America has room for the dreamers
In a saner time, in a country whose politics were less poisoned, there would be no talk of punishing young immigrants like Sofia De La Vega, Luis Roberto Ursua Briceno and Anayancy Ramos. No one would be threatening to derail their ambitions, stifle their educations, throttle their dreams.
But this is the country we live in, with a presidentelect who may be preparing to do that, and perhaps worse. When Donald Trump takes office in January, he will have the power to upend the lives of more than 700,000 young people who have grown up in the United States after being brought here illegally as children. And he has said many times that this is exactly what he will do.
Known as Dreamers, these young people were given temporary protection from deportation and permission to work by President Obama. They are the beneficiaries of a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the one sweeping immigration reform that Mr. Obama achieved in eight otherwise frustrating years.
Should Mr. Trump decide to send a deportation force after them, they could end up being expelled from the only country they know. It would be a relatively simple task: The Department of Homeland Security already has their names, addresses and other personal information and their written acknowledgment that they are living in the country without permission.
DACA was never a form of legalization, which only Congress can grant. It was not an executive order. It was a decision by Homeland Security, at Mr. Obama’s direction, to make dangerous criminals and security threats the main priority and to grant this group of young immigrants — who are culturally Americans, citizens in all but the paperwork — a reprieve from deportation, renewable after two years. This program is entirely revocable, and revoking it immediately is what Mr. Trump has promised.
The result would be potentially devastating to over 700,000 individual lives, not to mention the larger economy. One inescapable fact of living outside the law is the heavy ceiling that it places on a young person’s ambition. Without DACA, these young people would graduate from high school and have almost no way to pursue more education or careers. Their potential is vast, but their paths would become narrow. Living largely in the shadows, they are part of a tragic cohort: quiet casualties of America’s great failure to achieve immigration reform.
The Times has asked Dreamers to send in their stories and videos. They include Mr. Ursua Briceno, who is studying biochemistry at Arizona State University; Ms. Ramos, a biochemistry and biology major at Eastern Connecticut State University; and Ms. De La Vega, from Florida.
“When I first heard President Obama’s speech on DACA years ago, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel,” Ms. De La Vega wrote. “DACA granted me everything to live a normal life and, for once, belong. It was temporary, but it felt real.” She is pursing an associate’s degree to become a paramedic. “I have a brother that drowned when I was younger. In my home country, you can forget that police and ambulance will arrive or even bother to come if you call. My only hope is to save as many lives as I can, and to die risking my life for another.”
The decision to expand the opportunities of Ms. De La Vega and the others should be obvious. There are 11 million immigrants living here outside the law, a vast majority of them strivers, like these Dreamers. Congress has tried for years to fix the outdated laws that block their paths to legal status, but bipartisan bills have been killed time and again in Congress by mostly Republican opposition.
Lacking real immigration reform, DACA is one way to honor a vision of the country, and of the positive contributions of immigrants, that has been badly degraded in this grotesque election year. The program should be continued, as a down payment on the American future. Ending it would be a dreadfully shortsighted, self-harming way to start a presidency.