An unhappy time for America’s “Dreamers”
They call them the “Dreamers” – the undocumented children who entered America illegally with their parents and, through no fault of their own, face growing up in a land where they can never become legal residents. They acquired their name after the Dream Act, a law first proposed in 2001 that was set to give them a path to citizenship, but which repeatedly failed to get through Congress. However, in 2012 Barack Obama came to their rescue by enacting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) programme. Nearly 800,000 Dreamers now live and work openly in the US thanks to Daca. But for how much longer, asked the Los Angeles Times. Last week, in “an act of pure cruelty”, Donald Trump said that he was rescinding Daca. All those people, who registered their details in good faith, are now at risk of being deported to lands they barely know.
Relax, said Rich Lowry in the New York Post. Nobody is being deported any time soon. Trump has simply announced that the system will be phased out in six months’ time, and has challenged Congress to replace it. Before he introduced Daca by executive order (as what he called a “temporary stopgap”), Obama himself admitted that he didn’t have the constitutional authority to grant an amnesty to nearly a million illegal immigrants. Trump has rightly returned the issue to Congress, and given lawmakers another chance to put a new regime on a sound legal footing.
Since when has Trump given “a fig for constitutional niceties”, asked Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. There is a theme to his presidency, but it’s not “respect for the rule of law”; it’s the stirring up of racial resentments. Still, given that the Supreme Court would most likely have struck down Daca at some point, Congress might as well get on with fixing it. And fortunately, there’s clear room for a compromise deal between Republicans and Democrats: “stronger border enforcement (though not the surpassingly silly wall) in return for a new version of Daca”. Don’t count on it, said Jennifer Rubin in the same paper. The GOP caucus is filled with hardliners who erroneously claim that Dreamers are stealing US jobs. How likely is it that Republicans, who can’t even pass bills high on their agenda, such as repealing Obamacare, are about to write into law the immigration policy of a president they detested?