The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, turned 12 this past Saturday, and with it, Dreamers celebrate an extra year of a program that has let them stay in the country. But while celebrations ensue, the program remains on life support ahead of the November elections.
The policy was initially introduced under the Obama administration, allowing undocumented individuals who came to the U.S. as children to be temporarily protected from deportation and to work legally. But as years pass, celebrations are sobered by the possibility that Republicans will succeed in their legal and political battle to end DACA.
Back in 2017, former President Donald Trump tried to end DACA and stopped new applications into the program. This has resulted in more than a million young immigrants who could have qualified for the program to have been denied access to its benefits.
In fact, by 2025, no undocumented high school graduates will qualify for DACA because they will have entered the U.S. after the required arrival to the U.S. of June 15, 2007, NBC News reports.
The program is expected to once again be challenged in the Supreme Court, potentially within the next year, based on legal steps of states such as Texas to persuade the courts to cease the policy. As experts prepare for its potential end, a recently published study by the Coalition for the American Dream details the potential detrimental effects eliminating DACA could have on the economy.
An estimated 500,000 American families include at least one DACA recipient. They live with their parents, siblings, spouses, and children, including nearly one million U.S. citizens.
If the program were eliminated, the study reveals, 233,000 school-aged children of DACA recipients would be impacted, including several thousand in some of the country's largest school districts, including New York City, Miami-Dade and Los Angeles.
Because of this, up to 118,000 U.S. citizen children could lose the private health insurance they now receive through their DACA recipient parents, directly endangering their physical and mental health, which would force additional costs on state and local governments to meet the healthcare needs of U.S. citizen children.
Similarly, the majority (78%) of U.S. citizen children in DACA-recipient families live above the poverty line. But the loss of employment for one or two DACA parents could push an estimated 120,000 additional U.S. citizen children into poverty. This could lead to at last $10 billion in shelter, food, tax expenditure, and healthcare costs to the federal government during the next decade, the report shows.
Ending DACA, according to the organization, can also have other effects on the economy.
For instance, eliminating the program could shrink the U.S. economy an estimated $38 billion in income from underemployed DACA recipients over their lifetime, $295 billion in DACA recipients and their spouses are no longer working over their lifetime and $648 billion if all DACA-eligible individuals and their spouses were no longer working over their lifetimes. Of these losses, California, Texas, Illinois and Arizona would see the most significant losses, the coalition suggests.
Industries all over the country could also be affected. For example, prohibiting recipients from working could result in the estimated losses of: $32 billion in healthcare, $28 billion in manufacturing, $26 billion in construction and more.
The study comes as the Biden administration announced an immigration relief program that would offer work permits and deportation protections to unauthorized immigrants married to U.S. citizens, as long as they have lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years. Those sources also told CBS News that Biden is also preparing a second plan that would streamline the process for Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants to request waivers that would make it easier for them to obtain temporary visas.
But regardless of protections, as the election looms, and Trump remains the presumptive GOP nominee, some Dreamers and experts remain concerned about the future of the program, given the Republican's promises to begin mass deportations upon taking office.
Proposals of mass deportation currently have bipartisan support among registered voters, with nearly six in 10 of them saying they would favor, in principle, a new government program to deport all undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, according to CBS News.
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