Business reaction:
In a letter to the administration, more than 100 business leaders criticize Trump’s decision.
If Karina Macias is deported from the U.S. and forced to leave her Silicon Valley job, there are always other countries where she can make a life for herself.
“That’s the beauty of tech,” the 22-year-old East Palo Alto resident said. “It’s so global and connected, and there are definitely opportunities elsewhere.”
Losing highly skilled immigrants like Macias is exactly what business executives said they feared when the Trump administration announced its plan Tuesday to roll back a program that protects immigrants who entered the U.S. as children from deportation.
The elimination of the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a symbolic blow to the many supporters of immigration in the tech industry, who include company founders born overseas and CEOs who employ many foreign-born workers.
More than a hundred business leaders blasted Trump’s decision in a letter to the administration. Among the signers were Apple CEO Tim Cook, who said 250 of his employees are DACA recipients, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who said at least 39 of his employees have benefited from the program, whose beneficiaries are sometimes known as “Dreamers.” They called on Congress to pass legislation that would continue to protect DACA recipients.
“As an employer, we appreciate that Dreamers add to the competitiveness and economic success of our company and the entire nation’s business community,” Nadella said in a statement. “In short, urgent DACA legislation is both an economic imperative and a humanitarian necessity.”
The CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs also voiced their opposition to the administration’s decision.
“Immigration is a complex issue but I wouldn’t deport a kid who was brought here and only knows America,” Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said in a tweet. “Congress must address.”
The program was instituted by the Obama administration in 2012. It offered protection from deportation and a twoyear work permit for those 31 or younger who had come to the country before age 16, had lived in the U.S continuously since 2007 and were in school or had graduated. With Tuesday’s announcement, the beneficiaries will be at risk of deportation unless Congress legalizes their status.
Silicon Valley has long been a loud voice in the immigration debate as it pushes to expand visa programs for highly skilled foreigners. This move comes as the Trump administration attempts to curtail the H-1B visa program, which allows high-skilled immigrants to live and work in the U.S. for up to six years.
The prevailing argument for retaining and expanding such visa programs is that the industry is already short of technical talent. In 2012, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology warned the U.S. could have a shortfall of nearly 1 million technical professionals within 10 years.
But other studies, such as those from IEEE-USA, an association of technical professionals, have argued that any such shortage is a myth.
According to a 2015 report by the Institute for Immigration, Globalization and Education at UCLA, about 28 percent of unauthorized immigrant students were majors in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.
In announcing the administration’s decision Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said this move will fulfill the Trump administration’s promise to protect American jobs.
But Daniel Costa, a researcher for the Economic Policy Institute, said that while this decision might in theory free up jobs at big companies, it will force DACA recipients into less regulated sectors such as the service industry, where wages are much lower.
“People who have DACA are still the lowest priority for deportation, and probably have more ties to the U.S. than other unauthorized immigrants, which means they are unlikely to leave anytime soon unless they get removed,” he said. Those who don’t leave voluntarily, he said, “will be forced to work for lower wages, or without authorizations.”
Macias, whose family brought her to the U.S. from Mexico when she was 3 and now works for a major biotech company in East Palo Alto, is confident that something will eventually work out for her.
But the thought of trying to break into the workforce in another country comes with daunting questions: What is the tech industry like there? What is the corporate culture like? What language will the interviews be in? Should she translate her resume?
And though she can likely find opportunities in other countries, that doesn’t mean she wants to leave the U.S., the only country she has ever called home.
“There’s always a sliver of hope that Congress will do something within the next six months,” she said. “There are a lot of people that are really hopeful that something is going to happen — but at the same time, I’m trying not to get my hopes up too high.”