As we enter 2018, 800,000 Dreamers await news of their fate in the USA. Trump will soon terminate the only program giving them temporary reprieve from harassment or deportation. When Trump announced last September that he would terminate the Obama-era DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) Program by March, 2018, many Dreamers began protesting in Washington and other cities, seeking to galvanize public support.
In her 2008 study of immigration policy, Illegal, Alien, or Immigrant: The Politics of Immigration Reform, political scientist Lina Newton showed how changing images of immigrants colored debates and influenced legislation in the 1980's and 1990's. Though many Americans expressed concerns in the 1980's about job security when they discussed immigration, they nevertheless acknowledged the contributions that immigrants were making to American society; 61 percent of Americans surveyed in a 1984 Newsweek/Gallup poll agreed with the assertion that "immigrants help improve our culture with their different cultures and talents."
Right-wing Ronald Reagan even signed, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, opening a pathway on which 2.7 million undocumented immigrants would eventually advance to permanent residency.
The 1990's saw the start of a shift in debates about immigration. Playing on Americans' growing economic insecurities, lawmakers, particularly Republicans, increasingly characterized government as an engine of redistribution that shifted citizens' tax dollars to the undeserving, and they lumped into that "undeserving" category both welfare recipients and immigrants.
They not only characterized legal and undocumented immigrants as freeloaders; they also played up a more ominous image of the "criminal alien" who constituted a threat to law and order. They passed the most significant piece of immigration-related legislation, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, unsurprisingly introduced stiffer new enforcement measures while offering no new avenues to permanent residency or citizenship. In the ensuing decades, negative images of immigrants as freeloaders and as threats, played up by politicians (both Republican and Democrat) and nativist ]lobbyists, have continued to predominate in debates about immigration.
Trump's negative and threatening discourse about immigrants has been taken to unprecedented levels, spurring an uptick in hate crimes and bias incidents and creating an atmosphere of fear that many public officials have described as corrosive to public trust in local law enforcement.
The Dreamers continue to remind us of the talents and the promise they can offer.
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/time-for-truth-telling-on-immigration
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