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Wednesday marked 10 years since President Barack Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or DACA, to protect undocumented people brought to the United States as children from deportation.
“Let’s be clear,” Obama said when announcing DACA in 2012. “This is not amnesty, this is not immunity. This is not a path to citizenship. It’s not a permanent fix. This is a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people.”
With no path to citizenship, many DACA recipients are effectively made into second-class citizens.
The policy outraged conservatives, who’ve made a tradition out of demonizing immigrants. But, as the Biden administration highlighted in a press release Wednesday, the millions of people who have received DACA protection, known as Dreamers, have been an undeniable force of good for this country.
“DACA recipients enrich our nation with their deep community ties, exceptional talents, and work ethic,” the Biden White House said.
The administration cited stats showing hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients are employed in industries deemed essential, including health care workers, educators and workers along various points of the food supply chain. I personally find it somewhat crass for the public to frequently reduce a group of people’s social contributions to their financial impact on the country. But it’s worth noting that the very immigrants Republicans have demonized for a decade now have quite literally been responsible for keeping the U.S. economy — and surely many conservatives’ stock portfolios — afloat.
DACA has, in that sense, been at least as much of a blessing to the country as it has been for the DACA recipients themselves. And we’ve yet to make them whole, as they deserve. The constant uncertainty and the ever-present threat of deportation looming over undocumented people in lieu of immigration reform has been a curse of sorts. With no path to citizenship, many DACA recipients are effectively made into second-class citizens, particularly in states where they’ve been permitted to work but not collect on public benefits generated by that work.
That hardship is akin to what Obama referenced in a statement commemorating DACA’s anniversary, saying Dreamers have “lived through the cruelty of the previous administration’s attacks and legal challenges to the program” and calling on the country to treat them “like the Americans they are.” That, Obama said, requires Congress to develop a pathway to citizenship for them.
President Donald Trump’s administration, in fact, challenged DACA’s legality from all angles. Leaving DACA recipients in limbo is another way to spurn them. After 10 years, it’s past time for the country to reward them with all the benefits of full citizenship.
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