A decade of DACA: A middle-class launching pad for thousands, still at risk

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

64% :DACA "certainly has helped me to be where I am today, for sure," Sena said.
61% : After getting DACA in 2015, she found better work and attended California State University, Bakersfield.
60% : For those who were older and already in the workforce, DACA made it possible for them to seek professional licenses, leading to better jobs.
58% : "DACA is the fundamental key to open the door to achieve those academic merits for higher salary," said Cruz Flores, an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Santa Clara University in California.
57% : "We find that DACA significantly increased high school attendance and high school graduation rates," the economists stated in a 2020 study published in the American Economic Journal.
57% : There needs to be a pathway with citizenship."DACA was always meant to be temporary, with the goal of congressional legislation setting DACA recipients and other eligible undocumented Americans on a path to legal status."Ultimately, as great as this policy is, it's by nature temporary and partial and not meant to be longstanding policy," Gonzales said.
56% : Some have argued that advocates and media take a rosy look at DACA focusing on the success stories.
55% : As one of the early recipients of DACA, he sought out graduate programs and landed at the University of Arizona's Hispanic linguistics program, where he received a stipend, health insurance, had his tuition paid for and was paid to teach.
53% : There is mounting evidence that, in its decade of existence, DACA has done on a smaller scale what the GI Bill did for returning veterans -- it elevated a group of people into the middle class, thus conferring advantages to parents, children, siblings and communities.
52% : With DACA, they started out as Certified Nursing Assistants, doing basic yet necessary hospital work -- "you're changing bed pans".
51% : "The 10-year, long view of DACA is really the story of young people taking advantage of a policy to find on-ramps to education, job level programs and certificates, who were able to use that early entry to get their foot in the door in jobs and careers as stepping stones to really launch themselves," said Roberto Gonzales, professor of sociology and education at the University of Pennsylvania who has been tracking the lives of more than 500 DACA recipients over the last decade after studying thousands of undocumented young Americans.
49% : In the last 10 years, previous bipartisan plans for immigration legislation have been shelved, with Republicans eschewing attempts at immigrant integration and focusing on border control.
49% : DACA recipients live with two realities -- the regular renewal of DACA and the possibility that DACA is taken from them, which could even mean having to move to another country to start over.
45% : Alma Benito, 22, was working in the fields of the Coachella Valley alongside her parents when Obama implemented DACA.
40% : For Mendoza Arana, her prospects changed when in 2012 President Barack Obama implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, DACA, allowing hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants who were largely raised in the U.S. to apply to work and study in the U.S. without fear of being deported.
37% : Even so, DACA remains in jeopardy, with a Texas Republican-led challenge of the policy now in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and a court decision in that case blocking new DACA applicants from getting approved.
37% : Before DACA, Gonzales detailed in his book "Lives in Limbo" that undocumented young people's lack of legal status precluded any real educational and career advancement.
34% : This will be the first year that an overwhelming majority of the estimated 100,000 undocumented high school graduates are ineligible for DACA, according to FWD.us, a progressive immigration lobbying group.
31% : Obama used executive authority to create DACA after Congress' repeated failure to pass the DREAM Act, or versions of it.
28% : "Prior to DACA, going to college was a big risk," Gonzales said, "not worth it for those undocumented young people who could see no link between education and the types of jobs they could obtain.""With DACA, it's allowed them to obtain employment that matches their credentials in the field of their choice, and that is huge," he said.
22% : When Benito's sister became eligible for DACA, the Trump administration stopped taking new applications.

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