IIUC, the cutoff date for DACA was June 15, 2007. On the extreme edge, DACA participants who arrived as infants might be as young as 10 years old today. A 15-year-old arrival is now 25 at the youngest.
I would expect that the infant arrivals have very little recollection of their homeland, probably very few contacts there, perhaps don’t speak the language spoken there. Contrast that with a 15-year-old arrival who probably does remember his homeland, likely speaks the language, and might even have contacts back in their native country.
An infant probably took no active participation in any attempts to evade or deceive the authorities upon their arrival and had no knowledge that what was being done was against the law. More of the 15-year-old arrivals are likely to have actively participated in the law-breaking.
Those are just off the top of my head. There are probably more relevant differences. Overall, it seems a good bit more plausible to send a now-25-year-old back to his native country than the now-10-year-old.
I don’t think that’s true. Yes, you can/could apply for Advance Parole under DACA, but being paroled into the US doesn’t give you an improved status over what you had before. You still have to qualify in some other way, Visa, pending status adjustment, DACA, and now now DHS also has the option to cancel your parole if they see fit.
So like, basically just unilaterally took the decision to enable this predicament? Setting a new policy in clear violation of existing law? Pretty harsh on a child.
Never happened. The episode you are referring to was during a phone call with the Mexican President, referring to Drug Traffickers.
Wonder if anyone advised Obama about the potential Catch-22 he created with DACA?
I don’t think it’s really a Catch-22. The law has always been that anyone in the country unlawfully had to return to their country of origin for a period of three to ten years (depending on how long they were in the US) before they could apply for a visa. Obviously, if you’re planning on taking the “Go home for ten years” route, you don’t need DACA protection.
Even without DACA, you couldn’t have applied for a visa unless you left the US for 3-10 years. DACA just gave people cover while Congress hopefully came up with a solution that didn’t involve sending people who lived here their whole lives to a (for all practical purposes) foreign country for a decade.
WTF is your point? Yes, obviously there are going to be differences between someone who arrived at 1 vs 15. The one that arrived at 15 might still remember an uncle back in Mexico, but he/she has also had the opportunity to finish HS and is contributing to society, and has made it through their teens and early 20s with a clean record. They are the ones you want to send “home?”
Some of the nuance of immigration law has been glazed over in this thread.
While it is true that simply being a DACA recipient does not provide a path to permanent residence or citizenship it is also true to say that being a DACA recipient is not an automatic bar to permanent residence or citizenship by other means.
One of the frequent difficulties faced by DACA recipients is a failure to enter the US by legal means in the first place. Those DACA recipients who may have entered legally and then overstayed a visa do not have this same issue. But for those for whom lack of a lawful entry is a problem the Advanced Parole means of changing to a lawful entry absolutely worked for many. It may have been a risk for some and quite possibly failed some who tried it.
The LA Times wrote an article on the use of Advanced Parole travel and how that had led to and estimated 40,000 DACA recipients getting green cards. The article discusses how Trump’s termination of DACA was closing this loophole. Current status of the Advanced Parole means of obtaining an lawful entry for DACA recipients may be caught up in court proceedings. YMMV for the present, but it worked for tens of thousands.
And writing on this topic continues with The Arizona Republic discussing this Advanced Parole travel as
And even if we can assume by ‘bad hombres’ Trump was exclusively referring to Mexican drug cartel membersrather than immigrants at large, the fact is that most transportation and sales of drugs shipped through Mexico into the US is done by domestic gangs and organized crime, performed by US citizens who are not subject to deportation. Nor does Customs and Border Protection nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement recommended or requested a hypothetical solid wall along the entire US-Mexico border. Like most of the vaguely defined policy planks of the Trump campaign, ‘The Wall’ and the need to exclude Mexican drug dealers was based on a factually untrue premise and made little sense other than apppealing to a childishly simplistic view of the actual problem, to wit the drug trade, fueled primarily by American dollars, that has done far more damage to Mexico and Latin America than it has to the United States.
I was answering Ravenman’s question. That was the point.
I’m delighted to see that I’m not the only one that understands there are differences.
Not necessarily, but I suspect they’d be better-positioned to handle it if it happens. I’ve said repeatedly, I don’t really mind if a compromise is worked out and the DACA participants stay.
No, I don’t think so. You seem to want to draw some sort of distinction between older and younger DACA recipients. You’ve also stated that there are “problematic cases” that DACA supporters ignore. So what are these cases? And why is it important to make a distinction based on age unless you’re just looking for an excuse to kick them out.
Why not just face the fact that DACA was stupid mistake? Sucks to be lied to when you aren’t even old enough to know what’s going on, but that’s politics for ya.
Or to expect the “Party of Fiscal Responsibility” to make a decision to legitimize the immigrations status of residents with a demonstrated history of personal responsibility and financial success rather than spend money on deportation efforts that benefit no one except the minority of provincial nationalists who believe that “America should be for Real Americans’, e.g. the descendants of those who took the land fair and square from the natives.
That the DACA recipents are already here and positively contributing to the economy should be enough to justify the DREAM Act, notwithstanding the overall economic value (and, frankly, necessity) of immigration. There is no fiscally sound argument for deporting gainfully employed people without criminal records, some of the home and small business owners, that does not bear a significant shade of racist ideology.