Rachael Smith |
Last week Donald Trump unfortunately spoke up and claimed that he was terminating DACA. This stands for “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals”. The programme gives children who immigrated with their parents to America when they were very young a working permit to stay in the country. The destruction of this programme is catastrophic; the help it has delivered to close to a million child immigrants has been second to none, and now its all being torn away.
The defiling of this programme means hard-working citizens will be sent back to countries they have never known or can’t recall because they have lived in the US for as long as they can remember. Families will be torn apart. Students who live under the DACA programme will have to leave their hard-fought education, job opportunities and their very own home behind.
Trump supporters ignorantly argue that the children of DACA aren’t paying taxes as they are immigrants, so why should they receive the benefits, such as education, that the wonderful United States provides for them? Well the answer to that question is that undocumented families pay tax on their homes and on their employment, just like every other American family. They also pay for their own college educations or earn their own private scholarships. They don’t “steal” anything from your under achieving, academically-average, all-american kids.
Also right-wing supporters have claimed that the DREAMERS absolutely must be criminals, just because they weren’t born in America! First off, that is a racist stereotype that everyone must stop perpetuating – as it promotes the underlying systematic racism and oppression of the white population.
Further, the statement is flawed – one of the fundamental requirements to be accepted into the DACA programme is that applicants must have a perfect record. So yet again another discriminatory argument disguised as fake facts – simply debunked by actual evidence and a little bit of simple research.
So what can we do to stop this social injustice? Currently, protests are taking place all over the United States and some DREAMERS are fasting for days on end to prove their point and get across just how important DACA is to them.
The hash-tag #DefendDACA has gone viral and raised awareness about the problem all over several social media platforms. Over here in the UK we can aid by staying aware of what’s going on, donate to various charities and Go-Fund-Me accounts and contact American politicians on the matter.
