The end of DACA?

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The end of DACA?

Postby cmsellers » Sun Sep 03, 2017 1:16 am

For those of you who don't know: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), is a program which grants semi-legal status to illegal immigrants who came to the country as children. Congress tried to pass the DREAM Act granting a pathway to citizenship for these people several times, and each time it foundered. After several Republican supporters withdrew their support, Obama responded by creating DACA which allows these immigrants to get work permits though not permanent residency.

Obama later created a similar program: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), which would have granted legal status for parents of American citizens and green card holders. The media almost universally referred to this program, inaccurately, as a program which would have extended the protections of DACA to the parents of DREAMers. DAPA was challenged, overturned by the Fifth Circuit, and because of the death of Scalia affirmed by a deadlocked court. It's making its way back to the Supreme Court and with Gorsuch on the Court it will inevitably be overturned.

Trump promised to end DACA as well when he became president, and so far hasn't. I ran across this article, which purports to explain why, but it also gets wrong what DAPA was, and if you cannot get such a simple thing right I'm a bit skeptical of your competence as a journalist.

Still, the gist of the article is that Trump likes the DREAMers, and has therefore refused to end DACA. Since 80% of Republicans and 75% of Trump voters support DACA, it's also a smart political stance, which suggests it's unlikely to last. And to that end, several state Attorney Generals—likely with the collusion of the evil Keebler elf—have given him a deadline of 5 September: end DACA or we end it for you.

To me, it seems like DACA is on weaker legal footing than DAPA was, though for obvious reasons it's more politically popular. DAPA targeted a class of people who would be eligible for visas and green cards if they were in their own country; DACA carves out a new class for special protections. Since Kennedy tends to make decisions based on emotion, it's possible that DAPA will be overturned but DACA upheld, but I wouldn't bet on it.

As for the legality of DAPA, while it's obviously going to be overturned, my impression is that the president probably can grant stays of deportation to anyone he chooses, since he sets priorities for law enforcement, but it's not clear to me how he can grant work permits not authorized by Congress. However as I understand it the court's conservatives say he can do neither while the court's liberals say he can do both. I've asked avi in Discord to explain the liberal position, which I suspect will be more grounded in the law than the conservative one.

The point is that at this point, Trump has to choose between doing what his gut (and the polls) tell him is the right thing to do, and being seen as soft on immigration. No prizes for guessing which one I think he'll do, though he may surprise me. Trump apparently doesn't like being told what to do and may defend DACA out of sheer perversity.
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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby DamianaRaven » Sun Sep 03, 2017 2:06 am

This totally sucks! Children who are brought here by their parents should NEVER be punished as "illegal immigrants," any more than you'd arrest a 9-year-old and throw him in juvie with a criminal record because his mother brought him along for a drug deal.

A great way to deal with these "Dreamers" would be to offer them automatic permanent residency (or even *gasp* citizenship) if they successfully serve a term in the military. That way, America can benefit enormously from these "moochers" without exploiting their precarious legal status for an easy source of cheap, rights-free labor. On the other side, the Dreamers benefit enormously from having a clearly defined path to citizenship that doesn't amount to "go back to Mexico and keep sending us huge sums of money until someone calls you." Everybody wins... except, of course, those patriots who insist "this is MY country and they need to get out because it's rightfully all MINE and they can't have it."
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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby cmsellers » Wed Sep 06, 2017 1:35 am

So Trump has said that he'll end DACA in March and urged Congress to fix the problem. As this article notes, majorities in both houses of Congress support the DREAM Act. Of course given that it failed in 2009 when Democrats controlled Congress, I can't imagine it passing. Republicans offered to pass the DREAM Act if Democrats fund Trump's border wall, which, why the fuck would they agree to that? You're offering to support something that the majority of the population and of Congress supports in exchange for a white elephant that fires up your base and makes no one else happy.

I imagine the issue with just passing it is the Hastert Rule, which says that a majority of the majority have to support a bill for it to be brought to a vote. This is an asymmetrical rule only enforced when Republicans control the House and then only when it suits them; both McConnell and Ryan have previously ruled out working with the Democrats even though the Senate has no similar rule.

This is actually a smart political move on Trump's part, assuming his goal is to look out for number one. The people who support DACA mostly already oppose him, and it keeps him from supporting a policy unpopular with his base. He has, however, just handed a hand grenade and its pin to Congressional leadership, and much as I'd love to see them put the pin back in the grenade (since this is a policy I support), I just don't see it happening.
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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Wed Sep 06, 2017 3:17 am

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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby DamianaRaven » Wed Sep 06, 2017 3:30 am

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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby DamianaRaven » Wed Sep 06, 2017 4:02 am

Here's what doesn't make sense. Most of these DACA "Dreamers" are young adults. We've pretty much invested all we're going to spend on them by way of education, jobs skills, and generally just keeping children alive and healthy, NOW we're going to ship them back to Mexico right when they're about to become productive, taxpaying adults? I really don't think this is going to "stick it to Mexico" the way people are thinking it will. In fact, it has great potential to backfire spectacularly and boost their economy at the expense of our own. These people are NOT "trash," they're a priceless fucking resource!

However, these days it seems like everybody wants the United States to turn into a third-world country and/or a horrifying fascist hellhole, so whatyagonnado?
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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby Krashlia » Wed Sep 06, 2017 4:06 am

DamianaRaven wrote:Here's what doesn't make sense. Most of these DACA "Dreamers" are young adults. We've pretty much invested all we're going to spend on them by way of education, jobs skills, and generally just keeping children alive and healthy, NOW we're going to ship them back to Mexico right when they're about to become productive, taxpaying adults? I really don't think this is going to "stick it to Mexico" the way people are thinking it will. In fact, it has great potential to backfire spectacularly and boost their economy at the expense of our own. These people are NOT "trash," they're a priceless fucking resource!

However, these days it seems like everybody wants the United States to turn into a third-world country and/or a horrifying fascist hellhole, so whatyagonnado?


(whispers "Zimbabwe" in someones ear.
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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby IamNotCreepy » Wed Sep 06, 2017 3:47 pm

I am conflicted about this. I definitely think these people deserve to stay in America. They pose no risk (or at least less risk than the average citizen) and aren't harming the economy. They didn't choose to come here, and they are trying to abide by the rules by enrolling in DACA.

That being said, I do think setting up DACA was an Executive overreach. This put Trump in a position where the government would have to defend the program against the states who had filed against it, and since he was rather ambivalent about it, it makes sense that he ended it.

Giving it six months is actually a good idea. This is something that really should require legislation, and I sincerely hope Congress steps up to make DACA permanent. It's not good for these people to be in limbo indefinitely, and I think that this is the kick in the pants Congress needed to actually getting around to doing something about it.
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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby sunglasses » Wed Sep 06, 2017 4:30 pm

Isn't this why Regan granted a whole bunch of illegal immigrants amnesty (by calling it legalization)?

People are like, "Just become legal!" Oh, if only that weren't a landmine filled proposition.

I mean, not only does it cost bank, but it's not an easy process. INS is often backlogged and can be, unsurprisingly, total dicks.

One 45-year-old British-born woman, who asked not to be identified, has been waiting four years for her green card, and still doesn’t have it.

Her limited encounters with the immigration process have been disheartening. “It’s incredibly hard to get information. You have no idea where you are in the process,” she laments. When she called one official in Massachusetts, where she works, she says he told her that “it was his job ‘to make sure I get sent home.’”


That and DREAMers just aren't eligible based on current US immigration law.

“A lot of people have this misunderstanding that Dreamers were given citizenship or they’re shirking their responsibilities by not becoming citizens,” Keller said. “They can’t do it. You have to follow the existing law.”

In some rare cases, an American spouse can sponsor a Dreamer’s application for a green card, but the applicant would still have leave the U.S. for a period of time.


We need to find a way to allow these people who were brought over by no will of their own as children stay. Remember, it's persons who were brought over prior to '07.
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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby Marcuse » Wed Sep 06, 2017 6:12 pm

Here's what doesn't make sense. Most of these DACA "Dreamers" are young adults. We've pretty much invested all we're going to spend on them by way of education, jobs skills, and generally just keeping children alive and healthy, NOW we're going to ship them back to Mexico right when they're about to become productive, taxpaying adults? I really don't think this is going to "stick it to Mexico" the way people are thinking it will. In fact, it has great potential to backfire spectacularly and boost their economy at the expense of our own. These people are NOT "trash," they're a priceless fucking resource!


Who's saying they're trash? The thing is, if they're Mexican nationals and have no right to stay in the US, they should have been in Mexico anyway, contributing to their economy and making Mexico a better place to live. It's not a good thing for developed countries to poach the youth of another nation, leaving them with labour shortages, while their potential professionals get to do shit poor jobs because the economic imbalance means they're paid more for the shit job in the US than the professional job in Mexico. You're right that they're a priceless resource, and they belong to another nation, co-opting them for the US is contributing to keeping Mexico economically weaker. To an extent all European and developed states do this and it's an example of how immigration policy can contribute to difficult conditions elsewhere.
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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby cmsellers » Wed Sep 06, 2017 6:43 pm

It's not like these are necessarily the best and the brightest though. With legal immigration, we disproportionately take the best people from other countries, and I'm actually fine with that. I'm skeptical of protectionist arguments against immigration (other economic arguments and cultural arguments are a different matter), and I'm even more skeptical of the idea that we should force people to improve the place they were born in simply because they were born there.

But with illegal immigration, the the parents of DACA subjects aren't doctors and engineers, they're mostly low-wage laborers. Yeah, the DACA subjects themselves are often doing better than that, which is the American Dream, but they're doing better than that because they were educated here in America.

It's the fault of their parents for coming here, their parents' employers for employing them, and the government for turning a blind eye to the problem rather than fixing the problem. It's true that they have no legal right to be here, but I do think that people who've grown up in the US should have the opportunity to become citizens.
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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby Lindvaettr » Wed Sep 06, 2017 6:48 pm

I think an important thing to note here is that, much like how increased open trade between nations has caused a serious decrease in violence in the world, so too has it caused a serious decrease in poverty, and yet there is a persistent idea that both violence and poverty are increasing to levels never seen before.

Globalization, while often villainized as exploiting poor countries, is in fact extremely beneficial. Take China, for example. Before globalization, many Chinese had literally almost nothing. When our grandparents (or parents, for some of you older TCSers (or great grandparents, for some of you younguns)) were our age, there were many people in China who were starving. Not only because of the Great Leap Forward, but even before that. Rural people especially might have a shack to sleep in and a cup of rice a day to eat. The same was true for Brazil until quite recently.

Today, even the poorest in those nations have much more than they had. Working a sweatshop job making shoes for rich Americans might offer little pay and have be a terrible job, but it pays more than weeding rice paddies, and pays enough that many of the workers have enough to send home to their families to help out. Now that China is transitioning away from being a manufacturing hub, they're outsourcing manufacturing to Southeast Asia and Mexico. We're doing the same. Southern Europe is outsourcing to Africa, as are other countries.

Many of these up and coming manufacturing hubs have never had strong economies or resources before. The reason they're so poor isn't because the US has been exploiting them for bananas (that was elsewhere, in another time), but because they had nothing to export. Now they're beginning to, and that means more people there will have more money.

People have a problem with globalization because it isn't fixing everything right now. Things aren't perfect. People are still starving and dying. People are still being exploited. But those things are less prevalent than ever before. All around the world, people have more food, more security, more jobs, more money.

We don't need to poach workers from the third world to work for us for cheap under the guise of what amounts to a modern liberal White Man's Burden by rescuing them from their economically depressed countries. We need to maintain course, and tweak where we can to make it run more smoothly and more fairly. The goal shouldn't be to save the poor by bringing them here. It should be to help them help themselves, by slowly creating situations where their countries can grow their own economies.

To me, it's the best solution. Not only is it the best for us (we get cheap goods, and cheap food, and cheap everything), but it's the best for them (they get jobs, and from jobs, money, and from money, stability). Rather than the moral right being to scoop them up from lives in poor countries and promise them work and money here that we can't really guarantee, the moral right is doing the pragmatic, practical, sustainable thing we've been doing for the past few decades: Providing them with the opportunities to make their own selves, and their own nations, richer.
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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Wed Sep 06, 2017 6:50 pm

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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby DamianaRaven » Thu Sep 07, 2017 3:01 am

Lindvaettr wrote:^all that stuff up there^


I absolutely CANNOT deny the upsides of "globalization," but those upsides come at a cost. I think it's exploitative because as soon as those desperate countries are "raised up" to the point of thinking they deserve more, and being powerful enough to band together and actually get it, YOINK! Suddenly, those jobs will be vanishing for "greener pastures," meaning some other, shittier country where the locals will work themselves to the bone for just enough not to starve to death.

Nike isn't letting the Chinese make their shoes because they give a rat's ass about the plight of their peasants. They're doing it because it's cheap, and TREMENDOUS suffering will ensue when/if that bubble pops out from under them. We're at a point right now where the rich and powerful are doing a world tour, shopping around for the most desperate populations they can find and making billions on their backs while giving them JUST enough not to starve to death and then leaving them with NOTHING the second they go and get too "uppity" with their their little bit of buying power.

I've got no problem with lowering the standards of my own blessed nation to raise up the poor and suffering of the world, but I've got a BIG problem with making a Desperation Tour of it, taking turns raising each third world nation's economy a few inches and then SMASHING it back on its ass until it slides back down enough to be a "profitable place to invest" again.

This doesn't even touch on the environmental problems involved with corporations shopping around for whichever nation has the cheapest rules for things like waste disposal. The pollution in China is goddamn horrifying, and Brazil looks pretty gross these days as well. We'll be seeing more of this in more and more places where factories swoop in and take advantage and it won't be long before all this pollution in the name of "globalization" (which, for some people, is a code-word for "who will let me fuck them the hardest") starts affecting the whole world instead of one poor, isolated corner here and there.
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Re: The end of DACA?

Postby Lindvaettr » Thu Sep 07, 2017 3:26 am

DamianaRaven wrote: [...]


The thing you're condemning about globalization is the exact reason it's worked so well. The great boon globalization provides isn't a permanent source of revenue that a nation can rely on. It's a good leg up. Manufacturing jobs pour into a country (and they often really do pour in), and a lot of people suddenly have a lot more money than they had before. They might not be rich, they're actually almost all still very poor, but much better off than they were. But when millions of people have a lot more money than before, even if that lot more is only small in the grand scheme, those millions can contribute tremendously to that nation's economy. They spend more, new native companies open, new buildings are built. The more the economy grows, and the less it relies on manufacturing. Look at China now compared to 10 or 20 years ago. Where their entire economy used to hinge on manufacturing for the first world, they now have a massive economy built up that serves mainly other Chinese people. Chinese internet, Chinese phones, Chinese Amazon, tons of massive corporations that exist purely to serve Chinese. That didn't used to be the case. Go back a couple decades and most corporations in China existed to serve the West. Manufacturing isn't leaving China in some hellish poverty. They're leaving them as a massive, if currently rather unstable, economy that is capable in many ways of sustaining itself in ways it hadn't for a century and a half.

And it's not that way because some first worlders like you and I came in and granted them permanent economic help. The market gave them help because they had the best offers, and their economy is huge not because Americans made it that way, but because China harnessed the opportunities provided by the influx of manufacturing and built up their own economy. Now both China and the US are sending manufacturing jobs, as mentioned in my previous post, to southeast Asia and Mexico, among others.

Will those jobs be there forever? Hopefully not. If those jobs stay there forever, it means those nations aren't taking the opportunity to build up their own economy. Their economy is spinning its wheels as evidenced by them continuing to be the cheapest labor. But, barring some terrible dictator or something who messes it up for everyone, I would be absolutely stunned if that happened. Mexico will quite possibly become the China of the 2020s and 2030s. If they do well with manufacturing, and get a handle on their drug war (a strengthening economy should help with that), perhaps by the 2040s we'll be watching Mexico offshoring their manufacturing to Ghana or the Dominican Republic. Then those countries will do the same, and probably always at much faster rates. All those nations need to do is make the most of a huge influx of jobs and money.
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