What You Need to Know About DACA and the ‘Dreamers’

(Bloomberg) -- The “Dreamers” have been in and out of limbo. President Donald Trump said in 2017 he was scrapping Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a program crafted by his predecessor, Barack Obama, in 2012 to shield young, undocumented immigrants from deportation. Efforts to forge a replacement in Congress failed. Courts blocked execution of most of Trump’s order, a stance affirmed by the Supreme Court, in a decision that almost certainly leaves Obama’s protections in place until after the November election.

1. What is DACA, exactly?

It’s a policy that allows certain undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children before 2007 to apply for renewable, two-year permits that protect them from deportation and allow them to work legally. Applicants must have been less than 16 years old when they arrived and younger than 31 when DACA began in 2012. They must have no significant criminal record and be enrolled in high school or have a diploma or the equivalent. The program doesn’t provide a path to permanent residency or citizenship.

2. Why did Trump call for DACA’s demise?

He promised during his 2016 presidential campaign to end DACA -- one of several anti-immigration stances that won him praise from his conservative base. Trump’s supporters have said that Dreamers are being rewarded for breaking the law, even as children, and that they are taking jobs away from Americans. Ten Republican state attorneys general threatened to sue the U.S. if Trump didn’t follow through on his plan. Like Trump, the AGs argued that Obama had violated the Constitution’s separation of powers by making a unilateral decision about immigration without congressional input.

3. What’s the view in Congress?

Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, generally have sought to protect Dreamers in exchange for funding the wall that Trump wants to build on the U.S.-Mexico border. Many Republicans also want changes in legal immigration, such as ending visa preferences for family members of U.S. citizens -- what Trump disparages as “chain migration.” Because Democrats and moderate Republican senators have said their support for a sweeping bill is contingent on protecting Dreamers, Republican plans stand little chance of passing. Efforts in Congress to craft a replacement to DACA in 2018 failed, resulting in a three-day government shutdown.

4. What have the courts said?

Early on, federal courts in San Francisco and New York blocked Trump from abolishing DACA, saying the administration needed to give a better justification than its assertion that the program wasn’t legal. On June 18, the Supreme Court agreed, in a 5-4 decision whose key parts were written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts joined the court’s four liberal justices in saying the rescission of DACA was “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of a federal law that governs administrative agencies.

5. Who’s protected by DACA?

As many as 1.3 million people were immediately eligible, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Of those, about 800,000 have enrolled. Another 400,000 would be eligible if they met the education requirement. About 230,000 more are younger than the minimum age of 15 but would become eligible if they get a high-school diploma or equivalent. The vast majority are from Mexico, with smaller contingents from Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries. Most have no connection to their previous countries. Some didn’t know they were undocumented until they sought driver’s licenses or college aid. Current law makes it difficult for them to obtain legal status unless they leave the country and apply.

6. What’s been happening to Dreamers?

The lower courts that first blocked Trump’s move to end DACA ordered the government to continue processing applications for renewals of the two-year DACA permits but allowed it to stop accepting new ones.

7. Did DACA cause a child-immigrant surge?

Trump claims DACA triggered a “massive surge” of undocumented children from Central America to the U.S. via Mexico in 2013 and 2014, some of whom joined violent gangs such as MS-13. It’s true that tens of thousands of children surged across the southern border, many fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. It’s also possible they didn’t know about, or misunderstood, DACA’s age requirements. It’s more likely that child immigrants were drawn to the U.S. by another law, the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, signed by President George W. Bush, which required that child immigrants from countries other than Canada and Mexico should be promptly placed in a refugee resettlement program.

8. Did DACA result in job losses and lower wages?

The claim by Trump that Dreamers have taken hundreds of thousands of jobs away from natural-born citizens isn’t really backed by economic reality. It supposes that there is a fixed number of jobs in the world instead of a figure that changes as more people arrive in a given country, by birth or immigration. Not everyone agrees with that assessment, including George Borjas, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Using labor economist David Card’s study of the 1980 boatlift of about 125,000 Cuban immigrants, most of whom settled in Miami, Borjas suggested they largely took jobs away from locals rather than creating additional ones. Critics said Borjas made incorrect use of Census data. There is still no agreement.

The Reference Shelf

• The text of the Supreme Court decision.
• Michael Bloomberg on what Congress owes the Dreamers.
• An open letter from business leaders to President Trump, urging him to keep DACA’s protections.
• Video of a Migration Policy Institute conference on what the future may hold for Dreamers.
• A survey of DACA beneficiaries shows the average age at which they arrived in the U.S. was six-and-a-half.
• A DACA fact sheet from the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services.
• A survey shows most Americans favor shielding Dreamers from deportation.

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