Congress’s border deal talks might be ongoing, but in one essential area, legislators are moving backward: The ‘dreamers,’ undocumented immigrants who came to this country as children, have been left out of the conversation.
Since the first version of the Dream Act was introduced almost a quarter-century ago, support for the young people who are Americans in every sense but the legal one has been a bright spot of bipartisanship amid acrimony. Almost every immigration compromise that legislators have contemplated has included a pathway to citizenship for these 3 million or so individuals–including a 2022 framework constructed by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who was a Democrat at the time. Yet today, as lawmakers scramble to secure the votes for a package focused on security and asylum, the issue has scarcely been mentioned. Meanwhile, trouble in the courts leaves the fate of the dreamers as uncertain as ever.
President Barack Obama’s program to help the dreamers, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), was supposed to be a temporary solution to a problem Congress would, eventually, solve. By granting work authorization and immunity from deportation to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors, met certain educational requirements and presented no threat to public safety, the executive action offered a cohort of motivated noncitizens the opportunity to grow freely in the only nation they’ve known.
The idea was that legislators would transform this reprieve into a road for dreamers to become citizens. Instead, Congress did nothing. The half a million or so current DACA recipients must renew their status every two years, while approximately 2.5 million dreamers brought here too late to qualify for DACA remain at constant risk of being sent “back” to somewhere they’ve scarcely lived. There are also 100,000 more dreamers who do qualify for DACA but whose applications went unprocessed thanks to covid-era delays. Now, they’re at risk of deportation, too.
The issue isn’t only that this situation is unjust, though it is. The issue is also that leaving the dreamers to languish is a tremendous waste–of talent, enterprise and devotion to the United States.
Why is Congress forgetting the dreamers this time around? However poisoned against immigrants the political conversation may have become, lawmakers from conservative districts shouldn’t be afraid to vote for a position that the vast majority of Americans support. Congress has plenty of options before it: Some version of the Dream Act would be the best of them. Such a policy would allow everyone who came here as a child the ability, by meeting educational, workforce or military requirements, to apply for permanent legal status–starting, most likely, with a green card.
But there are more modest alternatives, if this is too much for legislators to countenance. At the very least, Congress could codify DACA so that the current recipients can keep their status–can stay, as advocates refer to it, “DACA-mented” forever without worry. Even the federal judge who struck down DACA in September recognized that these young immigrants have come to rely on the program. The country also relies on them.
* Guest editorial by The Washington Post.
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