The political debate over the fate of
"DREAMers" — undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children —
has overlooked just how many there are in the country today: about
3.6 million.
That number of people
whose lives risk being uprooted is not widely known, in large part
because so much public attention has been focused recently on 800,000
mostly young DREAMers accepted into the Obama-era Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
This smaller group of DREAMers is in the spotlight because President Trump terminated DACA in September, saying it was an illegal overreach of executive authority that can only come from Congress, which is negotiating with Trump on a compromise immigration plan.
While
many politicians use DREAMer and DACA interchangeably, the terms are
"not a distinction without a difference," said House Minority Whip Rep.
Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
DREAMers got their name from the
DREAM Act, a bill that has been proposed in Congress since 2001, but
never passed, that would protect that group of immigrants.
The
3.6 million estimate of undocumented immigrants brought to U.S. before
their 18th birthday comes from the Migration Policy Institute, a
non-partisan, non-profit think tank that studies global immigration
patterns. That is roughly a third of all undocumented immigrants in the
country and does not include millions of their immediate family members
who are U.S. citizens.
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