I agree with Josh Smith’s point in his post at RealClearPolicy—DACA needs to be enacted into law:
DACA is an executive action issued by the Obama administration in 2012 that protects immigrants who came to the United States as children from deportation and grants them eligibility to work. Its requirements are stringent: DACA recipients must be enrolled in school, the military, or have received a high school diploma or honorable discharge. Moreover, they must pass a background check from the Department of Homeland Security.
The executive action was likely unconstitutional.
Some form of legislative solution is overwhelmingly popular, both among Americans generally and among lawmakers. What’s impeding it? I can only think of two things: the opposition of the most extreme anti-immigration branch of the Republican Party and the incessant demand to bundle DACA with a more general amnesty, a topic into which Mr. Smith, too, veers.
Just enact DACA into law and enforce it. Leave it at that.
Congress is pretty much unable, institutionally, to pass clean bills due to the rules in each body as well as partisan advantage. The mechanism is the amendment process. Back when John Stewart was still at the Daily Show he had some very good segments on this problem.
Which is why I’d support a single-subject amendment to the Constitution. 41 states presently have such limitations, typically framed along the lines: “No law shall embrace more than one subject, which shall be expressed in its title.” It certainly would improve the likelihood of the members of Congress’s understanding the laws they were voting for or against.
I hadn’t heard of that before – it’s a great idea.
“…Just enact DACA into law and enforce it. Leave it at that….”
And how do you account for the moral hazard of enacting DACA into law? The many thousands of others who will bring their children here expecting another DACA?
It’s a legitimate question. The easiest answer is from where? Birth rates in Latin America and the Caribbean are declining rapidly, just as it is in Mexico. The pressures are not what they used to be. We still need a solution for those already here.
I don’t think declining birth-rates addresses illegal migration rates unless the cause of migration is purely population pressures. The Obama EO appears to have encouraged people who want a better life for their children, so the framework is more likely whether the standard of living is X units better than in the home country, and what is the cost of migration. In theory, better border security would increase the cost of foot traffic; also getting Mexico to stop helping.
Are we talking about DACA as in giving legal work status (what The executive action did) or DACA as in putting them in the queue for green cards and citizenship (what most legislative proposals are)?
You probably have to have lived in California back in the 1990’s when Proposition 184 was being debated to understand. But maybe reflection about other things (#BLM for instance) will do the job.
(1) Good honest decent God-fearing English-speaking white native-born Protestant American Republicans — normal people, in other words — really don’t like abnormal people. Spanish speakers, for instance, or brown skinned people, or kids from foreign nations where such abominations are common.
2. It’s absolutely ESSENTIAL that normal people communicate to other normal people that their likes and dislikes are, well, normal, and it’s even more ESSENTIAL that normal people inform abnormal people as frequently as possible that normal people naturally dislike abnormal people, and this is the way properly run societies are run, and God wants things this way.
3. If you don’t agree, you’re a SJW and will go to Hell.
Of course, that was from 20 years ago, when Republicans were still an important political party in California. But maybe you’all can make a guess about how Republicans are apt to think about DACA.
Couple of things I would like to see, no incentive for military service and for those who are still minors, entry of their parents and minority age siblings.
If you can’t find enough citizens for your army, you got problems. Keeping families intact should be a national priority.
All this will create moral hazards a plenty, yet the demand for cheap labor, electoral concerns in the Southwest and clearing an agenda item take priority.
Andy- I miss Stewart for that also. Essentially all writers/TV people when they write now about the dysfunction of government tend to try to blame it on the “other party”. While Stewart was very clearly biased towards the left, he did the best pieces, in an accessible, humorous way, explaining the general dysfunction of our government.
Steve
If Keeping families intact should be a national priority, chain-exportation should be implemented immediately. Reunite families in their home country.
Problem solved.
There are both pull factors and push factors at work in immigration. Both are on the decline, at least as they affect illegal immigration into the U. S. Europe has different problems. France, Germany, Italy are the natural destinations of immigrants the Middle East and Africa and they’ll need to come to terms with that. How they do so is up to them.
That having been said while I think that the status of the so-called DREAMers should be improved, I also think we should have workplace enforcement of legal status and serious legal penalties on employers who employ workers who are here illegally.