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A first step to make young illegal immigrants welcome
Aug 25th 2012 | ATLANTA AND CHICAGO | from the print edition The Economist http://www.economist.com/node/21560900
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LISA OHMAN was brought up in Macon, Georgia, and speaks with a gentle southern accent. She graduated from Wesleyan College, a women’s university in Macon, with majors in biology and chemistry, and has just taken her medical-school entrance exams. Teresa Lee was brought up in Chicago; at the tender age of 17 she played piano with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and she is now working towards a doctorate in music. Yet both are illegal immigrants. Ms Ohman’s parents brought her to America from Sweden when she was ten; Ms Lee’s brought her from Brazil when she was two.
Both faced the prospect of being forced to return to the countries they were born in—their “native” countries in name only. But on August 15th they and more than 1m others like them were granted a small but welcome measure of relief. From that day, immigrants under the age of 30 without criminal records who came to America before they were 16 years old, have lived in America continuously for at least five years, are enrolled in or have graduated from school or university or have been honourably discharged from military service, were allowed to apply for “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA).
DACA confers neither citizenship nor permanent-resident status. It is instead, in essence, a promise from the government not to deport an immigrant for two years. Applying costs $465, and acceptance can be renewed every two years. Successful applicants will receive a Social Security number and will be eligible to work legally. This means their wages will be taxed; but, because they are not citizens, they will not be eligible to receive the benefits that their taxes help to finance.
DACA has its roots in the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a bill first introduced in Congress 11 years ago. The DREAM Act would have conferred permanent-resident status on roughly the same set of immigrants that DACA covers. It died in committee in 2002. Four years later it passed the Senate as part of the far more expansive Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, but died in conference. In 2010 it narrowly passed the House, but was blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate. Hence DACA, which Barack Obama’s homeland-security secretary delicately termed an “exercise of prosecutorial discretion”.
The right cried foul. House Republicans proposed measures to stop Mr Obama’s order from being enforced. Twenty Republican senators (including one supporter of the 2006 immigration bill and two backers of the 2001 DREAM Act) wrote to the president, accusing him of “an inappropriate use of executive power” and worrying about the effects of unleashing “an untold number of illegal immigrants” into the workforce when jobs are scarce.
In fact, many eligible immigrants are already in the workforce. Others are students. Doubtless there are some budding entrepreneurs as well: as Mitt Romney acknowledges, legal immigrants are disproportionately represented among patent applicants, and among those who start and head successful tech companies. And their numbers are not quite untold: the Obama administration estimated there were 800,000 eligible applicants, though there may be as many as 1.7m.
Not all will apply, of course. Some still worry about the risk of exposure: the DACA forms warn that applications may be denied for any reason, and the government’s decision is final. Yet the enthusiasm on display last week suggests that DACA may prove immensely popular. As Ms Lee explained at a rally in Chicago on August 15th, it is “a chance for us…to give back to the country we love and call home.”
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