Once again, Democrats are pushing for permanent lawful status for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients. On June 15, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on the recurring American Dream and Promise Act which seeks to give citizenship to millions of illegal aliens who are currently protected by DACA, or a program known as temporary protected status (TPS), as well as anyone who came to the U.S. as a minor, regardless of whether they are currently enrolled in DACA.
The hearing comes on the ninth anniversary of DACA and now more than ever, it is important to highlight not only why DACA should be eliminated altogether but also why providing an amnesty to these recipients is a horrible idea.
(1) DACA is unconstitutional.
Created by President Obama in 2012, DACA essentially rewrote immigration law without congressional consent. According to Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress has exclusive control over creating immigration policy. President Obama himself admitted as much. He noted one year before the program’s creation, “With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed…for me to simply, through executive order, ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as President.”
(2) The narrative behind DACA is overwhelmingly false.
Supporters often purport beneficiaries as “children” brought here by their parents in order to paint them in a sympathetic light. This is inaccurate for a large majority of recipients. As of 2020, the average DACA recipient is now 27 years old, and out of 640,760 recipients, only 40 are under the age of 16. Additionally, many applicants were not brought here as young children but rather entered by themselves as older teenagers.
Furthermore, DACA advocates traditionally depict beneficiaries as more accomplished than they really are. Less than half of all DACA recipients have a high school education despite it being a requirement for the program, and only 24 percent can be categorized as functionally literate in English.
(3) It encourages more illegal immigration.
It is no surprise that rewarding lawless behavior attracts more lawlessness. After enacting DACA in 2012, illegal immigrants flooded across our border. Perhaps the greatest previous example of this is the Reagan Amnesty of 1986 which contributed to one of the greatest waves of illegal immigration in U.S. history. In the decade following the Reagan Amnesty, the illegal alien population in the United States nearly tripled.
During a time of record-breaking illegal immigration caused by the Biden administration’s irrational policies, it is absurd to create even more incentives for foreign nationals to enter our country illegally. Apprehensions for this fiscal year are already nearing one million, and with four more months to go, we will far surpass the border crisis of 2019, and there is no end in sight. Any type of amnesty will undoubtedly worsen an already historic crisis and set a precedent of lawlessness for this country.