Imagine the images of 10,000 young people being deported every week. If President-elect Trump cancels the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as he promised during the presidential campaign, we could see just that.
For one thing, consider the ill will this approach will generate. In an age of camera phones and social media, images of law-abiding, gainfully employed young people afraid of deportation will make an unpleasant mark on the early days of a Trump administration.
Beyond publicity, it simply is not good for business. Doing away with DACA could cost 700,000 participants their jobs in a single day. The cost to our economy? About $433 billion in gross domestic product would be lost over a decade.
Established in 2012, DACA protects some people who came to this country before the age of 16 from deportation for a limited period of time. To qualify, a DACA applicant must be enrolled in or have finished high school or a GED program. They can have no felony or serious misdemeanor convictions, nor can they pose any threat to national security or public safety.
There currently are 800,000 young people protected by DACA. More than 700,000 of them are employed. If they lose their jobs, the economic impact would include:
– A rise in unemployment and the shuttering of a number of businesses. About 6 percent of DACA participants have gone into business for themselves, employing a large number of American citizens. If these businesses close, Americans go on the unemployment rolls, where they cannot pay taxes or contribute to economic activity.
– A dip in consumer spending. Almost 55 percent of DACA participants have bought a vehicle, and more than one in 10 – 12 percent – have bought their first home. If the economy loses them, it also loses their taxes, their banking and the payments on their mortgages and car notes.
DACA recipients may be the nurses who care for our loved ones, the teachers who educate our children or the engineers who build our roads and bridges. But they would be turned into hundreds of thousands of de facto criminals with the stroke of a pen, if the president-elect makes good on his campaign promise.
Another severe impact would fall on the already overworked Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If ICE has another 800,000 people on its detention lists, it will have less time to pursue dangerous individuals who are true criminals and a very real threat to public safety. However, expanding ICE to cope with detaining DACA recipients could cost billions of dollars and result in the creation of another huge federal bureaucracy – exactly what most people hope to avoid.
Fortunately, there’s a better way, something that, perhaps, we all can agree on without disrupting 800,000 productive lives or building another huge government agency.
Congress could work with President-elect Trump to replace DACA with a new program that would allow those who would qualify under DACA to remain protected from deportation and continue to work legally. One example is the recently proposed “BRIDGE Act.” This proposal, co-sponsored by both Republican and Democratic senators, would create a “provisional protected status” for those who would otherwise qualify for DACA. If signed into law, those who qualify would be able to continue working legally and contributing to the growth of our economy, and those who rely on them – employers, employees, and families – will have a measure of security to plan for the future.
There are advantages for the president-elect in going this route. For one, ICE could keep its focus on getting criminals off the streets and out of the country, without the need to add hundreds of new agents and billions of dollars in new spending. This approach also would save the new president from a nightmare of bad publicity. Legislation like the BRIDGE Act is a way for the new administration to grow our nation’s economy and strengthen its social fabric, while at the same time beginning the process of reconciliation with the millions of America’s immigrant community who felt battered by campaign rhetoric.
Let your senators and representatives know that they should support the BRIDGE Act. There is a better way than mass deportations. It’s a common-sense approach. It protects our economy and our society. It’s the American way.
Martin Lester is a Chattanooga attorney.