President Donald Trump has decided to end the Obama-era program under which young illegal immigrants who came to the country as children could avoid deportation and receive work permits, Politico reported Sunday.
The report comes one day before ten states were set to sue the federal government over the constitutionality of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
The president is expected to announce the end of the DACA program Tuesday, reasoning that President Obama overstepped his constitutional bounds by changing immigration law via executive order. But according to a White House source, the change will not be implemented for six months, giving Congress an opportunity to pass some sort of amnesty legislation to protect DACA recipients.
Republican leadership in the House and Senate have said they support passing a form of DACA, although a packed legislative calendar and conservative immigration hardliners who oppose any type of amnesty for illegal immigrants will make that difficult.
The program also enjoys wide corporate support, as businesses have benefitted from the ability to hire DACA recipients. A study from the Center for American Progress and FWD.us released last week estimates that 700,000 illegal immigrants are currently employed under DACA work permits.
“The findings reinforce the devastating consequences a repeal would inflict on DACA recipients and their families,” the report argues, “as well as the dire, far-reaching consequences to communities across the country, to employers, and to the American economy across all regions and sectors.”
But DACA’s critics argue that this supply of cheap labor has depressed wages and stifled economic advancement for America’s working poor. Robert Rector, a senior research fellow focused on immigration and poverty policy at the Heritage Foundation, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that ending DACA would be a key component in an economic strategy to raise working-class living standards.
“It would certainly cause wages to go up for the remaining workers, wouldn’t it?” Rector said. “The fact of the matter is that the right doesn’t like to acknowledge that the wage rate for very low-skill native workers, those without a high school degree, has been static for decades. And I think that’s denying the American dream to those individuals.”
“Would businessmen be inconvenienced?” Rector added. “Yeah. You can hear my heart break.”
Were President Trump to end DACA, permits for its current recipients would not likely expire at once. Instead, the government could simply stop renewing the two-year permits, with an average of 1,000 expiring each day, putting major pressure on Congress to pass legislation to address DACA.
As a result, some have suggested that President Trump, who promised to end DACA during the campaign in January said that those who benefit from DACA “shouldn’t be worried” because he has a “big heart,” is making a political play by putting the program on the chopping block with an eye perhaps to a compromise immigration bill that reinstates DACA while also funding his signature border wall.
