Improving the legal status of undocumented immigrants beneficial to U.S.: Expert

The benefits, and liabilities
“DACA gets them social security numbers. It gets them driver’s licenses. They can therefore get jobs, access to higher education at public institutions, and sometimes even health insurance in some states,” Marrow says. “It not only gives them positive material things, it gives them a positive sense of belonging.”

Because recipients of DACA in its original form must renew their status every two years, however, and because the law is vulnerable to being overturned by the courts or the next president, its benefits go only so far, Marrow says.

“It provides a limited set of political and emotional privileges that might end, which would reverse these children’s personal progress and that of their communities,” she says.

Marrow believes that if Obama’s proposed expansion of DACA and the creation of DAPA survive current legal challenges, they could form the foundation for permanent immigration reform. That, however, would require partisan politics to be put aside, a tall order given the current divisive political climate.

“Being undocumented is not a form of permanent exclusion,” Marrow says. One study of the last amnesty program, passed in 1986, shows that the sense of exclusion “can be reversed almost immediately with enormous positive effects for the families themselves and also for the rest of the society,” she says. “You let people work, you let people earn, you let people go to school, and they participate, they do well. And that is good for American society.”

Decades of research also show that easing consequences for people in the United States illegally will not encourage more people to come here illegally. Contrary to public opinion, Marrow says that welfare levels and benefits in the United States do not affect migration flows, which are more influenced by economic conditions in the United States and the migrants’ home countries.

In the countries where most undocumented immigrants originate, Marrow says, it is often impossible to come to the United States legally if one is too poor to meet the financial and bureaucratic requirements for a visa. And wait times are sometimes greater than twenty years.

“This is what most Americans don’t understand,” says Marrow. “Coming in legally is often filled with bureaucracy, uncertainty and unpleasantness. But most undocumented immigrants never even have that. As we like to say, ‘There is not even a line to wait in.’” 

Dealing with the policy gap
With no national political consensus on immigration reform, institutions are devising their own policies. For example, this April Tufts joined a number of colleges and universities nationwide, including Dartmouth, Stanford, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Chicago, in considering all undocumented student applicants to the university, including, but not limited to, students with DACA status.

Only a handful of institutions, including Tufts, offer these students the financial aid they need to attend, however. “In keeping with our current undergraduate financial aid policy, Tufts will meet 100 percent of the demonstrated need of every undocumented student offered undergraduate admission to Tufts,” according to a university statement.

The policy was applied retroactive to the incoming Class of 2019. At least five undocumented students were accepted and offered financial aid.

This kind of action is important, Marrow says, because sociologists have shown that lack of legal status has negative effects not just on immigrants themselves, but also on later generations of their family. The 1986 amnesty program study showed that legalizing an undocumented Mexican immigrant mother in 1986 raised her child’s educational level from 11.5 years — the equivalent of dropping out of high school — to thirteen years — more or less the equivalent of graduating and getting a bit of college-level training. Legalization even raised her grandchildren’s schooling.

“One of the worst things that you can do is have people here with no rights and no access to education — that’s the worst thing not only for them but for the U.S. as a society,” she says.