Deportation, legality and five myths about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
David Bier says despite misgivings about the protections provided, it was wrong to just let the chips fall where they may for the program.
The Trump administration’ s move to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DA CA, has created an uncertain future for the 800,000 young unauthorized immigrants who had been granted protection from deportation and permission to work legally. A six-month delay provides a chance for Congress to save the 2012 program. But if we’ re going to debate the merits of DA CA, we should know what we’ re talking about. Here are some common myths.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Good lat te, R-Va ., is among those who support ending DA CA because it has“encouraged more illegal immigration and contributed to the surge of sand families seeking to enter the U.S. illegal ly .” Statements like this bet ray a misunderstanding of who is eligible for deportation relief under the program. DA CA applies only to immigrants who entered before their 16 th birthday sand who have lived in the country continuously since at least June 15, 2007 — more than a decade ago. No one entering now can apply.
Perhaps the chairman thinks that children coming to the border are confused on this point. But the facts don’ t support that view either. To begin with, the timing is wrong. According to data from the Border Patrol, the increase in migrant children in 2012— the year President Ba rack O ba ma announced DA CA —occurred entirely in the months before the president announced the policy. The rate of increase also remained the same in 2013 as it was in 2012. Even then, the total number of juveniles attempting to cross the border—unaccompanied and otherwise — never returned to the pre-recession levels of the mid-2000s.
Another problem with the theory is that although theDA CA beneficiaries are of Mexican origin, the increase in children crossing the border stems from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. These countries share one common trait: much higher than average levels of violence than anywhere else in North America. A careful study of this economist Michael Clemens found that more than anything else, a rise in homicides between 2007 and 2009 set off a chain of events that led to the rise of child migration.
Regardless, overall illegal immigration is far below where it was before the United States’ last legalization program, in 1986, when each border agent caught more than 40 border crossers per month. Last year, it was fewer than two per month. DA CA had no effect on this trend.
In announcing the Trump administration’ s decision this past week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that DA CA“denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to goto illegal aliens .” This myth even has a name in economics: the lump of labor fallacy. It supposes that the number of jobs in the economy is fixed, and that any increase in workers results in unemployment. Yet this notion is easily disproved. From 1970 to 2017, the U.S. labor force doubled. Rather than ending up with a 50 percent unemployment rate, U.S. employment doubled.
If adding workers made the economy poor er, we might expect that people would try to“free” themselves from competition by moving to a desolate mountain and making everything for themselves. That no one does so is an admission that competition is actually good. We depend on other CA recipients included, to buy the products and services we produce. That’ s one reason earlier efforts to restrict immigration did not produce any wage gains.
Sessions also argued that CA“protects taxpayers .” But the opposite is true. According to the National Academy of Sciences( N AS ), first-generation immigrants who enter the United States as children( including all DA CA recipients) pay, on average, more in taxes over their life times than they receive in benefits, regardless of their education level. DA CA recipient send up contributing more than the average, because they are not eligible for anyfederalmeans-tested welfare: cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid,health-caretaxcredits oranythingelse.
They also are better educated than the average immigrant. Applicants must have at least a high school degree to enter the program. An additional 36 percent of DA CA recipients who are older than 25 have a bachelor’ s degree, and an additional 32 percent are pursuing a bachelor’ s degree. The N AS finds that among recent immigrants who entered as children, those with a high school degree are positive to the government, to the tune of $60,000 to $153,000 in net present value, meaning it’ s like each immigrant cutting a check for that amount at the door. For those with a bachelor’ s degree, it’ s a net positive of $160,000 to $316,000. Each DACA permit canceled is like burning tens of thousands of dollars in Washington.
DACA repeal, the attorney general further claimed ,“saves lives” and“protects communities .” He implied that DACA “put our nation at risk of crime .” But DA CA participants are not criminals. Unauthorized immigrants-the applicant pool for DA CA-are much less likely to end up in prison, indicating lower levels of criminality. More important, to participate in DA CA, applicants must pass a background check. They have to live here without committing a serious offense. If they are arrested, DA CA can be taken away even without a conviction.
Only 2,139 out of almost 800,000 DA CA recipients have lost their permits because of criminal or public safety concerns — that’s just a quarter of 1 percent. Four times as many U.S.- born Americans are in prison. About 35 times as many Americans have ended up behind bars at some point before age 34.
O ba ma criticized the DA CA move this past week as “a political decision” that was“not required legally .” But legal issues certainly factored intoadministration’s calculation. The timing coincided with a deadline that several states imposed on the administration, stating that if the president did not wind down DACA by Sept. 5, they would sue. If President Trump wanted to end DA CA for political reasons, he could have done soon his first day in office.
O ba ma should know that defending DA CA legally could be difficult. After all, when he attempted to implement a similar but much broader program in 2015 for undocumented parents of U.S. citizens, courts shut him down. Obama implemented DACA without going through Congress, and although some legal scholars dispute whether it faces the same legal issues as the 2015 program, the Trump administration would have confronted aof defeat had it had chosen to defend DA CA in court.
The correct response, however — for economic reasons and security reasons, but above all for moral reasons—would have been to actively push for Congress to en act the program, not to announce its demise and leave the chips to fall wheret hey may.