Trump Ends Dreamers Program – As America Reviews Migration Policy, It Needs To Go Back To Basics

President Donald Trump announced the administration will put an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, an Obama-era initiative to shield individuals from deportation who arrived in the US with their parents before their 16th birthday. The decision puts added pressure on Congress after years of avoiding the issue, but it is not clear the administration will be able to score a solution by March, as it faces several other high-stakes deadlines this fall.

The coming fight over DACA and broader immigration reform is first emerging among Republicans. As noted in Politico, "A growing number of Republican lawmakers are softening toward Dreamers, but others say Trump can’t end the program fast enough". It will also test Steve Bannon's influence outside the White House.

But policy is only the surface in a long-standing discussion on immigration policy. To understand that, anyone interested needs to go back to the basics. 

To do that, I recommend Matthew Yglesias' long piece arguing that, while policy can be improved, America needs to acknowledge its greatness depends on welcoming foreigners. "The beginning of wisdom on immigration policy is that immigrants are people," Yglesias says in Vox. "Indeed, when you take the foreigner element out of it, most people correctly grasp that depopulation is not an economic growth strategy". Quite the contrary, they add to the nation's growth, wage levels, fiscal revenues, as well as the nation's diversity and richness.

Bloomberg's Noah Smith, meanwhile, says that "as the world’s economic center of gravity shifts toward Asia, the US will have to work harder to maintain its advantage". And far from being a problem, immigrants are essential to prop up the US' economic dynamism. "Knock out that pillar, and the edifice could well crumble," Smith writes.