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.
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.
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.