theory” championed by such Fox “news” crackpots as Tucker Carlson. Thomas wrote, “If you pour cream (into a cup of coffee) long enough it will replace the coffee.”

That’s a pretty thinly veiled argument that someone — replacement theorists never nail down the identity of the “someone” — wants to dilute America. The metaphor seems clear. You can’t dilute white with white, so when you talk of diluting a still-majority-white America, you must be talking about brown and Black.

I used to read every Cal Thomas column. I liked his ability to develop secular ideas from his faith without forcing non-Christians to accept his faith. But about halfway through Trump’s reign of error, he turned and began to shill for Trump. Pity.

We have to compromise on immigration. Compromise starts with taking a step toward someone with whom you disagree. If the other one also wants compromise, she’ll find a way to take a step toward you. And the process begins. It’s long, often arduous, but it has worked for 233 years.

The starting point here, missed by many on the left, is that we must have a secure border and a process to admit and assimilate immigrants. All but a million or so of us are immigrants. As the T-shirt I once saw on an indigenous man read, “Fighting illegal immigration since 1492.”

A wall won’t secure the border. Having enough people and facilities at legal border crossings would work better. By March 2022, Trump’s wall had been breached at least 3,000 times. And that’s just the times we know about.

After we secure the borders, we need to deal with the 11 million or so here illegally. Start by passing The Dream Act, written in 2001 by (surprise!) a Republican and a Democratic senator.

The vast majority of Dreamers came here as young children when their parents came illegally.

The old Cal Thomas might even have found a path for them in Scripture. Ezekiel 18:20, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.” Dreamers came because their parents came.

President Obama was correct, in moral terms, to grant them continued resident status. But now they are being held hostage by the likes of the Freedom Caucus. Instead of trying to solve the illegal-immigration crisis, the hard-right Republicans want to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. He may have made mistakes, but his head is hardly a trade-off for the head of Donald Trump, twice impeached and at risk of criminal action.

It would make more sense if House Republicans took the olive branch offered on Dec. 16 by Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, whose district borders Mexico: “I don’t know why they (administration officials) keep avoiding the border and saying there’s other things more important than visiting the border. If there’s a crisis, show up. Just show up.”

Just show up, indeed. Cuellar addressed the recalcitrants on his side; Republicans need to address theirs.

Bob Neal oversaw production of the “Good News” Christmas edition of The Tribune-Chronicle in Warren, Ohio, the only Christmas Eve he wasn’t with his family. He was fired the next day. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.

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