Why the plight of the DREAMers is unprecedented
by digby
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| Why do they protest? Because they are Americans and they don’t believe their country is a police state. Are they right? |
If you want to understand why the situation with the DREAMers is so acute, read this long piece by Dara Lind at Vox. This is a unique situation brought about by America’s paranoia and essential racism. We’ve always had migration back and forth over the southern border and Latino culture has been part of America since the westward expansion. But we’ve never had kids in this situation before because we’ve never had such draconian laws before.
The Trump administration’s announcement Tuesday, that it will end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — removing deportation protection and work permits from nearly 800,000 young unauthorized immigrants — unless Congress passes a bill in the next six months to protect DACA recipients, isn’t a punt or a reprieve. It’s an opportunity to deflect, or share, the responsibility for what would be an unprecedented act in US history.
There’s never really been a time when a generation of people, raised and rooted in the United States, has been stripped of official recognition and pushed back into the precarity of unauthorized-immigrant life.
Even though DACA never officially legalized anyone, ending it would be, in a way, the biggest “illegalization” of immigrants in American history.
As a policy matter, it’s straightforward: Ending DACA is unprecedented because DACA itself was more or less unprecedented. Never in US history had the government offered protection to so many people who didn’t have (and weren’t subsequently given) the opportunity to get full legal status from there.
The government has a lot of power to shape immigrants’ lives — but it’s never had perfect control over who immigrates to begin with. The history of immigrants who received DACA protections is unique, and the legal status to legitimize or delegitimize them is too. Often as not, when politicians try to reconcile law and reality, the result is that the law gets changed to bend to the reality — not that the reality is changed by enforcing or changing the law.
DACA was one such attempt. If Congress and the White House can’t agree on a bill within a six-month timeframe, and the Trump administration rescinds DACA, the US will be in wholly uncharted territory.
Please read the whole thing to fully understand how we got here and what this situation represents fundamentally about our country. These 800,000 of our fellow Americans deserve to be secure in their lives and futures. But it’s bigger than just them. This is about our definition of ourselves as a country and society.