Prof. Keyes: With DACA Ending, We Need Immigration Reform Now
September 7, 2017
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Elizabeth Keyes, associate professor in the University of Baltimore School of Law and director of the school's Immigrant Rights Clinic, writes in The Baltimore Sun that the drawing down of the DACA program should prompt Congress to craft a legislative solution to the nation's pressing problems with immigration.
"Only Congress can create a durable immigration status that cannot be revoked by executive fiat. DACA never had that durability and did not put its recipients on the path to citizenship. So, we can do better," Keyes says in an op-ed.
"Happily, since 2000, Congress has had before it a bill to set the Dreamers on that path. Called the DREAM Act, it has been introduced in every single congressional session. It nearly passed in 2010; the failure to pass that year ultimately led to the establishment of DACA in 2012. Now with five years of experience seeing Dreamers thrive under DACA, perhaps there is the political will to finally move the DREAM Act through Congress successfully. Everyone who cares about the young people whose productive young lives are going to be upended by this decision needs to ardently support this kind of legislative solution.
"But even at its visionary best, the DREAM Act is but a small piece of the puzzle. It does not solve the problems with our nation's failed immigration system, which condones leaving 11 million people to live in the shadows for decades—the vast and overwhelming majority of whom are hard-working, productive people with lives and families, with flaws and foibles, with promise and possibility."
Read the op-ed in The Baltimore Sun.
Learn more about Prof. Keyes and the University of Baltimore School of Law's Immigrant Rights Clinic.
Read University System of Marylan Chancellor Robert L. Caret's letter to Maryland's Congressional delegation about the ending of DACA.