Ricardo Montero-Hernandez
A lack of news literacy is having an effect on the national debate over “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA), and whether or not President Donald Trump should rescind former President Barack Obama’s executive action to give certain protections and benefits to eligible people brought to the U.S. illegally by undocumented individuals. While it may seem like a simple “yes” or “no” answer depending on personal views on immigration and policy, the question of whether or not President Trump should get rid of DACA brings up themes of morality, national identity, national security, guilt, free will and the punishment of children.
President Trump’s stances on DACA have softened since he was on the campaign trail, where he would make statements such as “Undocumented immigrants seeking legal status had only one route to citizenship: ‘To return home and apply for re-entry like everybody else under the rules of the new legal immigration system that I have outlined.’” But on Feb. 16. According to Breitbart News, President Trump said, “We’re going to show great heart. DACA is a very, very difficult subject for me, I will tell you,” he said during a news conference at the White House, “To me, it’s one of the most difficult subjects I have because you have these incredible kids.”
Regardless of President Trump’s changing statements on DACA, the undocumented community continues to be struck by fear and uncertainty. This lead them to be easy targets for fake news and misinformation, such as false notices of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and fake inflammatory articles, usually distributed through social media. In a series of tweets by ICE, the agency said “Reports of ICE checkpoints and sweeps or “roundups” are false, dangerous and irresponsible,” and “These reports create mass panic and put communities and law enforcement personnel in unnecessary danger.” In an interview with NPR, DACA recipient Ciriac Alvarez Valle, told Lulu Garcia-Navarro that reports of raids “Scares our communities, especially my family and other families. There may not be ICE raids actually happening, but people are saying there are. And it just adds to the fear.” The fear amongst undocumented communities could increase tensions with law enforcement agencies, which could lead to dangerous situations.
However, the misinformation has not only affected supporters of DACA, but opponents as well. The most prominent arguments against illegal immigration are the high crime rates held by undocumented individuals, that the order was an overreach of presidential power by President Obama, and how immigrants affect the economy by taking American jobs and spending taxpayer dollars.
The arguments for and against DACA have been influenced by false news, and while accurate information on DACA is easily accessible, people tend to bend the facts to justify their narrative. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly obvious that the opponents of DACA have been more affected by false information than the supporters.
Supporters of DACA argue that DACA recipients are Americans by nurture and their status is not their fault, which makes it immoral to suddenly change the life that they’ve built since youth, and that immigrants actually benefit the economy instead of hurting it. Such arguments have been made by people like Janet Napolitano, former Secretary of Homeland Security, in her article “The Truth About Young Immigrants and DACA” for the opinions page of the New York Times. Napolitano said “Dreamers, among other requirements, came to the United States as children, developed deep roots in the country and have become valuable contributors to their community.” An opinion shared by Greisa Martinez, Advocacy Director of United We Dream, who argued VICE News that “DACA recipients are citizens in nearly every way except on paper,” while economists, like Heidi Shierholz from the Economic Policy Institute, told the New York Times Magazinethat all immigrants — legal or not — benefit the overall economy.
On the other hand, those who oppose DACA argue that it was an overreach of Presidential power, and that undocumented individuals take American jobs and help increase criminal activity. The National Review called DACA a “Gross executive overreach” of power by former President Obama and that it “undoubtedly has to do with the prospect of political backlash over a very sympathetic segment of the illegal population,” as written by “The Editors” of the Review in their article “A Fair and Legal Replacement for DACA.”
Others, like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, cite the law as the main foundation for their opposition. He told FOX News that “Everybody in the country illegally is subject to being deported, so people come here and they stay here a few years and somehow they think they are not subject to being deported — well, they are.”
To support the claim that undocumented immigrants hold high criminal rates, The Hill published an opinion piece by forensics expert and former California detective, Ron Martinelli, where he uses statistics from Judicial Watch, a right-wing, non-profit organization that constantly publishes misleading, anti-left propaganda. In his article, he says, “A population of just over 3.5 percent residing in the U.S. unlawfully committed 22 percent to 37 percent of all murders in the nation.” However, these numbers turn out to be misleading and inflammatory.
In “Contrary to Trump’s Claims, Immigrants Are Less Likely to Commit Crimes” by the New York Times, writer Richard Perez-Peña argues that “In federal prisons, a much higher share of inmates, 22 percent, are non-citizens. But federal prisons hold a small fraction of the nation’s inmates, and in many ways, it is an unusual population. About one-third of noncitizen federal inmates are serving time for immigration offenses — usually re-entering the country illegally after being deported — that are not covered by state law.” Perez-Peña also cites primary sources, such as the Justice Department, and nonpartisan sources, such as studies by the National Bureau of Economic Research, instead of the clearly biased research that Martinelli used to support his opinion.
Furthermore, in John Hagan’s and Alberto Palloni’s article “Sociological Criminology and the Mythology of Hispanic Immigration and Crime” for the Oxford Academic, they make the argument that growing number of Hispanic immigrants in U.S. prisons is not only due to crime, but to “restrictive treatment in the criminal justice system, especially at the pretrial stage.” They conclude, “When these differences are integrated into calculations using equations that begin with observed numbers of immigrants and citizens in state prisons, it is estimated that the involvement of Hispanic immigrants in crime is less than that of citizens.”
As far as costing taxpayer dollars, Stephen Gross, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration, told the New York Times Magazine “Undocumented workers contribute about $15 billion a year to Social Security through payroll taxes. They only take out $1 billion,” since only very few undocumented workers are eligible to receive benefits. “Undocumented workers have contributed up to $300 billion, or nearly 10 percent, of the $2.7 trillion Social Security Trust Fund,” Gross said in Adam Davidson’s “Do Illegal Immigrants Actually Hurt the U.S. Economy?” article. Nevertheless, the argument made about undocumented individuals taking American jobs is undeniable.
Davidson makes the argument that undocumented workers undercut wages for jobs that could possibly go to similarly skilled native-born workers, leaving Americans with two choices: Accepting lower pay, or not working in the field at all. Due to the constant undercutting, Davidson says that labor economists have lowered U.S. wages of adults without a high-school diploma by anywhere between 0.4 and 7.4 percent. Still, undocumented workers do not compete with skilled laborers. According to economist Giovanni Peri, in states with more undocumented immigrants, skilled workers made more money and worked more hours, since undocumented workers take care of routine tasks while the skilled workers focus on productivity in their field. This interaction increased legal workers’ pay in complementary jobs by up to 10 percent from 1990 to 2007.
Fake news and lack of news literacy mostly affect the knowledge of accurate facts that may lead to the creation of false or ignorant opinions. People will try to support these opinions by using misleading information or literally fabricating evidence and pass it off as fact, creating a cycle of fake news that can only be disproved by a primary source. The easiest opinions to disprove are those unsupported by quantifiable evidence, and while there are arguments made by supporters and opponents of DACA that are grounded in such evidence, like the economic benefits that immigrants bring to communities and the impact that illegal immigration has on the American-born workforce, there are other arguments supported exclusively by opinion and individual morals.
Perhaps the most difficult argument to address is whether or not children should be held accountable for being brought into the country illegally. To be eligible, all DACA recipients had to come into the United States before their 16th birthday, which means that they became undocumented or “illegal” while they were still children. It is hard to imagine a reality where a person younger than 16 made the conscious decision to enter and stay in the U.S. illegally with malicious intent, and President Trump shares the same stance. In his “Person of the Year” article, he told Time Magazine “They got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”
But whether or not children who came illegally into the U.S. can be considered guilty for a crime they may or may not have had control over is not the only moral issue here. The very definition of what it means to be an American is also brought into question, given that some of these children were raised in American culture, under the American flag, and with an American education. Some of these children might not know anything about the country they were born in, and might be Americans by nurture, but not by birth or by law.
President Trump should not rescind DACA. Factual evidence from primary sources proves the many social and economic benefits that immigrants provide to this country, and how much they outweigh the negative impacts. However, DACA does not even mention all immigrants, it specifically mentions children brought before their 16th birthday, some who were raised in the United States and made their lives here; uprooting people from their history, culture and language and sending them to a country they don’t know is cruel and immoral, and in some cases, dangerous to their personal safety.
Opponents of DACA continue to base most of their arguments on opinions or unsupported data, and their justifications are constantly being disproven by bipartisan sources. It has come to a point where their only real argument is the negative impact of the undocumented immigrant on unskilled labor wages, but even that still has a silver lining, because it has meant higher pay for skilled workers.
There is an enormous amount of easily accessible, factual data that back up the arguments of the DACA supporters, who in context, are advocating for basic freedoms like education, work, and the right to have a home for children that were brought here without their consent.
DACA is the logical choice on economic reasons alone, without even mentioning the social, cultural and moral reasons. No amount of fake news and misleading articles can deny the numbers that the bipartisan American government publishes on immigration, and any opposition to those statistics is purely based on moral reasons unsupported by fact, in other words, ignorant, self-indulgent opinions that should have no place in deciding the future of children the United States.
Ricardo Montero || Journalist 