By the numbers: A
look at the undocumented immigrant population.
11.3 million
The total number
of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.
3.6 million
The number of
undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. before their 18th birthday, the
group known as DREAMERS
1.8 million
The number of
undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. before their 16th birthday. This
is the group that met the basic requirements to apply for DACA.
800,000
The total number
of DREAMERS who have received DACA protections over the five years of the
program.
690,000
The number of
DREAMERS currently enrolled in DACA
25
Average age of
DREAMERS.
6
Average age of
DREAMERS when they first entered the U.S.
97%
Percentage of
DACA recipients who are working or enrolled in school.
900
DACA recipients
serving in the military.
0.2%
Percentage of
DACA enrollees who had their status revoked because of criminal or gang
activity.
Compiled by USA
Today(Sources: Department of Homeland Security; Migration Policy Institute; National survey conducted by the Center for American
Progress; the University of California-San Diego; and several
immigration advocacy groups.
Chasing Dreamers: The Retreat of Common Decency.
President Barack Obama’s executive action to shield some 700,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation and to provide them legal status, renewable every two years, is being reviewed by the Supreme Court.
The court will deliberate the legality of Mr. Obama’s executive action, but will it entertain consideration on what is really at stake here?
That would be the fate of our common decency, that humanitarian instinct most responsible for bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice.
I would like to believe it was common decency that compelled President Obama to issue his 2012 order, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
To qualify for DACA protection, an undocumented immigrant must pass security background checks and prove they are either in school, employed or serving in the military.
They had to have been brought here before their 16th birthday and could be no older than 30-years-old as June 2012.
A felony conviction, a significant misdemeanor, or more than three misdemeanors of any kind made them ineligible for the program.
DACA applicants have to provide the government their bio-metrics–fingerprints, etc.–and they have to prove they do not pose a threat to national security or public safety.
Of course, the political argument on the right is that DACA, rather than being an act of conscience, was an illegal act by Mr. Obama to shore up his party’s electoral base.
President Trump claimed that even Mr. Obama knew he was acting illegally. The record shows otherwise.
Mr. Obama issued his executive order believing that like him most Americans viewed it unconscionable to mass deport undocumented immigrants brought here as children.
“In the absence of any immigration action from Congress to fix our broken immigration system, what we’ve tried to do is focus our immigration enforcement resources in the right places,” Mr. Obama said in announcing DACA.
“This is not a path to citizenship. It’s not a permanent fix. This is a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people.”
Indeed, the lower courts have generally concluded that the Trump administration’s phase-out of DACA seemed “arbitrary and capricious.”
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit last year questioned, for example, “the cruelty and wastefulness of deporting productive young people to countries with which they have no ties.”
According to a brief by the N.A.A.C.P. and others, President Trump could have ended DACA on the grounds that the government by policy shouldn’t protect any undocumented immigrant from deportation.
But by claiming instead that DACA is illegal “allowed the administration to tell the public that it could not permissibly maintain DACA, and that Congress and the courts, rather than the president, thus bore responsibility for the(policy) terminations’ human consequence,” the brief said.
Our deal-making president now says he is urging the court to strike down DACA because it would lead Republicans and Democrats to craft “a DEAL to let them stay in our Country, in very short order.”
But even if such a consensus is possible, and recent history says it isn’t, what would be the worth of a deal rooted in the president’s cruelty and lack of common decency?
