Excerpt: DACA doesn’t need to be fortified. DACA needs to die.
The New York Times reports that a federal judge in Texas has declared DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) unlawful, saying that “President Barack Obama exceeded his authority when he created the program…by executive order in 2012.”
DACA has been under threat numerous times and it has become a symbol of everything that left-liberal-progressive people are supposed to fight for in terms of immigration. Already, the Biden administration has declared that “The Department of Justice intends to appeal this decision in order to preserve and fortify DACA.” Doubtless, several commentaries and actions over the next few weeks will support this resolution and exhausted DACA recipients will once again be asked to vomit out their stories of sadness and woe, of their anxiety about living under the shadow of an executive order that can always be erased, of the fear of being deported, of being separated from their families, of seeing their lives in this country be rendered inconsequential and vanish.
DACA recipients need our activism, care, and protection in these unstable times. But instead of using this occasion to, once again, ask for DACA to be reinstated, we ought to think of a much more radical solution: scrap it once and for all. DACA was always DOA, dead on arrival, always doomed to failure. It’s unsustainable, creates humiliating conditions for hundreds of thousands of people, and does little more than create a vast pool of cheap and educated labourers who will support the “American Dream” with little to show for it in the end for themselves.
Consider its history.
DACA was born of the abject failure of a torpid and largely meaningless “immigration rights movement” to bring about anything resembling change for over twelve million undocumented people in the United States. The brief back story: until about twenty years ago, immigration reform battles in the United States were mostly labour based, with a focus on the undocumented as people suffering from the brutality of neoliberalism and changes like NAFTA. Around the early years of this century, the focus turned to the undocumented as people suffering not from exploitation but from an identity. Finally fed up with the inaction of the government, hundreds of thousands of them began to demand to be seen and counted, beginning with the historic marches in 2006. Around this time, groups of youth everywhere began to out themselves as undocumented and began organising for the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Minors Act). Based largely on the logic of exceptionalism, the DREAM Act proposed that those who had been brought here as minors (before the age of 16) by their parents—and who showed the potential to be excellent, contributing members of society— would eventually be set on a path to citizenship. The legislation never materialised but it gave rise to large groups of undocumented youth all over the country who adopted the conveniently sentimental and romantic moniker of “Dreamers.” Eventually, the Dreamers’ vision of immigration reform overshadowed all other groups and soon, immigration turned into a battlefield of feelings, littered with the corpses of abject life stories, spiked by tales of longing for America as the Great Saviour.
Those who lead and speak for the Dreamers and the immigration rights activists around them have been a mostly pernicious, opportunistic bunch: in the early years of their activism Dreamers actively sought to distance themselves from their own parents, emphasising that they had been brought here illegally through no fault of their own. That rhetoric has been mostly dropped over the years after pushback from more radical organisers. They chose to forego a labour-based analysis of immigration and alighted instead upon one based on an identity composed of sadness and woe. The former would have required them to voice a systemic critique of the very concept of “America” as a land of endless opportunity—after all, what opportunity is there for millions of people being exploited as cheap labour? The latter allows them to appeal to people’s sensibility and desire to see immigrants begging for compassion and clemency: Dreamers have focused on making Americans feel for them. But even this strategy did not create meaningful change. Obama resisted all calls for actual legislative change until he finally hit upon a solution that would placate all sides: show the immigrant rights community and the Dreamers that he would and could do something without incurring the wrath of conservatives.
DACA, an executive order, was the end result, meant to serve a sliver of the population of the undocumented (about 12 million, by conservative estimates) by allowing some qualified young people, numbering around 800,000 by now, to obtain deferred action from deportation for renewable two-year periods and become eligible for work permits. DACA is not inexpensive: an application costs $495, each year for every two-year period, and the same for renewals (the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is not accepting new DACA applications). It’s a cash cow for the state. DACA also requires that recipients show exceptional character and results in a great deal of self-monitoring and anxiety. Currently, DACA recipients can only travel outside the U.S after obtaining an “Advance Parole,” yet face the risk of not being allowed to return even after being granted permission to leave. For this privilege, they must pay $360 for an application.
Despite such problems, the trade-off for DACA recipients has been that they might finally gain legal employment in the U.S. That alone can mean the difference between endless and grinding poverty and a stable income. DACA recipients don’t get a lot more, especially since they still have no path towards citizenship or permanent residency. In essence, DACA has served to create a perfect labour pool: of people who have at least a high school degree and who will also be compliant and easy to manipulate. Yet DACA is politically unstable and volatile, constantly under attack from the right: we have yet to measure its psychological toll upon the hundreds of thousands of recipients who spend their days in a state of perpetual anxiety.
Liberals and immigration rights organisations like the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) love toothless initiative like DACA because they do nothing to actually improve matters for the vast numbers of undocumented people but give the impression of momentous change. Independent radical immigrant groups like the Moratorium on Deportations Campaign and several other radical voices on immigration have pointed out that DACA was always going to be a disaster, for several reasons. Among them: as a mere executive order, it is vulnerable to erasure by any president, even a Democratic one. Sure enough, Trump formally ended DACA (it was later reinstated by Joe Biden in early 2021). Now, once again, it may disappear. None of this was a surprise to those of us who predicted such instability.
An even more pernicious aspect of DACA is that it compelled hundreds of thousands of people out of the shadows and onto government lists, placing them and their families under much heavier scrutiny and surveillance. There can and should be no romanticising of lives lived in the shadows of the status of the undocumented. But DACA recipients have come out with only the promissory note of an executive order, and placed themselves at risk under potentially dangerous administrations that now have all their information on file.
None of this bothers organisations like ICIRR and the thousands of immigration “rights” groups which have profited massively in the shape of what we might term an Immigration Rights Industrial Complex (IRIC). DACA has created massive amounts of paperwork, and there is always a need for more so-called advocates who might help vulnerable would-be recipients navigate all the red tape (what is government without reams of such?). The coffers of the IRIC expand every single time DACA is declared dead or resurrected because every change brings waves of anxiety among recipients as well as institutional changes that are complex and confusing, requiring professional help. The IRIC, which masquerades as a “human rights” entity, has no interest in a United States where the undocumented might actually gain a humane path to citizenship. After all, such a drastic change would mean that the IRIC has less power over millions of anxious and disempowered people, much less power to milk them of massive amounts of money in the shape of legal fees.
Without the constant threats to DACA and to undocumented immigrants, the IRIC would have no way to fundraise. An organisation like ICIRR needs the status quo to continue, it needs the rights of the undocumented to be challenged and even denied, it needs the abuse and stigmatisation of millions of people to continue. Without all that, how would ICIRR and its ilk survive? If, magically, tomorrow, we saw actual meaningful immigration reform/change, what would happen to such organisations? Sure, for a few years, they might busy themselves with helping millions of eligible people get their paperwork in order, but they would have no reason to exist after that—there have always been legal firms specialising in employment-based visas, for instance, and those will be fine because they’ve never pretended, as ICIRR and others have, to be all about social justice.
This is why the IRIC has always pushed for inadequate measures like DACA and never really been anything other than a reactive force, why it has yet to create or demand a single piece of legislation that has brought about significant change for the undocumented. IRIC always knew that DACA would make millions more vulnerable, that DACA was always subject to erasure, that DACA was always DOA. But DACA and a fallow field of “immigration reform” has also kept the IRIC alive and booming: Trump was the best thing to happen to organisations like ICIRR.
The history of DACA has been written by groups like ICIRR and by many of its undocumented youth leaders who led their fellows towards a bright and shining lie: as a flawed but necessary part of the change that will inevitably come as we progress towards real legislation. The reality is that DACA was a tawdry, useless, meaningless gesture made by a president who, as Nathan J. Robinson reminds us, was always unwilling to challenge the status quo, was even terrified that people might actually lash out against him and that he might become unpopular. The reality is that DACA’s failure continues to stand in for the only version of anything resembling actual change in immigration laws. DACA, in its miserable and misery-inducing form, now overshadows and defines what change can look like.
This recent news about DACA will undoubtedly allow ICIRR and thousands of other exploitative “immigrant rights” groups a fresh new opportunity to sound the alarm: DACA must be rescued! We’re the only ones who can help! Send money! Now! Fundraising emails are being composed as I write this. Activists like Jose Antonio Vargas will appear on shows like Democracy Now, and we’ll agree to forget that he once unhesitatingly crossed a picket line—thus embodying the delinking of labour from immigration. Amy Goodman will voice her outrage and speak to other guests who have fattened themselves on the carcass of “immigration rights” for several decades now. The New York Times will feature more op-eds, possibly even by DACA recipients. There are immigration rights journalists who have spent their entire careers covering the trials of the undocumented without ever questioning the damage done by DACA, without ever demanding of the IRIC: “What have you proposed as a permanent resolution, and what steps have you taken to force any administration to bring it about?” There will be much hand-wringing and a lot of coverage of how unjust it is that a largely useless executive order which does little more than entrap thousands of people in a large labour pool might end.
With another Democrat in the White House (one half of the team that gave us DACA the first time), can we bring ourselves to demand something much bigger, more meaningful than pushing for a toothless order that was always dead on arrival? Moving forward, current DACA recipients should be made secure in their benefits. But the only way to get beyond DACA and its humiliating and pernicious effects is to scrap it entirely and replace it with actual legislation, legislation that benefits all immigrants in meaningful ways that don’t require them to wait endless years while their applications fester and rot in limbo. DACA is little more than a cash cow for cynical immigration rights groups and the vast network of commentators, activists, and legislators who keep their careers going by emphasising their support for it. It can be neither rescued nor reformed.
DACA doesn’t need to be fortified. DACA needs to die.
For more of my work on immigration, see also:
“‘Undocumented: How an Identity Ended a Movement.”
Using “Immigration” as a search term on this website will yield more pieces.
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Image: Edward Moran, Unveiling The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, 1886.