Ending DACA Will Cost Florida $1.4 Billion

Nearly 700,000 immigrants brought to the United States as children and granted DACA status could be deported beginning March 5 if Congress and President Trump fail to reach a deal to keep them here.

Since being implemented in an executive order by President Obama in 2012, nearly 800,000 immigrants have been approved for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — DACA — granting them a renewable two-year reprieve from deportation and permission to work. The most recent data available, from September, showed about 690,000 DACA immigrants, known as Dreamers, are currently protected. They include 27,000 in Florida.

About 685,000 DACA recipients are now in the workforce but would lose their work authorization when their current two-year status expires. An average of about 30,000 workers will lose their permission to work beginning in March and extending into 2019.

The Center for American Progress estimated that the loss of all DACA workers would reduce U.S. gross domestic product by $460.3 billion over the next decade, with Medicare and Social Security contributions dropping by $24.6 billion.

California would suffer a GDP loss of a staggering $11.3 billion annually. Texas would lose $6.1 billion, and North Carolina would lose $1.9 billion each year. (GDP represents the total dollar value of all goods and services produced over a specific time period, which means everything produced by people and businesses, including salaries of workers.)

Florida, with an estimated 26,417 DACA workers, would lose $1.4 billion annually.

The average age for a DACA immigrant is 24. None of them collects welfare benefits such as cash assistance, food stamps or Medicaid. More than half were brought to the United States when they were 6 years old or younger. More than 90 percent of them have jobs. They have contributed billions of dollars in taxes to Social Security and Medicaid though they are not currently entitled to benefits from either program. Their desire to become permanent legal residents is supported by the vast majority of Americans, Democrats, Republicans and independents alike.

Trump, who campaigned on a promise to end DACA, has seemed at times to want the Dreamers to stay.

“Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!....” he tweeted in September. .

He softened his harsh campaign rhetoric on the program after he became president, saying he doesn’t like the idea of punishing children for the crimes of their parents and once told reporters that he had “great love” for Dreamers, who he called “remarkable kids.”

In September, though, he announced an end to DACA effective March 5 unless Congress passed a replacement program.

Uncomfortable with the prospect of announcing his decision and threatening Dreamers with the uncompromising bluntness that his base would expect, Trump sent his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a long-time anti-immigration hardliner, to announce his decision.

“The White House needed him to do this because I don’t think Trump would have delivered a convincing performance,” said Mark Krikorian, a Sessions ally and the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “His own body language and ad-libbing would have undercut his message.”

“Congress, get ready to do your job — DACA!” the president wrote on Twitter that day, at one point urging them to preserve the DACA program he had just decided to kill by voting it into law. If Congress would just come up with an acceptable plan, the young immigrants would be saved.

Trump’s idea of an “acceptable” plan, though, has changed by the day and sometimes, literally, by the minute.

On Jan. 9, a Tuesday, in an extraordinary televised meeting with about 25 lawmakers that was televised live, Trump said he would like to see a “clean” DACA bill with no strings attached and that he would “take the heat” politically for finding a solution for the Dreamers. Other priorities, including border security, family immigration and the visa lottery system would be taken up next. Within a minute, he reversed himself, demanding that money for border security must be part of any DACA fix.

Finally, the president said he’d support whatever immigration bill Congress could pass, whether he liked it or not.

"You folks are going to have to come up with a solution," Trump said at the meeting. "And if you do, I'm going to sign that solution."

Two days later, he not only rejected a bipartisan plan presented to him, he threw negotiations off the rails with racist comments about “s---hole countries” and his desire for fewer immigrants from Haiti and Africa and more from Norway.

“So to the President, what I saw Tuesday was a man that understood what America was all about, a leader who understood that bipartisanship must occur and understood that love and security are not mutually exclusive,” Graham said from the Senate floor after the bipartisan plan was rejected. “What I find today is complete chaos.”

So far, the moral implications of separating families by deporting Dreamers, who on average have lived in the United States 20 years and really know no other country, have not been enough for Congress or the president to find a way to keep them here.

Nor has the major hit the economy would take if the Dreamers are removed from their jobs.

Senate Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky admitted earlier this month that Trump’s shifting positions left him negotiating on DACA blind.

“What I want to see is an outcome, and an outcome involves the signature of the president of the United States,” McConnell said at the time. “So what I’m waiting for in terms of making a decision about floor time is, are we dealing with an issue that has a chance to become law?”

Trump released a written proposal for DACA’s legislative framework on Thursday.

His proposal includes a path to citizenship for about 1.8 million immigrants now living illegally in the country, including those in the DACA program and more than 1 million immigrants who would qualify but have not applied; $25 billion for more immigration officials and to build a “border wall system” between the U.S. and Mexico; an end to the visa diversity lottery; and restrictions on sponsorships for family migration.

Experts say the curbs on sponsorships would eliminate hundreds of thousands of family-related visas by allowing legal immigrants to sponsor only their spouses and underage children to join them in the United States but not their parents, adult children or siblings.

The Senate's top Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, dismissed the plan as a "wish list" for hard-liners and accused Trump of using the Dreamers as "a tool to tear apart our legal immigration system and adopt the wish list that anti-immigration hardliners have advocated for years."

DACA Protection: Timeline Of Events

Trump’s position on DACA has evolved over time, and nothing is a sure bet. On Friday, he tweeted that “DACA has been made increasingly difficult by the fact that Cryin’ Chuck Schumer took such a beating over the shutdown that he is unable to act on immigration!”

A Sept. 5 order by Sessions gave Congress until March 5 to act on DACA, implemented by President Obama in 2012.

Democrat leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California and Schumer signaled said Sept. 13 that they had reached a deal over dinner with Trump, announcing they had promised some border protection funding in exchange for DACA protections and an agreement with the president to shelve the wall until later.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders quickly tweeted that night that “excluding the wall was certainly not agreed to.”

Trump was silent until early the next morning, when he tweeted, “No deal was made last night on DACA. Massive border security would have to be agreed to in exchange for consent. Would be subject to vote.” He made no mention of the wall until after 10 in the morning, when he told reporters, that "the wall will come later."

On Oct. 8, the Trump administration released a list of hard-line immigration principles that threatened to derail any deal to protect Dreamers. The White House made clear it wasn’t interested in protecting them without, among other conditions, border wall funding, an end to family immigration, tougher thresholds for political asylum and mandatory use of the E-verify employment certification.

On Nov. 28, after a meeting with Pelosi and Schumer to avert a government shutdown, Trump tweeted, “I don’t see a deal” because the Democratic leaders “want illegal immigrants flooding into our Country unchecked.”

On Dec. 19, a bipartisan group of six senators met with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to discuss DACA, but were unable to flesh out details about what Trump might be willing to support. “We couldn’t finish this product, this bill, until we knew where the administration was,” Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, told Politico. “And that’s why this meeting was so important.” In the end, it came down to an end to family immigration, restrictions on asylum seekers, border security and other immigration policy changes.

On Wednesday, Trump offered a broad proposal for citizenship for immigrants brought here as children. The White House said details would be released Monday

“Over a period of 10 to 12 years,” Trump said of the path to citizenship. “Somebody does a great job, they work hard — that gives incentive to do a great job. Whatever they’re doing, if they do a great job, I think it’s a nice thing to have the incentive of, after a period of years, being able to become a citizen.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting.

Caption: Antonia Catalan marches outside of the office of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in support of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and Congress passing a clean Dream Act, Monday, Jan. 22, 2018, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)