From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbarrow. This is The Daily.

Today, the president demands to know why the U.S. should welcome immigrants from quote,

shit hole countries. It's alarming lawmakers and threatening an immigration deal.

But above all, it raises a question about a central American idea.

Who do we let in?

It's Friday, January 12.

Julie, what's this meeting in the Oval Office on Thursday?

So the president had hosted a meeting earlier in the week and basically called on members of Congress as he had

to come to an agreement by partisan deal to protect the dreamers, these undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children.

Julie Davis covers the White House for the times.

And Dick Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, and Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina who are the leaders of this effort, both separately called the president and told him,

listen, we think we have something. And he invited them down to the White House to talk him through it essentially.

Okay. So a Democrat and a Republican, both senators, saying essentially, we think we have a deal for you on DACA that you might like.

Let's talk it over.

That's right. This is not a comprehensive deal, but the president has basically insisted all along that any DACA fix have within it certain things that Republicans want to see.

And he in particular wants to see funding for the wall or for border security and end to what he calls chain migration or basically limiting the amount of family that immigrants can bring into the United States after they gain their own legal status.

And then ending the diversity visa lottery program, which is a State Department program that allocates about 50,000 visas a year to people from countries who don't send a lot of people otherwise to the United States.

So what's under discussion here are the big issues that would be part of a DACA deal fixing DACA border security, ending what the president calls chain migration or the prioritization of family migration and the visa lottery program.

Right. And the senators, one of the reasons they thought they had a good deal here is because they had all four of those elements in their proposal.

So what happens when Graham and Durban get to the White House?

So when they get to the White House, they think they're going to have essentially a three way meeting with the president to walk him through this proposal and they do sit down with the president in the cabinet room.

But what happens next is that a door opens and a bunch of Republicans file in some of them are immigration hardliners who have been very skeptical of a DACA fix.

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