Washington Post: Distinguished persons of the week

President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions this week chose to use the beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program as fodder in their battle for the hearts of angry white nationalists. Their phony legal deadline — no lawsuit had been filed — concocted by Republican governors (with or without collaboration with Sessions) to provoke action forced the country to look carefully at exactly who the “dreamers” are.

Sessions flailed in his announcement attempting to tie the young immigrants to an upswing in crime (of which there is no proof). DACA of course bars those with any serious criminal record from participation. David Bier of the Cato Institute tells us: “Only 2,139 out of almost 800,000 DACA recipients have lost their permits because of criminal or public safety concerns — that’s just a quarter of 1 percent. Four times as many U.S.-born Americans are in prison. About 35 times as many Americans have ended up behind bars at some point before age 34.”)

In the real world, the country learned there is “no compelling proof” that dreamers take jobs from native-born Americans (we’re at virtually full employment as things are). Americans who bothered with the facts found out: “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, according to an analysis by New American Economy.”

Read the full story from the Washington Post: “Distinguished persons of the week”