Kevin Moye
In recent weeks, the executive branch of the U.S. government has ramped up talks of anti-immigration policy. This talk has included threatening to have a government shutdown over a border wall and talks of ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Unlike the sitting president and many of his cabinet officials, NC State is proud of our immigrant population. It would be a self-damaging act to build a wall around potential innovators of society.
In order to stop these menacing policy changes from being implemented, we must react to them with the fierce condemnation that they deserve.
In August, President Donald Trump embraced his cavalier anti-immigration rhetoric by declaring that legal immigration would be cut in half within a decade. The initiative to cut immigration in half would be achieved by preventing legal immigrants from bringing their families into the U.S. Many have lambasted this as a plan that would sever immigrant families.
One of the most potentially devastating blows to college-aged immigrant populations would be the repealing of DACA. An Obama-era policy holdout, DACA was created to prevent young, undocumented immigrants who were raised in this country from being deported. The policy also makes it possible for these young immigrants, commonly referred to as dreamers, to obtain work permits.
On Sept. 1, a wave of unrest hit the undocumented immigrant population when the president made ambiguous remarks about the future of the policy. The president’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, has been an opponent of the policy since its conception during the Obama presidency. With the president expected to make a decision next week, many parts of the immigrant community have already begun to panic about their futures as Americans.
After the election last year, a statement was released by NC State in an attempt to give assurance to DACA students here. While no policy changes were imminent at the time, the University promised to “continue to support all DACA students and families to the fullest extent allowable by law.”
Now, the time is necessary not just for a statement of assurance, but also for preventative steps to be taken to ensure that DACA continues to exist. The most crucial of the measures is to inform the American public, and more specifically, the NC State community, of the beneficial role immigrants play in society.
It is both morally and fiscally the right approach to continue to support the dreamer population here in America. The common critique on this population is that they are a drain on the country by siphoning resources that documented citizens could have benefitted from. This narrative is true if we only look at their presence through a myopic view.
Dreamers were not brought to this country simply to exist in an insignificant sense. Dreamers were brought here to develop lives that were better than the ones their guardians lived in their native countries. According to a column in Forbes by Stuart Anderson, it is because of this drive to live better lives that dreamers provide three critical aspects of economic growth: entrepreneurship, human capital and the strengthening of the labor force.
The most important — and likely most unknown — of the three aspects is the human capital provided by dreamers. In the article, Anderson refers to human capital as the capability for these immigrants to become high-skilled workers allowing room for innovation. As it stands currently, DACA does not allow for this process to easily take place. Dreamers are currently able to attend public K-12 schools in the U.S., but access to higher education remains prohibitively expensive as they are barred from in-state tuition prices.
Last year in North Carolina, a bill, HB 1081, was put forward which would grant DACA students access to in-state fees. Unfortunately, the bill did not even make it to a vote in the General Assembly. A dreamer looking to go to NC State would have to pay upwards of $168,000 with minimal, if any, financial assistance from the government to subsidize the tuition.
An efficient pipeline for dreamers to high-skilled workers could result in the production of a whole new generation of ambitious innovators to better the country. The possibilities of what a dreamer could do with an education from a university like NC State are limitless.
The Overton window, the range of ideas the public will accept, should not be centered on how we can remove these undocumented immigrants. Instead, the discourse should be shifted to how we can turn these already hard-working people into the Americans they came here to be.