As expected,
the Trump Administration announced on September 5 that it was rescinding the
five-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, with a
six-month delay before the cancellation takes full effect. President Trump
dodged making the announcement himself; he stuck Attorney General Jeff Sessions
with the job. And later in the day Trump seemed to contradict the announcement
with a tweet threatening to “revisit”
the issue in six months if Congress fails to put together some sort of DACA
replacement. What that meant was anybody’s guess.
Sessions’
official announcement was vague, but the administration clarified some points
during the day. No new DACA applications will be accepted, but people who have
already applied can expect their applications to be processed in the usual way.
Current recipients whose two-year deferrals and work authorizations are set to
expire before March 6, 2018, can apply to renew their deferrals and work
authorizations, but they must do so before October 5. Current recipients
whose deferrals expire on or after March 6 are simply out of luck.
In
public pronouncements the White House tried to make its approach sound humane,
but a talking
points memo the administration circulated in Congress on September 5 had
this chilling remark: “The Department of Homeland Security urges DACA
recipients to use the time remaining on their work authorizations to prepare
for and arrange their departure from the United States—including proactively
seeking travel documentation—or to apply for other immigration benefits for
which they may be eligible.”
According
to the memo, the total number of DACA recipients as of September 4 was 689,821,
somewhat lower than estimates in the media of about 800,000.
“Congress, get
ready to do your job - DACA!” Trump tweeted,
implying that Congress now had six months to find some legislative solution for
the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who came here as children.
In other words, he was calling for some version of the DREAM Act, a legislative
proposal that has been kicking around on Capitol Hill since 2001. It’s true
that the DREAM Act has bipartisan support, and the latest version might well
pass Congress if there was a straight up-and-down vote. But various
observers
note that this hasn’t happened in the past 16 years—and the current session of
Congress has had a lot of trouble passing anything.
Some
Republicans will be pushing for a divide-and-conquer
strategy: they’ll back the DREAM Act in exchange for an agreement to
fund Trump’s border wall. But the Dreamers themselves seem to have no patience
for this sort of horse trading. “I’m not going to step on top of my community
to get ahead,” a DACA recipient protesting outside the White House told The
Daily Beast on September 5.
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| DACA protest at White House, September 5 |
Sessions’
September 5 announcement sparked
protests that day, including civil disobedience and arrests, throughout the
country. But what will the long-term response be?
Several
legal organizations have already started to challenge
the DACA cancellation in court, and at least three state government seem
ready to mount their own challenges. These would be unlikely to overturn the
White House’s decision, but they could delay implementation, just as the right
wing’s challenges to President Obama’s Deferred Action for Parental Accountability
(DAPA) tied the program up in court until Obama’s successor could repeal it.
Meanwhile, a number of organizations are gearing up to pressure Congress
with online
petitions calling for passage of the DREAM Act.
Some
of the organizations we can expect to lead efforts to protect DACA recipients
include Mijente, Moviemiento Cosecha, Presente and United We Dream,
DACA recipients and their friends and families add up to a
substantial part of the population, and young Dreamers have been especially
forceful in the past as activists. Add to this their potential appeal to native-born
citizens. A Morning
Consult/Politico national tracking poll from August 31 to September 3
showed 58 percent of respondents supporting a path to citizenship for DACA
recipients, while another 18 percent felt the immigrant youths should be
allowed to become legal residents but not citizens. Only 15 percent wanted them
deported. In other words, like the ObamaCare “repeal and replace” effort, the
DACA cancellation is only popular with Trump’s hardcore base—and is extremely
unpopular with the great majority of the population.
One way to build on this potential support among the
native born would be to confront economic issues—especially the one often
misrepresented as “they take our jobs.” Although much anti-immigrant feeling is
simply racist and xenophobic, a good deal comes from native-born workers who
find their own wages held down because of lower pay for undocumented
immigrants. As a recent Economic Policy Institute (EPI) blog
post puts it, “The reasonable fear unauthorized workers feel keeps them
docile and quiet, which in turn diminishes the bargaining power of Americans
who work alongside unauthorized workers.” The corollary, rarely mentioned in
the media, is that providing authorization for undocumented workers raises
their pay and puts upward pressure on the pay of other workers in the
same fields.
A 2016 survey found that after receiving DACA protection,
including work authorization, recipients found their wages increasing by 42
percent on average. Other factors probably contributed to the wage increase, but the main
factor was certainly the DACA work authorization. So what happens when DACA
recipients are forced back into low-paying jobs in the informal economy? “Ending DACA and forcing these young
workers out of the formal, regulated labor market, thus making them easily
exploitable will not help American workers,” the EPI blog concludes. “[I]t will
do the opposite.”
A
little more than two hours after Sessions’ September 5 briefing, Vox
posted an article entitled “4
lies Jeff Sessions told to justify ending DACA.” One of these was his claim
that DACA “among other things contributed to a surge of minors at the southern
border with humanitarian consequences,” a reference to an uptick in asylum
seekers from three Central American countries in the spring of 2014.
It is
well known that the principal cause for the uptick was a sharp increase in
crime in the three countries, but did DACA have anything to do with it? The Vox
article said there was “a lot of disagreement” on this but indicated that the
increase in asylum seekers was mostly due to “increasing violence and worsening
economic conditions in Central American countries.” PolitiFact found
Sessions’ claim “mostly
false.” Actually, it’s completely false.
Sessions
was repeating disinformation perpetrated by the right wing—including an office of the Border
Patrol—in the summer of 2014, disinformation that was never sufficiently debunked by the
corporate media. A leaked Border Patrol report about interviews agents
conducted with asylum seekers one day in May 2014 attributed the uptick to
“misrepresentations” about DACA. But someone also leaked the original
report about the interviews. This report showed clearly that any “pull” factor from
the United States for the uptick was the Trafficking Victims Protection
Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA), not DACA.
Sessions
probably wasn’t aware of any of this. He—or whoever wrote his statement—simply
didn’t know the facts and couldn’t be bothered to find out what they were.
