A Data Portrait of the 611,470 DACA Recipients Who Still Have no Path to Citizenship
DACA turns 10 years old on Wednesday, June 15—an anniversary that was hardly a foregone conclusion given years of legal challenges. DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) provides relief from deportation and allows immigrants who came to the country as children to go to school and to work, but little else.
Despite widespread public support for Dreamers, bipartisan bills from both Republicans and Democrats, and years of sustained activism, DACA recipients are in the same precarious legal state as they were a decade ago.
In this short data-focused post, I use USCIS’s resources on their Immigration and Citizenship Data page to paint a portrait of the more than 611,000 immigrants who still have DACA status as of December 2021. (Feel free to share images online with attribution.)
To learn more about DACA, watch the first-hand experiences of people with DACA in this short video from the New York Times and watch Saturday Night Live’s skit of the Game of Life: DACA Edition which is a more darkly humorous take on the program.
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This is both heartbreaking and revealing: heartbreaking to think of these 600k-plus people living in fear of deportation arising from potential changes in DACA and revealing in that the conservative resistance to any form of amnesty is so strong that many proposed legislative remedies have been blocked. I empathize with the dreamers, and I understand the conservatives' objections to any form of amnesty, which stem in large part from how badly they were burned with 1986 IRCA which traded amnesty for workplace enforcement that 35 years later has still not manifested.