Daily Times

Washington DC: House Republicans failed to pass another GOP leadership immigration bill this Wednesday; despite furious negotiations to develop a ‘compromise’ bill between conservatives and moderate republicans, the failure has left thousands of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients uncertain about their future.

The fate of DACA programme has been in limbo for nearly a year now. Donald Trump ended the Obama-era programme last year. Since then, Congress has tried and failed to pass several bills that would have provided Dreamers, another term for DACA receipinets, an opportunity for citizenship whilst the programme is phased out.

Following the announcement on Wednesday, dozens of activists, many of whom are recipients of the DACA programme, rallied outside the Washington headquarters of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, calling for the organisation to be dissolved. They shouted at police and workers looking out of the windows to “quit your job.”

Dreamer Lidia Souza, one of the activists, explained, “I feel powerless and scared, It’s never easy because I’m unsure about my future.”

Souza was born in Brazil but came to the United States with her parents when she was nine-years old, she has lived in the US for 18 years and is now a psychology graduate and has a 3-year-old child. She works for an immigration centre.

“I used to think to myself, ‘man I’m helping so many people get their citizenship’ and I was like ‘yes, one day I can apply and become a US citizen,'” she said.

As a ‘dreamer,’ she renewed her application for citizenship this May. She’s been shielded from deportation since 2012, thanks to former President Obama’s executive order. DACA has allowed dreamers to temporarily stay in the US but President Trump can end the programme anytime now.

Immigration attorney Liliana Vasquez says, “If DACA were to end, all the people working under it would no longer be allowed to work. This would affect the US economy.” .”

DACA was an initiative to let young people who immigrated to the US as children to escape deportation temporarily and receive benefits. It was started under President Barack Obama in 2012, and President Donald Trump has vacillated on the issue in the past year.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, in 2016 about 1.9 million people were eligible for DACA. Immigrants must have been under age 25 on June 15, 2012, arrived in the US before age 16, and lived in the US since June 15, 2007, to be eligible to apply for DACA.

This is the second immigration bill the house has failed to pass in two weeks. Last week a hard-line immigration bill introduced by Rep. Bob Goodlatte ( R-VA), that would have drastically cut the the nation’s immigration levels and provided an extension to the DACA program, failed. All Democrats and 41 Republicans voted against the bill.

This Republican “compromise” bill included conservative policy proposals that would have provided DACA- eligible immigrants six-year temporary legal status, after which they could apply for – but not guaranteed – a green card – but not US nationality.

Although the bill was initially aimed at solving the ‘Dreamer’ problem, analysis from the Libertarian think tank CATO reports, only 420,000 ‘Dreamers’ would actually benefit from the bill’s route to citizenship – less than the estimated 1.8 million DACA-eligible immigrants living in the US.

Immigration has long been a difficult issue for Republicans, who are divided over an increasingly right-wing voter base and personal pro-immigration business interests. Trump further fuelled the divisions, by delegating Congress the responsibility to solve the issue of DACA and family separations at the border.

Published in Daily Times, June 30^th 2018.