DACA fallout has people dreaming of Canada

This editorial ran in the Halifax Chronicle Herald:

Another week, another political firestorm south of the border. U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement his administration would be phasing out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program instantly ignited protests and fierce debates over immigration policy in that country. Depending what happens over the next six months, DACA’s end could well prompt new waves of migrants — young, educated and law-abiding — to decide to head to Canada, by the thousands, to seek asylum.

Former U.S. president Barack Obama’s DACA program, brought in five years ago, was never meant to be a permanent solution. Since 2001, Congress had attempted and failed on a number of occasions to pass a law giving so-called Dreamers — children of undocumented immigrants who’d grown up in America — a viable path to citizenship or permanent residency. So, in 2012, Obama humanely issued an executive order allowing those young people a short-term way — twoyear permits — to legally work and study in the place they knew as home. DACA’s constitutionality has been fiercely debated ever since. Republicans themselves are fractured on whether they’d support a new DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act. When the Trump administration indicated temporary protected status for post-2010 earthquake Haitian migrants might be lifted this summer, thousands flooded across the Quebec border. With the future now unclear for up to 800,000 DACA registrants, Canada should prepare for the possibility Congress won’t act and more could flee north.