A report from the USA Today admits what the real number of dreamers in the United States really is.
The political debate over the fate of “DREAMers” — undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children — has overlooked just how many there are in the country today: about 3.6 million.
That number of people whose lives risk being uprooted is not widely known, in large part because so much public attention has been focused recently on 800,000 mostly young DREAMers accepted into the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.Â
This smaller group of DREAMers is in the spotlight because President Trump terminated DACA in September, saying it was an illegal overreach of executive authority that can only come from Congress, which is negotiating with Trump on a compromise immigration plan.
While many politicians use DREAMer and DACA interchangeably, the terms are “not a distinction without a difference,” said House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
DREAMers got their name from the DREAM Act, a bill that has been proposed in Congress since 2001, but never passed, that would protect that group of immigrants.
The 3.6 million estimate of undocumented immigrants brought to U.S. before their 18th birthday comes from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit think tank that studies global immigration patterns. That is roughly a third of all undocumented immigrants in the country and does not include millions of their immediate family members who are U.S. citizens.
A number so large raises the stakes for both sides in the dispute over whether to deport DREAMers, allow them to stay under prescribed conditions or provide them with a path to citizenship.
Well, this is certainly not a shock. For quite some time the left has been using the 800,000 number to make it seem a lot less of an issue to provide amnesty. As Conservative media has pointed out on many occasions Amnesty has long-lasting effects on our country. Not only have we seen that the Obama Administration lowered the standards for background checks on the DACA program but we also know that DACA age kids are far more likely to commit crimes than any other age group.
We also knew that a legalization of DACA would allow at least 2.2 Million foreigners extra to come to America. Bumping the number of DACA recipients up to 3.6 Million would lead to an even more uncontrollable amount of people coming to America.
