DACA’s death could be opportunity

The Trump administration doesn’t want to be unkind to the 800,000 children and young adults it threatens to kick out of the country next March, the story goes, but the law and the Constitution must be respected, and so the fiveyear-old policy of licensing underage illegal immigrants to stay in the United States had to be rescinded.

But the Trump administration is unsure what the policy should be. People registered under DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — can carry on for another six months. During that time, U.S. President Donald Trump is inviting Congress to find a solution to the childhood-arrivals question.

A strong and decisive president would craft a new immigration law for the U.S. through a process that would ensure support in Congress.

That law, enjoying support in the country, would be enforced; people sneaking into the country in defiance of that law would be removed.

People such as the beneficiaries of DACA would be allowed to stay on the basis that they are blameless Americans, in fact if not in law, who have no other homeland.

Official registration with the government has given them something more than squatters' rights to live and work in America.

But reforming U.S. immigration law is hard work. Winning congressional support for any particular set of reforms is harder still. The easy thing is to cancel the former president's policy, win some cheap applause from the antiimmigrant crowd and let someone else do the hard thinking and the heavy lifting.

If that throws the lives of 800,000 young Americans and their employers and schools into turmoil, well, that's just too bad. Those young Americans and their friends were never going to vote Republican anyway.

It seems highly unlikely that Congress, which was unable to figure out a replacement for the Obama administration's healthinsurance policy, will have better luck with immigration policy, even with a six-month deadline.

The country will arrive at the March 5 deadline in pretty much the same position as today’s. Procrastination is this administration’s preferred option today, as it was for the Obama administration five years ago.

Procrastination may well prove to be as good a solution in March as it is in September.

It’s a poor solution for the people whose lives are in play, but they scarcely matter in the Washington swamp.

Canada has always done well out of turmoil in other lands by recruiting the most highly educated, most keenly motivated of the distressed multitudes to come and settle here.

So we did with the Hungarian refugees and the Uganda Asians and the Vietnamese boat people. So we can do once again with the young Americans who are now under notice that the administrative shelter of DACA will be rescinded.

Most of those young Americans live in Texas and California. They may not yet be thinking of relocating to these latitudes.

But some well-targeted publicity about the delights of life in Canada might find a ready audience among upwardly mobile people whose future in America is suddenly clouded.

Over the course of the next six months, the American public will learn the individual stories of DACA beneficiaries.

They will learn specifically the harm and the injustice that will be inflicted by the threatened deportation.

Further procrastination is likely as the political pressure builds. Canada should make its move soon, while the anxiety is at its height.