DACA’s Stratified Tracks for Economic Mobility and Lessons for Addressing Immigrants’ Long-Term Inequality

Authors

Els De Graauw
Shannon Gleeson

Abstract

Since 2012, the politically tenuous Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has provided temporary deportation relief and work authorization to over eight hundred thirty-five thousand undocumented young people who fit certain criteria. This Essay draws on one hundred fifteen interviews with DACA applicants in California, New York, and Texas during the heyday of the program to better understand its impacts on recipients’ school and work experiences. We confirm many of the key benefits DACA status has provided to recipients, notably opening doors for them educationally and professionally.

However, our research also confirms DACA’s uneven impacts. Those without four-year college degrees have had a harder time leveraging their DACA status overall. For those with four-year college degrees, DACA generally provided a range of new opportunities, allowing them to launch promising professional pathways. Across the board, however, DACA recipients consistently reported discrimination and microaggressions, even in educational and nonprofit work settings. While DACA empowered some to speak up and even exit these environments in search of better opportunities, many still experienced consistent workplace abuses and struggled to obtain raises and promotions. Inadequate social protections also remained a critical concern for all respondents. For example, health insurance was available only to some, depending on state policy, employer benefits, and school settings.

In all, our study’s findings caution against temporary relief as a singularly viable way of addressing immigrant inequality long-term. Instead, we call for a broader vision of immigration reform that focuses also on addressing systemic gaps in the social safety net and the broader history of worker precarity and racial capitalism in the United States. Relief for immigrant illegality is a moral imperative and a critical ingredient, but alone it cannot level the playing field.

Recommended Citation

Els De Graauw and Shannon Gleeson, DACA’s Stratified Tracks for Economic Mobility and Lessons for Addressing Immigrants’ Long-Term Inequality, 75 Hastings L.J. 1601 (2024).
Available at: https://repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_law_journal/vol75/iss6/4