What is the Future for DACA?

In the current political era, there have been increasing questions surrounding the Obama-era policy concerning Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients or DACA for short. The current administration put the policy at risk in 2016 when then-candidate Trump promised to immediately terminate the protection afforded to children who were brought to the United States before they were sixteen years old. However, now that Donald Trump has become president, both he and his administration have chosen a much softer stance. In the president’s own words, he has called the people that DACA protects “incredible children” and the policy itself a “very, very tough subject.”

So what does DACA do for those that came here as children, illegally? In short, it protects these people that did not have a say in whether or not they were brought here. For these people, DACA does not provide citizenship or even a path to citizenship. What it provides is that these children are given a grant that would last for two years so that they can obtain driver’s licenses and be able to work in the United States legally. According to the statistics available, these DACA recipients are more likely to graduate with high school diplomas, have a clean criminal record, go to college, receive a degree, and start small businesses.

However, the Trump administration has promised from the beginning of their campaign to end DACA and remove these so-called “illegal aliens” from the United States. With this promise kept and the rhetoric from the White House and its constituents, DACA recipients are facing some tough choices. President Trump has meetings with Republicans planned over the next several days to discuss the end of the program, which will begin to wind down in March of 2018. Trump has given Congress until this time to make concrete plans on what can and should be done with the DACA recipients.

The Department of Homeland Security has stated that they plan on honoring DACA visas until their last two-year grant expires. DACA recipients have until October 5th to apply for a renewed status. The administration plans on ending the DACA program on a rolling basis, with a hard end date of 2020.

With this in mind, economists, industry giants, tech companies, including the majority of Silicon Valley, have opposed this move by the White House. According to the numbers that have been made available, this step will put the economy at risk of losing as much as $280 billion. Deporting the recipients will cost the federal government upwards of $60 billion along with the reduced economic expansion of $280 billion. It should also be mentioned that these reports believe that these numbers are conservative. Economists are worried because these dollars could be pumped into a flagging economy that is in desperate need of resuscitation and growth.

To this very day, the Trump administration insists that the children that were brought to the United States before they even had a say in the matter of where they would reside, have taken thousands of jobs from the people that were born here in America. So far, there has been no definitive numbers or reports to back this claim.