In immigration law, “continuous residence” does not mean what it seems to mean in ordinary speech. Immigration law allows people to claim “continuous residence” even if they return to their country of origin for visits (plural!) of up to six months each.

Likewise, the “no more than three misdemeanors” tally for aspiring Dreamers carries some fine print. DACA will count all the charges arising from a particular incident as a single misdemeanor. A DACA applicant who drives past the speed limit while intoxicated and then resists arrest (all potential misdemeanors in most states) will be counted as having committed one misdemeanor, not three. Nor can we feel any certainty that the public records will reveal all the charges against an applicant. Illegal immigrants sometimes use more than one identity—and their documents do not always tell the truth about their ages either.

As for the educational requirement, Jon Feere of the immigration-skeptical Center for Immigration Studies explains how it has already begun to fade:

The new DACA guidelines note that certain sections of the application can be skipped if the alien is renewing. One section that can now be left blank is the "Education Information" section. In other words, illegal aliens who applied for DACA two years ago and have since dropped out of school are still eligible to receive the amnesty.

This is not a minor loophole. The Migration Policy Institute—a group strongly sympathetic to Obama’s policies—calculates that of the 2.28 million people who potentially meet the age requirements for DACA status, some 473,000 will not be able to meet its requirement for a high-school diploma, current enrollment in school, or honorable completion of military service.

And even the Migration Policy Institute’s shocking number may nevertheless still overestimate the number of DACA Dreamers who will ultimately graduate from high school. The question is not, how many potential Dreamers fail the educational requirement today? The question is, how many Dreamers who were enrolled in school on the date they applied for DACA will remain in school until graduation? Mexican immigrants, who account for about three-quarters of Dreamers, have far and away the highest dropout rate. In 2011, The New York Times studied Census data for Mexican migrants aged 16 to 19 living in New York City, both legal and illegal, and found that 41 percent of them had dropped out of high school. “No other major immigrant group has a dropout rate higher than 20 percent, and the overall rate for the city is less than 9 percent,” the Times reported. The president’s promise that young Dreamers will someday staff America’s nursing wards and EMT ambulances looks unlikely to be fulfilled.

Beneath all of this is the bedrock problem of illegal immigration into an advanced society. In 1914, it was perfectly plausible that the son of an unskilled laborer would acquire a skilled trade. The skilled worker’s children would then advance into business and the professions, achieving the upward mobility of the American dream.