USA would lose 22,000 workers per month for two years if the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is ruled illegal by courts across the country, a FWD.us report warned on Monday. Eph had early access.
According to a report from the Spanish agency, the new report indicates that Texas and California are the states that will see a greater reduction in their labor force, since they house a large percentage of beneficiaries of the program, which offers work permits and protection against deportation of more than half a million migrants.
DACA recipients and their families are waiting for a Louisiana appeals court to rule on the legality of the program.
In early July, the note by journalist Alejandra Arredondo points out, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans heard the arguments in the case about the program started in 2012 under the government of then President Barack Obama.
Last year, Texas federal judge Andrew Hanen sided with the plaintiff states in ruling that DACA violated the administrative process when it was created and ordered to prohibit the granting of new permits under this framework.
Texas and the other Republican-led states that filed the lawsuit have argued that the program has sapped their budgets by allowing undocumented immigrants to remain in the country.
If the immigration benefit were withdrawn, the US would see an “immediate impact on its economy and on the labor market,” he told Eph demographer Phillip Connor, author of the report.
More than 611,400 people are enrolled in the DACA program in the country, according to data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) cited by Efe. That number, Connor said, isn’t a large percentage nationally, but the loss of those workers “can be felt strongly locally,” especially in areas where there is a higher concentration of DACA recipients.
According to the study, if the program is closed, California would be the state where the most jobs would be lost -6,000 per month-, followed by Texas -5,000- and Illinois -1,000 jobs per month. The impact will not only be felt by the “dreamers,” as DACA recipients are known, but also by their families.
The administration of President Joe Biden has defended the DACA program in court and it is not yet clear if the case will reach the Supreme Court. Several migrant rights groups have asked the US Congress to pass legislation that would allow permanent status for DACA recipients.
Efe/OnCuba.
