Caribbean Dreamers Caught in the USA Immigration Crisis

Immigration reform in the United States has been a longstanding dispute divided along partisan lines. Broadly speaking, the Democrats argue for greater leniency on illegal arrivals, claiming that this embodies the best traditions of embracing immigrants to the US and the economic progress they can drive. The Republicans argue for a more hard-line position, maintaining that leniency ultimately endangers the emigrant traditions held by emigrants who go through lawful processes. Now, with under a year to go until the 2020 presidential election, with a landmark Supreme Court case expected to return a decision beforehand, the issue of immigration reform is reaching a critical point, given the sharp differences between the two major parties, with the fate of millions of illegal residents of America hanging in the balance.

So how may members of the Caribbean family residing illegally in the US be impacted in the months ahead? And is the White House failing to pursue a real solution to the issue?

A Difficult Journey

Although immigration has long been a volatile topic in the US, recent years have seen it become more high-octane. The Trump administration is pursuing the construction of a giant wall along the nation’s southern border. For President Trump and his supporters, the wall is helping to “take back control” of America’s borders. To critics, the wall and other advents, like the family separation policy, have compounded the misery on refugees and defy the US’s long history of accepting those fleeing horrors elsewhere. 

Central to this debate is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. DACA is an Obama-era executive-issued directive that recommends “prosecutorial discretion” when it comes to deporting illegal immigrants who arrived in the country as children, and also allows them a capacity to work and study. 

Following initial movement in this direction in 2012, in 2014 the Homeland Security Department, under President Obama, announced a substantial expansion of its “deferred action” executive direction that would give some cover to up to millions of individuals working in the US who are parents of American children. 

Although in effect for a number of years, these directives were not congressionally authorised. Alongside the ongoing bickering in Congress surrounding formal enactment into law, Donald Trump’s election to the White House gave him the authority to reverse the decisions of his predecessor, and he did so.

The Future of DACA

Presently, a DACA bill has made its way through the Democrat majority-controlled House. Its prospects of passing the Republican-majority Senate are far less promising, at least in the next few months. Yet, over a dozen of the remaining 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have expressed support for giving citizenship to “Dreamers” and there’s every expectation that a new Democratic Party president will bring about a sharp shift in policy from Trump. 

Meanwhile a case now sits with the Supreme Court that asks the nation’s highest judiciary to rule on the scope of presidential authority within immigration law and the future of DACA. Although Trump and his supporters are firm in seeking to wind back DACA, Dreamers have some strong supporters in their corner, with tech giant Microsoft notably joining an ancillary case that challenged the DACA rescission.

The Caribbean Connection 

Statistics from 2017 estimate that some 4.4. million immigrants from the Caribbean currently reside in the United States, accounting for around 10% of the total immigrant numbers. Although most immigrants eventually go through the regular processes of naturalisation, for varying reasons not all feel able to do so. What’s more, when it comes to the Caribbean, there are a number of additional considerations in this area of US law that impact on this dynamic.

Following the devastating 2010 earthquake, the US provided Temporary Protection Status to many in the Haitian community across America. Although Homeland Security ended this arrangement in mid-2019, the decision (like others surrounding Temporary Protection Statuses) has faced a subsequent challenge in court.

Via the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act and US-Cuba migration accords, a special arrangement emerged for Cubans arriving in America, commonly known as the ‘wet-foot, dry-foot’ policy. This created a path for Cubans who reached the US with or without a valid visa to obtain legal permanent residency after one year of residing there. This policy has since changed but its legacy remains a factor in collating the population of the Cuban diaspora in the US, and the murky nature of illegal immigration means it’s unclear how many people have arrived or remained there illegally.  Dreamers who arrived as children are estimated to number 700,000 alone and, undoubtedly, the question of deportation is especially harrowing for them. That these individuals arrived in the US while children means, in many cases, the nation is the only one they’ve ever known; their ‘homeland’ to which they could be deported would be a foreign country, for all intents and purposes.

Words and Actions

A longstanding principle of many Americans who reject a more lenient approach to illegal immigrants is the argument, “The best way we can assist these people is to help stabilise their native homelands,” reasoning that in such circumstances it’s a win-win as the US doesn’t have to contend with as many refugees thereafter, and there’s the opportunity for impacted individuals to return home happily.

While past performance is no guarantee of future behaviour, especially in politics, so far throughout his term, Trump has shown a large disinterest in Caribbean and Latin American relations. In some respects this isn’t a radical break from prior presidents but, given that Trump is in so many other ways a radical break from his predecessors and has undoubtedly soured relations in the region, he must be held to a different standard accordingly. 

If he seeks re-election based on his success in immigration, then the year ahead will require his focus domestically to be complemented by an uptick in attention south of the US border, otherwise his first term will show a failure to comprehend that real solutions to illegal immigration from Latin America require action both domestically and regionally.