DACA paves path to better jobs, ties to society: Study

For immigrants who are in the country illegally, getting even tentative legal status can mean finding better jobs, doubling their pay and paving pathways to education, according to a study released Thursday that looked at how the DACA program has helped “Dreamers.”

The average hourly wage for a DACA recipient rose from $10.94 to $22.90, according to the latest results of a survey by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

And 3 out of 5 DACA recipients currently in school said they wouldn’t have been able to pursue the same educational opportunities without the program.

But they’re also suffering amid the uncertainty of the program, with frequent worries that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will be canceled and they may face deportation, the survey found. More than 40% said they think about being arrested or deported at least once a day.

“DACA is a transformative policy that continues to be a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of immigrant youth and their loved ones, but it is no replacement for a permanent solution,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center.

DACA was created by President Obama’s administration in 2012. It granted amnesty from deportation to immigrants who arrived in the U.S. illegally as children, had been here since 2007, were under age 31 at the time the program was created, had avoided a major criminal record and pursued an education.

More than 800,000 people have gone through the program, and more than 611,000 had current DACA status as of Sept. 30.

Most DACA recipients were never in any significant danger of deportation anyway, but the real benefit is that the program confers some taxpayer benefits and a work permit.

That makes the program a good test for what would happen under a broader legalization for immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally.

The survey says it’s given Dreamers, as DACA recipients are called, a way to attach themselves more deeply to U.S. society.

More than half of DACA recipients who responded said they bought their first car after getting the tentative status. Nearly a third have opened a retirement savings account. One in 5 DACA recipients 25 years old and older has bought a first home.

Nearly a third of respondents said they are in school, and most of those were pursuing a bachelor’s degree or higher.

About 1 in 50 said they’ve started their own business since being approved for DACA.

The data has some important limitations. The questions about cars and homes don’t test whether those actions were specifically tied to DACA, and indeed the ages of DACA recipients make it likely a number of them would be going through those experiences about this time.

Tom K. Wong, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, has been running the same sort of survey for seven years.

He said the pandemic is taking a particular toll on DACA recipients, which should fuel efforts to grant them a more permanent legal status.

All told, 1,021 DACA recipients responded to Mr. Wong’s survey. They reported their median age when they first came to the U.S. was 6 years old. More than 90% were Hispanic. They are also more likely than the general population to identify as gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual.

Those who responded were invited online, and checks were used to try to weed out non-DACA recipients. Mr. Wong’s survey doesn’t say how many people were contacted to get the 1,021 responses, and because it is an opt-in survey, in which respondents are self-selected, it’s impossible to estimate a margin of error.

It’s possible that less successful DACA recipients weren’t reflected in the data — such as those with legal troubles outside of their immigration status.

The Washington Times maintains a database of border migrant smuggling cases, and DACA recipients sometimes show up as being charged with smuggling.

Last week, Border Patrol agents caught a DACA recipient from Honduras they say was acting as a scout for a smuggling attempt at Padre Island National Seashore in Texas. He told agents he was being paid $1,000 for his part, and had successfully smuggled four people days earlier. He’d already been paid $500 for that job, he told agents, according to court documents.

Criminal entanglements can lead to someone’s DACA status being revoked, though such cancellations are infrequent. From June 2012 through June 2021, just 4,700 DACA permits were terminated.

Even then, it’s rare that the person is a target for arrest and deportation, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it doesn’t have the resources to investigate each case, and generally will only worry about people involved in “high-impact” cases involving large criminal organizations or people with the most serious criminal records, like sex offenders or war criminals.