It’s the second day of the new year, and most Americans who took holiday vacations have returned to work. Not included are the more than 300,000 federal workers idled by the government shutdown that began Friday when no agreement could be reached on President Trump’s demand for $5 billion for a wall on the Mexican border.

That’s unacceptable. The furloughed workers should be returned to work — and paid immediately what they are owed. It speaks to a particular kind of elitist cruelty that the president would willingly have worker’s livelihoods ruined and savings drained as a sacrifice to partisan petulance.

Trump has dug his heels so deeply into the dirt on building “the wall” that it seems fruitless to negotiate with him until Democrats and Republicans can face him as a unified force. That’s not impossible. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., after having lunch Sunday with Trump, suggested the president might be open to trading wall funding for something Democrats want.

Democrats should jump on the opportunity to compromise if in doing so they can resolve the status of some 800,000 “Dreamers” brought into this country illegally by their parents in addition to the millions of other undocumented immigrants.

First, Democrats and Republicans need to agree on what they’re dickering over.

Departing White House chief of staff John Kelly said the “wall” is actually a mixture of border security enhancements. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said, “There may be a wall in some places, there may be steel slats, there may be technological enhancements.”

Even Trump in a tweet Monday seemed to retreat ever so slightly from his campaign promise to build a solid wall. “An all concrete Wall was NEVER ABANDONED,” the tweet said. “Some areas will be all concrete but the experts at Border Patrol prefer a Wall that is see through.”

Democrats plan to pass seven bills after they take over the House Thursday to reopen an array of federal agencies, including a stopgap funding bill for Homeland Security that includes $1.3 billion for border fencing and other measures. That’s not the $5 billion Trump wants, but it’s close enough to find some middle ground.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he won’t send any bill to Trump that he won’t sign. He’s looking at things backward. He needs to find a bill so good that Trump has to accept it. McConnell must take a bigger role to end this impasse.

For their part, Democrats already accept the need for more border security. Do they want to fight a semantics battle with Trump over what to call it? Trump may call it a “wall,” but most people by now know he says a lot of things that aren’t exactly accurate.