DACA ends as Trump kicks the can down the road

Tuesday’s announcement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the Trump administration was going to end the 2012 executive order by President Barack Obama  authorizing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, was the latest shot from from a president who has regressed from the norm of a planned presidential agenda, and instead has focused on tactics that will play to his base of loyal supporters.

Failing to reverse course on the Affordable Care Act, his Muslim travel ban, fallen prey to stays on the appeals circuit, his plans to tackle much needed infrastructure reform, overshadowed by his insensitive remarks which seemed to support white supremacists in their militant demonstration, in Charlottesville, Va; his only real success, so far, was getting Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.

What pushed Trump, in this move, was the promise of “A group of state officials, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton,” who threatened to sue the administration to end DACA if Trump didn't pull the plug by September 5 — which would have resulted in the program being put on hold in federal courts.

This Obama era program removed the threat of deportation against children brought illegally to the United States, as children (the average age was 6 years old) or whose parents had visas that expired. The main benefit was the right to work, and some, in error, saw that as a threat to American workers; while others gave nativist rants towards foreign born children of a program that has benefited, mostly Mexican youth.

Fearing that federal lawsuit, and facing further loss of face, he felt that the public would see him bruised and battered, by his own party. And, rather than take that risk, Trump panicked, asking Sessions for a way to end it.

With his poll ratings tanking to 30 percent, once again, in true fashion, as he recently did with affirmative action, (and the spectre of black kids getting a college education) he chose vulnerable, mostly Mexican, kids, to shore up his weakening profile, against those supporters that felt they would leapfrog over whites for good jobs.

Knowing full well that this often misunderstood program, would appeal to those whose nativism is focused on illegal immigration, and the displacement of American workers, this would do the trick and at the same time, move the ball, much like Lucy did to Linus, from the threatening front of North Korean missile tests.

In a further act of redemption, even penance, Sessions promulgated several mistruths about DACA, one of the most obvious was the age of the beneficiaries: “The DACA program was implemented in 2012 and essentially provided a legal status for recipients for a renewable two-year term, worker authorization and other benefits, including participation in the Social Security program, to 800,000 mostly adult illegal aliens.”

As the researchers at vox.com stated, “The majority of DACA recipients are adults now, but the whole reason they were given DACA status in the first place is because they were brought to the United States as children — on average, arriving at the age of 6.”

To achieve the ability to work and go to these young people, was the purpose of the plan, a stopgap measure, with the hope that a full immigration policy would be achieved in the future. But, more about that later.

“In order to apply, immigrants had to arrive in the US before 2007. They needed to have been 15 or younger when they arrived and younger than 31 when DACA was created in June 2012.”

Next on the Session list was: “The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things contributed to a surge of minors at the southern border with humanitarian consequences.”

The reality is that “the program was implemented in 2012, while the border surge started a year earlier, in 2011. One study by San Diego State University researchers in 2015 found the surge had much more to do with increasing violence and worsening economic conditions in Central American countries, which were forcing people to flee.”

Researchers also found that few of those that had fled knew anything about DACA.

Sessions also claimed another bugaboo among nativists, when he said that DACA granted unauthorized immigrants the same benefits as Americans, including Social Security “... and other benefits, including participation in the Social Security program ...”

No DACA immigrant is yet eligible to draw Social Security benefits.

As Vox noted, “By saying “other benefits,” Sessions seems to imply that immigrants with DACA protection are getting the same public benefits as ordinary American families. That’s not true. DACA workers are not eligible for Obamacare subsidies, Medicaid, food stamps, or cash assistance. The statement also makes it sound like DACA workers are depleting Social Security funds, when in fact the opposite is happening.”

DACA beneficiaries pay into the social security program but teap no benefits from them.

“Ending DACA could cost the federal government $19.9 billion in Social Security revenue over ten years, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Meanwhile, DACA recipients can’t currently collect Social Security benefits. For one, they have to work (legally) at least 10 years to be eligible for them, and DACA has only been around for five years. Second, all DACA recipients are under 36, so they are nowhere near retirement age. For now, then, DACA workers are giving a needed boost to the Social Security system and helping fund the retirements of millions of Americans,” they found.

The third falsehood that Sessions made, and the one, that has the potential to rally Trump supporters, and those ignorant about the program, is that “It denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs.”

“This is almost certainly false. The economic evidence is very clear that immigration is a huge boon for Americans as a whole. In part that’s because of complementarity: Immigrants don’t take jobs from Americans; they let Americans take higher-skill jobs (ones requiring English language fluency, for instance) and complement their labor.”

“America’s past experience confirms this. When the US ended a guest worker program that let Mexican laborers work on US farms in the early 1960s, wages for US farm workers didn’t rise at all, nor did more Americans get jobs. Companies simply bought more machines to make up for the lost workers,” the researchers commented.

Not to anyone’s surprise this represents another opportunity to trash the Obama presidency, and accuse him, ironically, of overreaching both his executive powers, and that of the Constitution, a view shared by Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Nearly 790,000 young people have benefitted from DACA, and now many face an uncertain future as they await a Congressional direction, from the president that a divided GOP Congress does not want to make. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, when he took up his gavel, made it clear that he would not move forward on this issue, unless there was a majority of Republicans that wanted to.

 
“This Congress will continue working on securing our border and ensuring a lawful system of immigration that works,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, sidestepping the issue.

“No single issue has divided Republicans as much as immigration reform, and expecting this Congress to take action on immigration after it failed in July to fulfill the GOP’s years-long goal of repealing ObamaCare would seem like wishful thinking on the part of the president,“ reported the beltway publication, The Hill.

The hard liners might be willing to take the charge, but the sound of reveille would only help to redefine the GOP, once again, as the party of “no” as they struggle with rallies and protests across the nation, for what many critics, across the country has said, is a lack of decency.

The earlier attempts at partial immigration reform with the Deferred Action for Parents (DAPA) had support in both the House and the Senate, but did not have enough votes  -- 60 -- to defeat a filibuster. DACA, as noted before, was a stopgap measure, with the hope that there would be comprehensive immigration reform later on. And, that never came before Obama left office.

The program, rigorous in its background checks and requirement for school or work, is renewable for two years, and according to the Pew Research staff, “Since 2012, about 800,000 such renewals have been issued,”

They also showed that “. . . requests for renewals have increased significantly each quarter since spring 2016 – from about 16,000 in the third quarter of fiscal 2016 to about 122,000 in the second quarter of fiscal 2017 – as an increasing number of program participants have become eligible to renew their benefits . . . halfway through fiscal 2017, more than 200,000 unauthorized immigrants have renewed their benefits so far.”

What we are looking at, in short, is political expediency, fueled by political fear, on the part of Trump, who, as we have noted was frightened to death by the threatened lawsuit, and is willing to, once again, exploit societal fears on the backs of the vulnerable.

Obama said in his statement, also on Tuesday, released on his Facebook page, “Let’s be clear: the action taken today isn’t required legally. It’s a political decision, and a moral question.”

He then added, “It is precisely because this action is contrary to our spirit, and to common sense, that business leaders, faith leaders, economists, and Americans of all political stripes called on the administration not to do what it did today. And now that the White House has shifted its responsibility for these young people to Congress, it’s up to Members of Congress to protect these young people and our future.”

He also said, in part, “Over the years, politicians of both parties have worked together to write legislation that would have told these young people – our young people – that if your parents brought you here as a child, if you’ve been here a certain number of years, and if you’re willing to go to college or serve in our military, then you’ll get a chance to stay and earn your citizenship. And for years while I was President, I asked Congress to send me such a bill.

That bill never came. And because it made no sense to expel talented, driven, patriotic young people from the only country they know solely because of the action of their parents.

My administration acted to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people, so that they could continue to contribute to our communities and our country. We did so based on the well-established legal principle of prosecutorial discretion, deployed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, because our immigration enforcement agencies have limited resources, and it makes sense to focus those resources on those who come illegally to this country to do us harm.”

Perhaps the strongest denunciation of Trump’s actions came with Obama’s following words: “Ultimately, this is about basic decency. This is about whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated. It’s about who we are as a people – and who we want to be.”

The future of these young people, many young adults, is in jeopardy, but actual predictions are veering towards the hypothetical, some say.  Predictions vary that some could sell their homes, cars and business, and return to illegality, in the fervent hope that they might not be caught, or hope to face the very real risk that they would be flushed out. This is a fact, since their applications, gave very detailed information about them, that government officials could use to deport them to countries, and languages, that they barely know.

There are some signs of support, primarily from lawmakers with large Hispanic populations; for example, “Rep. Leonard Lance (R-N.J.), a top Democratic target in 2018, announced that he will cosponsor legislation authored by Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) that would establish a path for young undocumented immigrants to gain legal status.”

National Public Radio, on its website, detailed a few options that entailed a path to citizenship with a GOP version of DACA, which the president said he would not support, and others that extended the current program to three years, allowing more time to do a comprehensive bill, from Colorado Republican Mike Coffman; or a stripped down version by Rep. Luis Gutierrez, from Illinois,without work or school requirements; nearly all previous attempts that seem doomed, especially those that contain a path to citizenship.

“Overall there were few signs on Tuesday that many Republicans beyond the usual suspects were eager to extend deferred deportations for DACA recipients,” said The Hill.