The government shutdown is in its fourth week, with no end in sight because our leaders in Washington don’t seem to want an end that doesn’t amount to political humiliation of the opposition.

But imagine for a moment that President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer could see their way to a compromise that Americans would support and that would greatly benefit this country.

To us, it would look like this: The president would get the funding he seeks to enhance border security, including some 230 miles of physical barrier, but also with more technologically sophisticated solutions.

In return, the president would agree to a sweeping deal to protect young people who were brought to this country without authorization at ages when they had no say over what happened to them.

We are speaking here of the Dreamers. That includes the 800,000 young people officially protected from deportation under the law known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. But it also includes an additional 1 million people brought here before their 16th birthday but who have not qualified for DACA for a variety of reasons. Some have committed minor crimes. Others refused to register under DACA for fear that they would be spotlighted and face faster deportation than they would risk if they remained under shadow.

The Dreamers have the sympathy of the American people, and they deserve it. Stories abound of these young people making their way in this country against obstacles of poverty, language and living in homes headed by unauthorized immigrants. Many are exactly who America would hope to have as immigrants. And, of course, they broke no law in coming here. They were children under the agency of adults.

Across the country, meanwhile, rhetoric about Trump’s wall has become distorted in language of morality. The president bears much of the blame for this. From the time of his “bad hombres” comment to his persistent tweets highlighting the worst sort of immigrant, he has courted a sense that he is anti-immigrant. But his opponents on the left are less than honest when they suggest that any attempt to secure our southern border with a physical barrier is unAmerican or immoral.

A deal in which America protects Dreamers and gives them a clear and simple path to citizenship while offering real protection on the border would be a way for both the president and Democratic leaders to walk away from this shutdown as winners. What’s more, the American people would support them.

The only thing that is needed for a deal is leaders on both sides deciding that they can let the other side have something.

If that’s not the art of the deal, what is?

What's your view?