DACA and Resetting of Inclusion and Exclusion at Federal and Local Levels/Evolving Impacts on Immigrant Families

• In Event: 3149 - Understanding the Social, Legal, and Political Ramifications of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)

Abstract

This paper will report findings from a longitudinal study of the long term effects of lacking, having or gaining or losing legal status (especially Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA,) for the life chances of individuals, their families/friends, across what I call legal status and institutional ecosystems. Analytically, DACA created a population of legal status “category changers” that can help illuminate legal status effects. This research is underway, originally embedded within a larger service-evaluation project. This paper will report findings from our research to date, which is continuing through 2021. First, the project compares the trajectories of persons having/lacking legal status over the medium and long term, and identifies how local variation in ecosystems integrates or protects, and/or excludes or exploits them. Second, the project is documenting how the ecosystems themselves are changing -- being made more or less exclusionary -- in response to several factors. The new administration has tried to reset immigration federalism to punish inclusionary ecosystems, and reward exclusionary ones. But the push back to the current president, and the liberating effects of getting DACA or other, permanent, legal status, have driven a push to make some ecosystems more inclusionary, including some that were most exclusionary before.

Authors

• Robert Courtney Smith, City University of New York-Baruch College, Graduate Center

• Guillermo Yrizar Barbosa, CUNY Graduate Center