For the past year and a half, the United States has been battling the COVID-19 pandemic along with the ensuing economic fallout. Now, Congress and the Biden-Harris Administration’s biggest task, along with tackling the virus itself, is to chart the course for our country’s economic recovery. One way to boost the economy for all? Put the approximately 10.4 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States on a pathway to citizenship. Doing so would magnify their fiscal and economic contributions while adding up to $1.7 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. It would also ensure that families can remain together, a case that is particularly urgent for the hundreds of thousands of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and their loves ones, who, after living under a cloud of constant legal uncertainty, are now faced with the greatest threat to their livelihood and well-being after a negative court ruling out of a federal court in Texas in mid-July.
The above excerpt was originally published in Democracy Journal.
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