FWD.us, the mass immigration advocacy group funded by tech industry titans, is alarmed and they think you should be too. Tuesday’s announcement that the Trump administration is phasing out President Obama’s unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program could mean that beneficiaries will begin losing their work authorization come March 2018.
If you thought the economic fallout from the collapse of the housing market in 2008 was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Pulling the plug on DACA could result in a loss to the U.S. economy of $460 billion over the next decade, FWD.us warns in an email. For those who may not know how to divide by 10, that works out to $46 billion a year in an $18.57 trillion economy – or less than two-thirds of Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth (the primary financier of FWD.us). For those who may not own a calculator, the claimed loss of $46 billion of economic output amounts to one-quarter of 1 percent of current GDP.
If that’s not bad enough, it might be time to dump all your Microsoft stock. If DACA beneficiaries were to lose their authorization to work in the United States, that giant of the tech industry stands to lose .00063 percent of its U.S. labor force over the next two and half years – a blow from which they may never recover. Microsoft employs 39 DACA beneficiaries…out of a total U.S. labor force of 61,030.
Microsoft president Brad Smith will not take that lying down. “There is nothing that we will be pushing on more strongly for Congress to act on,” Smith said in an interview with NPR. “We put a stake in the ground. We care about a tax reform bill. The entire business community cares about a tax reform. And yet it is very clear today a tax reform bill needs to be set aside until the DREAMers are taken care of. They have a deadline that expires in six months. Tax reform can wait.”
Besides the comically small impact that the phase-out of DACA could have on the economy and on their businesses, the claims are not even true. These claims rest on the patently absurd assumption that there are no other people around to perform the work currently being done by DACA recipients; that nowhere in this vast nation are there 39 other qualified people that Microsoft could hire.
In fact, despite a tightening labor market, there are vast reservoirs of untapped human potential. Millennials, the demographic with whom DACA recipients directly compete, still lag far behind nation as a whole in employment and labor force participation. This is particularly true for women and minorities. A recent report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research finds that “Unemployment rates were higher in 2016 than in 2007 for many subgroups of women, particularly for women aged 25 to 34 in each of the racial and ethnic groups.”
The sky will not fall, the economy will not collapse, and Microsoft will not be forced into bankruptcy by the phase-out of DACA. The president has given the advocates for DACA recipients six months to agree to direct actions that will truly secure our borders, our communities, and American jobs against future illegal immigration in exchange for some consideration for this subset of illegal aliens. Insulting the intelligence of the American people is not a good start.