June 15, 2022 marked the ten-year anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, known as DACA. An executive branch memorandum announced by President Barack Obama, DACA allows some individuals who were brought to the country as children and who maintain an unlawful presence in the United States to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and become eligible for a work permit. DACA does not provide a pathway to citizenship for its recipients, leaving somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 people in a precarious position.
More than one third of DACA recipients came to the United States before they were five years old. Many of them (over 200,000) work in essential roles in the heath and education sectors, and DACA recipient households pay $10 billion in federal, state, and local taxes each year. Clearly DACA recipients are well-integrated in the United States. Despite this, over its ten-year lifespan the policy has come under attack from multiple angles. President Obama announced his intention to expand DACA protections to other undocumented immigrants in 2014, but was blocked from doing so after the Supreme Court ruling United States vs. Texas. In 2017, President Donald Trump announced plans to phase out DACA. This triggered a number of lawsuits, and complex litigation around DACA continued through 2020.
On his first day in office in January 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order effectively reinstating DACA. This came with its own challenges. Federal judge Andrew Hanen ruled shortly after the executive order was announced that DACA was unlawful and illegally implemented. His ruling prevents the government from accepting new applications to the program, although it allows immigrants currently protected by the program to keep their status and continue to apply for two-year renewals. This case is currently going through an appeals process, and the uncertainty over DACA’s future only enhances the insecurity of its recipients. According to the National Immigration Law Center, 91.6% of people with DACA or their family members reported concerns about their safety in a 2021 survey.
Most Americans are supportive of DACA and pathways to citizenship. Polls show three quarters of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for immigrant youth, and these numbers cut across the political divide. Yet the DACA program is essentially “frozen in place” after Hanen’s ruling, with no new applications being accepted and no amendments to the programs possible at the moment. Millions of immigrants also remain ineligible for DACA because of the program’s strict requirements.
Legislators have taken some action over the past year. The House of Representatives passed the American Dream and Promise Act in 2021, a bill that would allow DACA recipients to apply for permanent legal status and citizenship. It’s currently with the Senate, but they have failed even to vote on the bill. President Biden has renewed his efforts to solidify and expand DACA, releasing a video on its tenth anniversary calling on Congress to pass the Dream Act. But with a divided Senate, DACA will likely remain in limbo for a while yet.
As it exists, DACA is still a temporary program that shuttles along in two-year increments. If legislators do not take action, recipients will still be unable to apply for permanent residence or citizenship, thousands of other immigrants who may have been eligible for the program will be unable to access it, and millions of others will simply continue to be undocumented because the strict guidelines make them ineligible for DACA.
Why should legislators consider passing the Dream Act? According to most economists and social scientists, DACA has few if any negative consequences, and indeed seems to have serious economic and social benefits for both recipients of the program and the country at large. 91% of DACA recipients are employed. 5% own their own businesses, compared to 3% of American citizens. The program increased the labor participation rate and increased income for immigrants at the bottom of the income distribution. It also improved mental health outcomes for participants, though many DACA recipients still report high levels of stress when thinking about the long term.
Congress has repeatedly failed to pass immigration reform over the past few decades. One of the reasons President Obama issued the executive order for DACA was because Congress failed to pass the DREAM Act, which would have granted temporary conditional residency and the right to work to undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as minors. This act would also have allowed them to attain permanent residency if they satisfied certain requirements. From the DREAM Act we get the term “dreamers”, which has been applied to the recipients of DACA who hope for a permanent solution for their immigration status. But these dreamers continue to be let down by their representatives.
There are other dreamers too. They are the immigrants who missed out on applying for DACA before new applications were suspended, or who do not fulfill the narrow requirements of the program and so would be unable to apply even if DACA were unfrozen. These men and women nonetheless hope for wider legislation that will allow them a pathway to residence or citizenship. But is this legislation forthcoming? If Congress continues to do nothing, it will keep millions of people in a prolonged state of uncertainty and fear. But the dreamers will, we hope, continue to dream. As we recognize with mixed emotions the tenth anniversary of DACA, we ought to remember the words of Ted Kennedy, the long-serving Massachusetts senator: “…the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
