Let Them DREAM
Part 10: On DACA and a Path to Citizenship
No single component of immigration reform can stand on its own and succeed — policy changes must be comprehensive and holistic.
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) participants should be given a one-time path to citizenship, but ONLY after there remains no incentive for illegal immigration and every measure has been taken to stop it. Immigration quotas must be increased, amnesty loopholes closed, the laws restructured, our borders secured, and cities must cooperate with the law enforcement tasked to enforce immigration law. Otherwise, all of our problems continue, and nothing is solved.
Attempts to create a pathway to citizenship without these other reforms are disingenuous, and do not take the humanitarian crisis at the border seriously. A refusal to look at this issue in its entirety is just a political game. Moral decency demands a genuine and comprehensive approach to policy change.
That being said.
Children are paying for choices they did not make. Often, they are brought here as a consequence of the perverse incentives of our own laws. Then we forget about them. In the words of President Obama:
They were brought to this country by their parents, sometimes even as infants. They may not know a country besides ours. They may not even know a language besides English. They often have no idea they’re undocumented until they apply for a job, or college, or a driver’s license … Whatever concerns or complaints Americans may have about immigration in general, we shouldn’t threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own, who pose no threat, who are not taking away anything from the rest of us … Kicking them out won’t lower the unemployment rate, or lighten anyone’s taxes, or raise anybody’s wages.
There were concerns surrounding the unilateral executive action taken with DACA — consensus must come from Congress, but that is not on trial here. These are children who were brought into this country by no fault of their own — it is often all they know. Eligibility requirements are strict.
“To be eligible [for DACA], recipients must be present in the United States unlawfully after being brought in as children before their 16th birthday and prior to June 2007, be currently in school, a high school graduate or be honorably discharged from the military, be under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012, and not have been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor or three other misdemeanors, or otherwise pose a threat to national security (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals).”[1]
They broke the law, but they are also victims of it. Intent matters. They are your friends, classmates, co-workers, and neighbors. They have become part of the fabric of our society — yet we tell them they do not belong. This is an issue of dignity.
They are hard-working, law-abiding members of our communities.[2] They regularly pursue higher education and are net positive contributors to our economy; ’91 percent of DACA registrants are employed, and 5 percent have launched their own businesses, compared to 3.1 percent of all Americans’.[3]
“The Immigrant Legal Resource Center estimated that deporting DACA-eligible individuals would reduce Social Security and Medicare tax revenue by $24.6 billion over a decade. U.S. public school system has already invested in educating these individuals, and they are at the point at which they can start contributing to the U.S. economy and public coffers; deporting them or increasing the likelihood that they be deported is economically counterproductive. A 2017 study by the Center for American Progress estimated that the loss of all DACA-eligible workers would reduce U.S. GDP by $433 billion over the next 10 years (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals).”[4]
They are proud Americans, and will contribute more than they receive. Continuing DACA protections — allowing them to work and pursue degrees without fear of deportation — is a basic obligation to those who have given so much and done no wrong.
We have a Kantian imperfect duty to provide aid to those when we can. Here we can. But we can do better than DACA. We can provide them with a path to citizenship. The details must be debated, and a bipartisan path forward agreed upon. It cannot be a rolling protection and must only apply to those already here. But the conclusion is simple. We must welcome them home.
Moral immigration policy reform can only arise from a comprehensive understanding of our ethical obligations, and the truth of our circumstances. The political arena must be a contest of ideas, where we use the best information to come to the most valuable conclusions. I hope that’s what I’ve done here today.
Let’s take a final moment to review.
- We are morally obligated to provide aid when we can (an obligation we must seek to maximize), but it is not an absolute.
- Our government has certain recognized moral obligations to its citizenry — and so long as there are homeless and hungry children and veterans (among a myriad of domestic socio-economic problems), we are failing in those obligations on many levels.
- Everyone has the right to seek asylum from persecution, but not the right to choose where they go.
- Immigration is economically, socially, and culturally beneficial to our country.
— Illegal immigration is costly, detracts from our representative democracy, is dangerous for those making the journey, and forces an unethical choice: either look the other way when it comes to the treatment of people whose labor benefits us, or further divert resources away from our most vulnerable.
The resulting moral calculation is simple.
We must maximize legal immigration in its most productive form, and disincentivize and limit illegal immigration to the best of our ability. Only in doing so can we satisfy our many competing moral obligations.
We are maximizing the use of our finite resources to achieve the best outcome for the greatest number of people; fulfilling our ethical responsibilities to our citizenry and our duty to those in need of our help. We will have extinguished the perverse and dangerous incentives of our asylum laws, lifted a great burden on our representative democracy, and have begun protecting the people whose labor our economy relies on.
The path forward to reflect this obligation in our policy is clear.
1) We must modernize and increase our immigration quotas, streamline the process, and created a legal apparatus for low-skilled permanent labor to access our economy.
2) We must close asylum loopholes, rewrite the laws, disincentivized the use of children as pawns to move across the border, and built the necessary legal and humanitarian infrastructure to process the remaining requests in a reasonable timeframe.
3) We must secure the border.
4) When we’ve overhauled our immigration system, we must provide a path to citizenship for DACA participants.
The reform is all or nothing — but it is bipartisan in nature. We must understand, and then demand the change we want to see. Anything less is disingenuous political maneuvering, immoral, and as I’ve hopefully shown, just bad policy.
We started from the beginning, and this is where we ended up.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_Arrivals#Eligibility
[2] “No Evidence Sanctuary Cities ‘Breed Crime’”. FactCheck.org. 2017–02–10
[3] Davidson, Paul (September 8, 2017). “Analysts Say Ending DACA would Hurt Economy, Hiring”. USA Today
[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_Arrivals#Eligibility
