Defend DACA
As I write this, I’m keeping one eye on my phone, waiting for breaking news alerts. In June 2017, ten states announced that they planned to sue the federal government on September 5 if Trump did not suspend the DACA program, otherwise known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Word on the street is that Trump is leaning towards acquiescing. Surprise, surprise. This means that while I’m waiting anxiously to see if this blog post will suddenly become irrelevant, hundreds of thousands of young people across the country are waiting anxiously to see if their lives will be suddenly upended.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was launched by the Obama administration in 2012 in response to Congressional gridlock on the DREAM Act as immigration reform. The purpose of the DREAM Act was to provide conditional residency and a pathway to permanent residency for young undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to age 16. While DACA does not provide that same conditional residency or pathway to permanent residency/citizenship, it did in the words of Dara Lind at Vox, provide “a commitment not to initiate deportation proceedings against the applicant.” Essentially, young people who registered under the program could get work permits, would be allowed to register for bank accounts and credit cards, could get access to health insurance, without the constant threat of deportation.
It certainly wasn’t ideal, but DACA is an important stopgap which helps protect hundreds of thousands of young people across the country while the rest of us try to work out how to see and treat them as human beings.
Arguments for immigration reform are well meaning and practical and Define American has a great fact sheet that lays some of them out. Their sources include the Social Security Administration, the Pew Research Center, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and other reputable sources. I urge you to check out their resources, especially if you have friends or relatives who are most likely to be convinced by an economic argument.
According to these sources, undocumented Americans pay $11.64 billion annually in state and local taxes, which amounts to an effective 8% tax rate. For comparison’s sake, America’s richest 1% pay an effective 5.4% tax rate. Undocumented Americans have also paid $12 billion annually to the Social Security Trust Fund, and an estimated $100 billion in the last decade. Overall, immigrants are an important facet of economic growth — immigrants are more likely to start businesses and less likely to commit crimes. Allowing hard working people who have made lives here to come out of hiding and contribute in economically meaningful ways will, according to most research, benefit the rest of us.
And that’s great, and if you have people you want to convince who will only listen to these arguments, use them. But there is a more pressing issue here, which is that approximately 11 million people live in this country and do not have access to legal status and the accompanying benefits. They are already contributing their taxes and their work, their friendships and their traditions and their faith to the fabric of this country but we aren’t giving them much back besides fear.
Of course there are people in every group who aren’t conscientious, who aren’t hard working, who take without giving back, who wreak havoc or cause violence. I can think of a lot of white American citizens who fit that bill — we saw them exercising that violence all over Charlottesville. We see white American citizens who run rampant over our finances, who use nepotism to get jobs they are unqualified for, who commit crimes and yet somehow we still manage to treat them like human beings, and their punishment is rarely being forced to leave their homes to live in a country they’ve long since left behind.
We need comprehensive immigration reform, reform that adheres to the values we profess — family, diversity, compassion. We need it so that the law treats immigrants, documented and undocumented alike, the same as the rest of us. Regardless of where you were born, you are a human being and deserving of the dignity the law grants to so many of us because of the privileges of our birth (frankly, this applies to many more Americans besides immigrants, but that’s another blog post).
Call your members of Congress and ask them to support the DREAM Act. A new version of the law was introduced last month. But also ask them, and your attorney general, to defend DACA. 5 calls still has this as an option if you’re looking for a script, and Defend DACA is a great website with resources and scripts and a ton of helpful information. If Congress can’t manage to get its shit together, the least the Trump administration can do is not dismantle the current protections as a punishment on young people for our inability to come up with a plan for immigration reform.
There are lives on the line and there’s something you can do to help. Call today.
