States have a vital stake in federal action to rescue the beleaguered program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Instituted by President Barack Obama in 2012 by executive order, DACA has protected from deportation nearly 800,000 young immigrants who were born abroad and brought to the United States as children.
“We’ve spent millions of dollars educating these kids, and we need to keep them,” said Nevada state Sen. Mo Denis, D-Las Vegas), co-chairman of the task force on immigration for the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).
“They are our engineers, computer scientists, doctors and teachers of the future.”
Although the vast majority of DACA participants are children of parents who came from Mexico, some 200,000 of them come from 24 other countries. They live in every state and territory of the United States as well as the District of Columbia.
President Donald Trump’s administration in September unveiled a plan to phase out DACA, extending the program until March 5 of this year to give Congress time find a legislative solution. With the deadline approaching, Congress is scrambling to come up with a bill that would protect DACA recipients, also known as “Dreamers.”
“It will take a compromise in Congress and we don’t do compromise very well anymore,” said Ann Morse, program director for NCSL’s Immigrant Policy Project.
Any solution would also require compromise on the part of Trump, who has offered to keep DACA only if Congress puts strict limits on legal immigration and provides billions of dollars for his signature campaign proposal of building a “big, beautiful wall” along the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico.
Supporters of the Dreamers were until last week optimistic about the Senate, which on Feb. 15 considered several immigration bills without success.
They are less hopeful about the House of Representatives, where House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has said he will not schedule a House vote on a DACA replacement bill unless Trump agrees beforehand to sign it. Without Trump’s support, it is unlikely Ryan could win the backing of conservatives in his own party who see DACA as unjustified amnesty for illegal immigrants.
The House has twice in this century been the graveyard for immigration reform. In 2006 a comprehensive immigration bill supported by President George W. Bush passed the Senate, but the Republican majority in the House refused to consider it. In 2013 a Senate-passed immigration measure supported by Obama also died in the House at the hands of the GOP majority.
With Congress stalled on immigration, states have opened many opportunities for unauthorized immigrants, especially Dreamers. Before DACA, three states — New Mexico, Utah and Washington — issued driver’s licenses or driving privilege cards to unauthorized immigrants. California pioneered in allowing DACA recipients to receive driver’s licenses. All states now do so.
Twelve states also issue driver’s licenses to any unauthorized immigrant who can provide documentation, such as a foreign birth certificate, and evidence of residency in the state.
Twenty states offer in-state college tuition to unauthorized immigrants. Seven states also provide financial aid. Ten states have enacted legislation enabling immigrants to obtain a professional license. Six states — California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Washington plus the District of Columbia — fund health insurance for children, regardless of immigration status.
But no state can offer immigrants legal residence or a path to citizenship. That is the exclusive prerogative of the federal government, which has not changed immigration law substantively since 1986 when President Ronald Reagan supported and signed a bill that gave legal status to 2.7 million unauthorized immigrants, including 1 million farm workers.
That law gave temporary legal status to any unauthorized immigrant who had lived continuously in the United States before 1982 and paid a fee. It also imposed sanctions on employers who knowingly hired unauthorized immigrants and provided additional funds for improving border control.
But the sanctions, watered down as the bill passed through Congress, were ineffective, and the border controls proved insufficient. The flow of unauthorized immigration spiked, rising to a peak of 12.7 million in 2007 from 5 million in 1986, according to the Pew Research Center.
Unauthorized immigration began declining in 2008, as the United States entered the Great Recession. It has leveled off at 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants, according to Pew. California has the most such immigrants, an estimated 2.3 million, and also the most DACA recipients — 223,000 — more than a quarter of the total.
Nearly 800,000 dreamers received temporary lawful status under DACA from June 2012 through June 2017. The number has fallen to 689,800.
Thousands of DACA recipients have received legal permanent residence (green cards) through such paths as marrying a U.S. citizen, being a victim of a crime or assisting law enforcement, according to fact checker Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post.
The DACA recipients are the cream of a large crop of 1.8 million immigrants brought to the United States as children. All of them would be protected from deportation under a bipartisan bill by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Richard Durbin, D-Ill., that is pending in the Senate.
When he announced DACA’s phase-out, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the program took work from hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing “illegal aliens to take those jobs.” This contention has been disputed by many economists, including Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, who called repeal of DACA “particularly wrongheaded as economic policy.”
Since the phase-out was announced, the U.S. unemployment rate has dropped to 4.1 percent, a 17-year low. Denis, who represents a highly diverse Las Vegas district, said there is a shortage of workers of all ethnicities and races in Nevada, as is also true in several other states.
Most Americans do not see DACA as a job threat. Public opinion surveys differ widely on many immigration issues, but there is solid support for DACA, which was backed by 87 percent of respondents in an ABC/Washington Post poll and by 66 percent in an NBC News/Survey Monkey poll.
This public support for a DACA solution has yet to be evident on Capitol Hill. On Thursday, a bipartisan “common sense caucus” of 11 senators proposed a bill to provide an eventual path to citizenship for 1.8 million unauthorized young immigrants and authorize $25 billion for border security including construction of Trump’s wall — but over a 10-year period instead of immediately. These immigrants would not be allowed to sponsor their parents for citizenship.
It will be hard for Democrats to swallow a wall in any form, but the bill did not go far enough for Trump. He urged senators to support a rival measure by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that, while also admitting 1.8 million young immigrants, would build the wall immediately and restrictively rewrite present immigration law.
The Senate, after emotional debate, rejected both plans, leaving a legislative solution of the DACA issue fraught with uncertainty.
The legal future of DACA is also uncertain, as it has been since its creation. Texas and 21 other states tried to stop DACA in 2014, alleging that Obama had exceeded his constitutional authority in creating it. A U.S. district court issued an injunction blocking the program, and the decision was upheld by an appellate court.
The case then went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in June 2016 deadlocked 4-4, leaving the appellate decision in place.
Amazingly, DACA remained in effect throughout this legal process. It’s still a functioning program, and it could last beyond March 5. On Feb. 13, U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled that the Trump administration must continue to process DACA applications and renewals after the deadline but is not required to enroll new applicants. The Brooklyn-based judge said the government had not provided adequate explanations for terminating DACA and must continue the program until there is a court decision on the program’s merits.
His ruling echoed a similar finding last month by San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who also ordered processing of DACA applications to continue.
Shortly after the ruling by Garaufis, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to review the decision. The justices have yet to say if they will do so. If they do review DACA on its merits, they could also consider a lawsuit filed by New York and 13 other states that seeks to halt overturning of the program.
In the meantime DACA recipients cling to their protected status in a legal limbo, not knowing if they will eventually be deported or allowed to stay. That’s sad, for a decision of this human magnitude should not depend solely on legal maneuvering.
DACA recipients are striving young immigrants who know no other home than the United States. Congress should address their predicament.
— Lou Cannon, a Summerland resident, is a longtime national political writer and acclaimed presidential biographer. His most recent book — co-authored with his son, Carl — is Reagan’s Disciple: George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy. Cannon also is an editorial adviser to State Net Capitol Journal, which published this column originally. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
