After last month’s exasperating three-day federal government shutdown, Hawaii’s U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono observed that opposing sides on immigration policy could be careening toward a bruising collision course.

“There is no question that an open debate on immigration will be a knock-down, drag-out fight,” said Hirono, who has rightly expressed an urgent need to protect “Dreamers” amid political punches expected next week as Congress grapples with another potential shutdown.

“We will resolve the DACA issue with heart and compassion … while at the same time ensuring that any immigration reform we adopt provides enduring benefits for the American citizens,” President Donald Trump said in September, when he ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program while giving Congress six months to save it. “… Above all else, we must remember that young Americans have dreams too.”

That “Americans are Dreamers too” rejoinder surfaced again in the president’s State of the Union address this week.

While the speech touched on other policy proposals, such as infrastructure in vague terms, it clearly outlined a White House immigration plan that consists of four parts. The first is billed as a citizenship path for 1.8 million undocumented immigrants — twice as many as are currently covered under the DACA program. In return, the plan seeks: a $25 billion trust fund for a border wall; and the end to both a lottery program that targets immigration from underrepresented countries and long-standing family-based immigration.

Doing away with family-based immigration — legal immigration based on family ties to a U.S. citizen or permanent resident — is a move that could hit Hawaii hard. For example, due in large part to “chain immigration,” the growing Filipino community is now the state’s largest ethnic minority, with immigrants from the Philippines making up more than 45 percent of the state’s foreign-born population. The ability for immediate family members to reunify should be preserved.

As for the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education of Alien Minors) Act, it was introduced in the Senate in 2001 to give legal status to unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the United States as children. But Congress never passed it.

President Barack Obama, however, created DACA by executive action. Under the program, immigration officials let Dreamers pursue higher education and jobs here for renewable two-year periods.

DACA is a good thing for young people snagged in circumstances they did not initiate. And it benefits the overall economy until Congress can figure a way to effectively rework the nation’s faulty immigration system.

Nationwide, some 700,000 Dreamers — about 600 in Hawaii — are now mostly in their 20s and 30s. Their lives and roots are here and they contribute to our communities, but are caught in legal limbo through no fault of their own.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to bring the Trump plan to the Senate floor for a vote next week — in the days preceding the Feb. 8 expiration of a short-term government spending plan. Also in the works and hopeful: a possible bipartisan alternative that focuses on protecting those in DACA in exchange for stepping up border security while dropping the harsh push for ending family-based immigration.

If the debate spurs on hyperpartisanship and fighting of the sort Hirono has predicted, we could see another federal government shut down — the 20th since the mid-1970s — and DACA recipients could face deportation when the program fully expires on March 5.

As was the case last month when the signing of a stopgap bill funded the government for three weeks, Congress must pursue a comprehensive funding plan and take action on DACA through regular order — rather than resorting to unacceptable, entrenched theatrics from both parties.