(1) This isn’t just cruel and needless; it’s affirmatively harmful for America. These children aren’t just dreamers. They’re soon-to-be achievers. They’re in a demographic that is disproportionately responsible for creating jobs and economic value. (one particularly notable non-partisan study finding that immigrants started more than half of the startups valued at $1bn or more: https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/03/17/study-immigrants-founded-51-of-u-s-billion-dollar-startups/). There’s a reason basically every CEO supports DACA and more immigration. Macroeconomic growth is largely a function of productivity and population growth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solow%E2%80%93Swan_model); in western countries and Japan, where population growth by birth is limited, a lot of economic growth depends on immigrants coming in to replace the aging population. By contrast, China, with its massive labor force, is surging ahead — according to the economist Byron Wien, they are on pace to become the world’s largest economy in the 2030s (https://www.blackstone.com/media/byron-wien-market-commentary/article/comparing-risk-and-opportunity; note that he is a colleague). More on the economics here: https://www.cato.org/blog/economic-fiscal-impact-repealing-daca
(2) DACA was not about amnesty. It didn’t provide a path to citizenship or even lawful status. It was always about resource allocation. DOJ has limited resources with which to address national security, cybersecurity, terrorism, and major federal crimes. Whatever you think of DACA, it’s impossible to create a priorities list for DOJ (or the federal government more generally) that includes “target children who were brought here by the parents, who have done nothing wrong, and who have established themselves in schools and communities.” Each deportation will cost thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars (in some cases much more) — money that in the scheme of things could be returned to taxpayers, or spent on anything else, like infrastructure, education, medical science, FEMA relief, training police, securing nuclear waste, upgrading our grid, cleaning our deteriorating water distribution system, or any number of national security issues, including preventing terrorist attacks. Who in the world would rather pull this money out of their pocket to spend on targeting people who were brought here as children? No one. That’s what DACA reflects — the idea that we have priorities in who we target and, in the meantime, everyone else should be registered and a productive part of society, rather than outcasts looming in the shadows. Two side notes. One: without DACA, these people are more likely to “take” jobs because employers can coerce them into accepting less than minimum wage, effectively making them cheaper sources of labor than people who are lawfully permitted to work. Two: Worth noting it has long been unconstitutional to deny funding for K-12 education to the children of illegal immigrants on the basis of that status (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plyler_v._Doe), so anything along those lines is law and policy that long pre-dates DACA.
(3) If there are legal issues with DACA, they can be resolved in courts, and preferably/ultimately by Congress. In the meantime, the same use of executive discretion that justifies a six-month delay in repealing DACA — coupled with respect for the previous administration’s legal position, which set a landscape on which hundreds of thousands of people have relied — should have justified leaving DACA for the time being. The sheer amount of reliance makes this a particularly bad case for the whimsical use of executive reversal after a weekend’s worth of thought (http://www.npr.org/2017/09/05/546423550/trump-signals-end-to-daca-calls-on-congress-to-act). While we do need comprehensive immigration reform, reversing DACA will sow disorder and shroud 800,000+ people’s lives in uncertainty, decrease their likelihood of success, and strain families and communities — all while undermining economic growth. None of this fosters respect for the rule of law or does anything to promote American growth at home or its image abroad. To quote the President himself, who sums up so much in this one word: sad.
