Companies to offer ‘Dreamers’ legal protection as Trump scraps DACA
PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s decision last Tuesday to scrap an Obama- era programme allowing young undocumented immigrants to work in the United States would fall most heavily on the hospitality, retail and construction industries, which together employ nearly half of the 1.3 million immigrants initially eligible for protection, according to an analysis by New American Economy, a national business coalition.
The announcement that the Trump administration would phase out the five-year- old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals ( DACA) programme jeopardises the livelihoods of tens of thousands of cooks, waiters, cashiers, salespeople and construction workers, the analysis found.
The impact will also be felt across across tech, healthcare and education – where many of the DACA- eligible immigrants who are college educated work as software developers, nurses and teachers. Of the DACA- eligible immigrants over 21 years old, 12 per cent have bachelor’s degrees, three per cent have advanced degrees, 84 per cent have completed high school and some college, and two per cent did not graduate from high school.
New American Economy, a national business coalition founded by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to advocate for immigration reform, conducted the analysis for The Washington Post using Census data.
“People have a very specific image in their mind of who an undocumented immigrant is, but the reality is that Dreamers, who are American in every sense of the word except the legal one, are working in every industry in every community,” said Jeremy Robbins, executive director of New American Economy.
In the hours following the Trump administration’s announcement, some executives reassured employees who are DACA recipients, saying the companies had no plans to fire them and would offer legal protection.
One multi-national corporation that declined to be named said it offered employees the opportunity to be transferred to other countries – but its workers wanted to stay in the United States where they have made a life for themselves and their families.
The Trump administration said it would wait six months to begin enforcing Tuesday’s action to give Congress time to agree on a legislative solution. Current DACA recipients would not be impacted until Mar 5, 2018, the White House said.
“I am not going to just cut DACA off, but rather provide a window of opportunity for Congress to finally act,” Trump said in a statement last Tuesday.
Trump said he decided to end DACA after 10 states threatened to sue the federal government over the constitutionality of the programme. He said that he would gradually wind down the programme over a period of two years.
“While new applications for work permits will not be accepted, all existing work permits will be honored until their date of expiration up to two full years from today,” Trump said. “Furthermore, applications already in the pipeline will be processed, as will renewal applications for those facing near-term expiration.”
Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer of Microsoft, said Tuesday that while he believes Congress should now prioritise DACA over tax reform, Microsoft should be prepared for the possibility that Congress will not act in the next six months.
He said Microsoft is committed to the 39 known Dreamers employees of the company and would “vigorously defend” their legal rights. “If Congress fails to act, our company will exercise its legal rights properly to help protect our employees,” Smith wrote in a new blog post. “If the government seeks to deport any one of them, we will provide and pay for their legal counsel. We will also file an amicus brief and explore whether we can directly intervene in any such case. In short, if Dreamers who are our employees are in court, we will be by their side.” — WPBloomberg