It’s been 10 years since President Barack Obama issued the executive order known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, protecting from deportation foreign nationals who had been brought to this country as children and know no other home.
The order was intended as a stopgap measure against increasingly xenophobic rhetoric that was arising against all immigrants, both legal and illegal. A decade later, that rhetoric has continued to move toward the extreme, while Congress has taken no action to codify into law the commonsense effort to recognize that these immigrants are Americans in every sense of the word except for the nation of their birth and their families’ inability to secure legal status for them. In fact, demands that Dreamers, as they are called, be rounded up and kicked out of the country have become more insistent, including among many Texas elected officials.
Continued inattention to this urgently needed immigration reform is unnecessary, immoral, and completely senseless.
DACA enabled lifelong undocumented Americans to apply for protection from arrest and deportation for being in this country illegally. They were able to get Social Security cards and obtain jobs, students could qualify for in-state college tuition. More than 800,000 people obtained DACA permits in the past decade. Thousands more have not, unable to pay the permit fees or perhaps afraid that upon expiration the information on their permits would make it easier for officials to find and deport them.
Part of the blame for the program’s difficulties lies with Obama. In seeking the Hispanic vote in 2008, he promised to make immigration reform his top priority. Once in office, however, Obama diverted his attention to the Affordable Care act and other issues, virtually ignoring immigration until his second term — and losing the benefit of Democratic Party majorities in both chambers of Congress during his early years.
Making DACA permanent U.S. policy should be a no-brainer. Multiple polls have shown that three-fourth of Americans, of both major political parties, support enabling Dreamers to become U.S. citizens, if not legal residents.
And why wouldn’t they? Dreamers have long shown that they are every much as American as native-born citizens. Thousands of them have graduated from with honors high schools and universities, including many valedictorians and salutatorians.
And yet they remain in limbo, unsure if their ability to stay in the only home they’ve every known might be ripped away. The American economy continues to struggle due to a lack of workers, even though legions of able and eager Dreamers could fill many of those positions. The American people wait for a member of Congress — anyone, perhaps even someone representing the Rio Grande Valley, where thousands of Dreamers live — to propose legislation that might codify DACA into law.
DACA is a specific, definable issue that can stand alone doesn’t have to be part of a larger omnibus immigration reform bill. Every day that goes by without someone taking the initiative to offer DACA legislation only compounds the sin committed against our Dreamer neighbors, and against our country as a whole.
