This past week, President Trump finally made good on his campaign promise to end DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Now, Congress has six months to decide if nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants, often called Dreamers, should be protected from deportation.
As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday, "This is a sad day for our country. The decision to end DACA is not just wrong. It is particularly cruel to offer young people the American dream, encourage them to come out of the shadows and trust our government, and then punish them for it."
It is terribly unsettling to me that many Americans seem to support this decision based on the response Zuckerberg and others who have spoken out against it are receiving on social media. Children and adults, who are American by definition and have spent the majority of their lives here since before they were 16, are being excluded from the American dream and told they do not belong. Here are some of the myths I've seen being circulated about DACA/Dreamers and why they're wrong.
1. DACA takes jobs away from Americans.
In announcing the Trump administration’s decision this past week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that DACA “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.” This is simply false; an increase in workers does not cause more unemployment. We depend on other workers, DACA recipients included, to buy the products and services we produce, which is partially why earlier efforts to prohibit immigration did not produce any wage gains. More workers = more jobs and more employment.
2. Dreamers don't pay taxes.
Sessions also argued that ending DACA “protects taxpayers," when in fact the opposite is true. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), first-generation immigrants who enter the United States as children (meaning all DACA recipients) pay, on average, more in taxes over their lifetimes than they receive in benefits, regardless of their education level. DACA recipients have paid about $2 billion in state and local taxes, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates.
3. Dreamers go to college for free.
Unlike myself, DACA students are not eligible for Pell grants or other types of federal financial aid which would help fund their education. Some states allow these students to pay in-state tuition and offer state-sponsored aid, while other private institutions enroll them as international students, who in some cases have to pay thousands of dollars more than out-of-state students. There are definitely no undeserving DACA students out there receiving free rides to college, and all of the funding they receive is either through scholarships or (occasionally) from the state.
4. Ending DACA "prevents human suffering."
In his speech, Sessions said "Enforcing the law saves lives, protects communities and taxpayers, and prevents human suffering." There's a number of issues to unpack here, but since we already addressed the taxpaying aspect, we'll focus on the obscure human suffering comment. I can't see how sending young adults, who have built their lives here, back to countries that they hardly know "prevents human suffering." With 97 percent of DACA recipients enrolled in school or employed, it seems truly cruel to destroy the lives of people who have earned everything they have.
5. DACA hurts communities.
To further unpack the mess of a quote above, Sessions' claim that rescinding DACA will "protect communities" is totally unfounded. It is a misconception that Dreamers are criminals, and as unauthorized immigrants (people who apply for DACA) are much less likely to end up in prison, indicating lower levels of criminality. More important, to participate in DACA, applicants must pass a background check. If they were to be arrested, DACA could be taken away even without a conviction. Only 2,139 out of almost 800,000 DACA recipients have lost their permits because of criminal concerns. To put that into perspective, four times as many U.S.-born Americans are in prison.
Don't let Jeff Sessions or social media make you believe that Dreamers are hurting you in any way. They are Americans and this is where they belong. For tips on how to fight back, check out this link.
“Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt
