Washington Post: Companies to offer ‘dreamers’ legal protection as Trump scraps DACA

President Trump’s decision Tuesday to scrap an Obama-era program allowing young undocumented immigrants to work in the United States would fall most heavily on the hospitality, retail and construction industries, which together employ nearly half of the 1.3 million immigrants initially eligible for protection, according to an analysis by New American Economy, a national business coalition.

The announcement that the Trump administration would phase out the five-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program jeopardizes the livelihoods of tens of thousands of cooks, waiters, cashiers, salespeople and construction workers, the analysis found.

The impact will also be felt across tech, health care and education — where many of the DACA-eligible immigrants who are college educated work as software developers, nurses and teachers.

Of the DACA-eligible immigrants over 21 years old, 12 percent have bachelor’s degrees, 3 percent have advanced degrees, 84 percent have completed high school and some college, and 2 percent did not graduate from high school. 

New American Economy, a national business coalition founded by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to advocate for immigration reform, conducted the analysis for The Washington Post using census data.

“People have a very specific image in their mind of who an undocumented immigrant is, but the reality is that ‘dreamers,’ who are American in every sense of the word except the legal one, are working in every industry in every community,” said Jeremy Robbins, executive director of New American Economy.

Read the full story from the Washington Post: “Companies to offer ‘dreamers’ legal protection as Trump scraps DACA”