American Dreams: How DACA Shaped the Political Identities of the Dreamers

• In Event: Politicizing the Immigrant Experience

Abstract

President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) strongly influenced American immigration policy, yet, little research examines its political consequences on potential beneficiaries. I employ “Policy Feedback” scholarship to examine how DACA shaped the political identities of eligible individuals. Such scholarship indicates that generous policies bolster beneficiaries’ efficacy and status, while restrictive and paternalistic policies reduce efficacy and status. DACA provides an ideal case to test this theory given its generous benefits and onerous requirements. DACA’s age of arrival eligibility cutoff enables comparisons that show the policy’s influence on the attitudes of the eligible. I leverage this variation by drawing on numerous survey datasets—collected before, months after, and years after enactment—to test how individuals’ attachment to various identities (panethnic, national heritage, American) and levels of political efficacy causally relate to DACA eligibility. Specifically, I implement regression discontinuity designs across the eligibility cutoff, on survey measures of identity and efficacy. I find no evidence that DACA eased immigrant incorporation (by increasing American identity or solidarity with other immigrant groups). Instead, DACA instantiated political alienation in beneficiaries relative to those most narrowly ineligible. This project advances policy studies, showing how even generous immigration policies can attenuate political incorporation, fueling beneficiaries’ political alienation. Second, it traces how policy can solidify racial/ethnic difference, as even relatively advantaged immigrants were politically alienated by DACA. This project, also, details how policy delineates American civic membership: it illustrates how democratic contestation over difference forecloses immigrant incorporation into the polity.

Author

• Colin Cepuran, Cornell University