United States President Donald Trump is planning to end a program started by former President Brack Obama that protects illegal child immigrants from being deported. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, popularly known as DACA, is be ended in the next few months according to a report on Bloomberg and the US Congress will be tasked with codifying the provisions of the program.
Businesses not happy
While sources close to the developments have told Bloomberg that the end of the DACA program could take up to six months, there are genuine fears that the whole exercise could adversely affect the economy.
According to publicly available information, around 8000,000 children got protection under DACA and have been given two-year work permits that can be renewed upon expiration. Hence, it is not a surprise that most lawmakers, as well as business leaders, feel that scrapping the whole program will end up damaging the economy.
According to the Bloomberg report, chief executives of as many as 350 companies in the country have signed a letter urging him to not scrap DACA. A study conducted by Cato Institute states that the scrapping of DACA will result in the dismissal of around 750,000 workers from the work force and employers would have to incur costs to the tune of $6.5 billion. Such an outcome will also harm Donald Trump's business friendly image.
Lawmakers' response
Even lawmakers who were opposed to DACA, when it was first introduced by Obama stated that scrapping it now will be counterproductive and instead asked for more 'permanent solutions. Prominent Republicans like Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham have opposed this plan from Donald Trump. While Paul Ryan said that Congress should be looking for a "permanent solution," Senator Lindsey Graham said that the immigrants who got protection under DACA would be left in the lurch if the program is discontinued.
Graham suggested that he would work for legislative action to take care of the rights of those who have already got protection from DACA.
Obama, the architect of the program had stated back in January that he would be forced to get involved if Trump ends DACA and then deports the children, who had been given protection. He had said, “That the notion that we would just arbitrarily or because of politics punish those kids, when they didn’t do anything wrong themselves, I think would be something that would merit me speaking out.”
