Pathway to citizenship made possible through Biden bill
President Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20 represented a dramatic shift in our nation’s immigration policy.
Biden immediately rescinded the Trump administration’s top three immigration obsessions: Biden stopped construction of a border wall; he halted deportations for 100 days and fully embraced DACA; he also returned us to pre-trump asylum policies which means asylum seekers from Central America no longer are forced to “Wait in Mexico” before pleading their case with a U.S. Judge.
There are hundreds of thousands of people who benefit from these policy change. Here in Memphis, thousands breathed a sigh of relief on inauguration day, but that relief may be brief and tenuous if Congress does not enact meaningful comprehensive immigration reform.
DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, has never been enacted by Congress and shows us the shortcomings of executive action.
DACA emerged after a Senate filibuster prevented the passage of the 2010 “Dream Act,” which would have offered kids with clean police records the opportunity to apply for residency and eventually earn their citizenship.
DACA grants “deferred action” for kids who came to the US before turning 16, arrived prior to June 15, 2007, and would graduate from high school and demonstrate a commitment to the USA via continued education, work or military service. DACA kids are not U.S. citizens: generally, they arrived in the USA with their parents who came here to escape gang violence, repressive poverty, and economic stagnation in their nations of origin.
We need immigration reform now
More than 826,000 kids have taken advantage of DACA, and in doing so, they’ve woven themselves into the fabric of our society and our city. More than 7,500 DACA recipients call Tennessee home. Since its enactment nearly nine years ago, many of the DACA “kids” have become young adults.
From a small sampling of our friends, students, and clients here in Memphis, we know them as a professional artist, activists, a middle school teacher, a nursing student, mothers, a father, an Autozoner, and a liaison between Memphis’ latinx community and its government. Over the past nearly 9 years, DACA has done what it was intended to do. It has given young people an opportunity to pursue their dreams, to build lives, to succeed, to fail, and simply to be people. They have worked to make Memphis a better place and a better community.
While building a better Memphis community with us, however, the lives of DACA recipients have also been constantly wrapped in uncertainty.
The road was never easy
When President Trump was elected, he sought to undue DACA despite the fact that such a move would have wrecked the lives of recipients, as well as the millions of people who love and support these youngsters.
Fortunately, Mr. Trump was uninterested in the mechanisms and workings of government and his effort to overturn the Obama executive action died at the Supreme Court when his administration failed to offer the faintest of rationales for its actions.
We were forced to listen to former President Trump’s racist rhetoric for five long years about immigration: The fact is, he got it wrong and the people he employed—particularly the anti-immigration Senior Advisor Stephen Miller—floated a dark, deeply cynical vision of our history and our culture.
For the sake of our city and society, to create more social and economic harmony here and across the land, Congress must pass a bill that allows DACA kids the opportunity to earn citizenship here in the United States, the only nation that most of these kids know. President Biden understands this, which is why he introduced the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021.
Ten years ago, the Senate rejected the “Dream Act” and the immigration debate was hijacked by hard-liners on the far right.
We can do better as a society and it’s in all of our interests, no matter our political affiliation, to support, through congressional action, the regularization of immigration status for our friends and neighbors.
As our fellow Memphians show, the contributions of immigrants are clear and articulable. We must dial down the disingenuous noise of immigration apocalypse and look to the reality of our history: We are, and always will be, a nation and city of immigrants.
Michael J. Larosa teaches history of Latin America at Rhodes College.
Bryce W. Ashby is an attorney with Donati Law in Memphis and a former Board Chair of Latino Memphis.