Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Donald Trump promised an immigration crackdown as soon as he announced his run for the Presidency. Within minutes of that unforgettable entrance by escalator, he accused Mexico of sending drugs, crime, and rapists into the United States, and he never let up on the ethnic insults and xenophobia. Under President Trump, the crackdown has come in many forms, beginning with the slapdash ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries. Trump has vowed to triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers; expand the Border Patrol, despite plummeting apprehensions; withhold federal funding to “sanctuary cities”; and, of course, build a wall. In the first half of 2017, arrests of undocumented immigrants rose nearly forty per cent above arrests made in the first half of 2016, and arrests of noncriminal immigrants more than doubled. Last month, Trump backed legislation that would cut legal immigration by half. Then, last week, after months of reassuring the nearly seven hundred thousand Dreamers—recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, created by President Obama in 2012 to give young undocumented immigrants who had been brought to this country as children the chance to live, study, and work legally—that he “loved” them and that they should “rest easy,” he cancelled the program.

Ending DACA was not, to be fair, an easy decision for him. As with other issues, he found himself caught between the Bannonite nationalists and the relative moderates on his staff. A group of ten conservative state attorneys general, led by Ken Paxton, of Texas, had threatened to file a lawsuit against DACA, which they consider to be unconstitutional, by September 5th. There were suggestions that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a passionate opponent of DACA, was quietly advising Paxton. Trump, according to the Times, demanded that his aides find him “a way out.”

What they came up with was a plan to phase out the program in an “orderly, lawful wind-down,” and to have Sessions make the announcement. He flatly called DACA “unconstitutional,” and said that it had “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans.” He added that the failure of previous Administrations to enforce immigration laws “has put our nation at risk of crime, violence, and terrorism,” and that it was his job to strengthen “the impartial rule of law.” In fact, DACA has successfully survived court challenges to its constitutionality, and the notion that it has caused economic harm is pure canard. Connecting Dreamers, moreover, to crime, violence, and terrorism is both absurd—anyone convicted of a serious crime is ineligible—and a tactic drawn straight from the nativist-demagogue playbook.

Is cancelling DACA the worst single decision Trump has made? In terms of immediate human suffering and sheer moral obtuseness, yes. The Dreamers trusted the federal government with their personal information, including fingerprints and addresses. Their status was always temporary—they had to apply for renewal every two years—but they were assured that their information would not be used against them. Dreamers were able to get Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses, go to college, work, buy cars and homes, start businesses. In a recent survey, ninety-one per cent were employed, and forty-five per cent were enrolled in classes. Many have no memory of the countries in which they were born. They are, in a word, Americans. But six months from now, and possibly sooner, they will begin losing their work permits, their places in college, their businesses, their legal right to be in this country. They will start living in fear of deportation. The cruelty of it is staggering.

According to the Times, “As late as one hour before the decision was to be announced, administration officials privately expressed concern that Mr. Trump might not fully grasp the details of the steps he was about to take, and when he discovered their full impact, would change his mind.” Trump did seem misinformed about what Dreamers now face, and afterward, when he began to register the enormous consternation his decision had caused, he did appear to change his mind. The phaseout gives Congress six months in which to “legalize DACA,” he tweeted. “If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!” What that meant was unclear: DACA was legal until he struck it down. His real point, though, was obvious: the ball is in Congress’s court now, so stop looking at me.

Last week, Politico reported that seventy-six per cent of Americans think that Dreamers should be granted citizenship or resident status, and versions of a Dream Act have been rattling around Capitol Hill since 2001. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has issued a statement saying that rescinding DACA is “contrary to fundamental American principles and the best interests of our country.” But the hard-shell nativists in Congress (Jeff Sessions was their leader in the Senate) have blocked all immigration-reform efforts for a generation. Meanwhile, sixteen Democratic state attorneys general have already filed suit in federal court in Brooklyn, alleging that the cancellation of DACA was driven not by the reasons given but by racial animus. (The purported reverence for the impartial rule of law may seem like a stretch after Trump pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio, his fellow-birther, and described the sheriff’s lengthy reign of racial terror as “doing his job.”) Microsoft and Amazon plan to support the suit and have pledged to pay the legal expenses of employees left vulnerable by DACA’s disappearance.

Deporting or simply disemploying Dreamers will not benefit the economy in any way. Indeed, it is estimated that the loss of the Dreamers’ output will reduce the G.D.P. by several hundred billion dollars over a decade. The “economic nationalism” of this Administration’s nativists is really a political calculation—shared anti-immigrant feeling is a bonding experience for the base. It’s even electoral; for some conservatives, one of the undesirable things about Dreamers is the suspicion that, if they become citizens, they will vote Democratic.

The truth is that the U.S. economy needs immigrants, including those who are currently undocumented. In Houston, contractors rebuilding the city following Hurricane Harvey say that their work will be slowed by a labor shortage, made worse by the reluctance of undocumented workers to show their faces while the state’s Republican leadership is on the political warpath against sanctuary cities. The workforce that rebuilt New Orleans after Katrina is estimated to have been twenty-five per cent undocumented. Native-born Americans are an aging population; we need young immigrants to keep things ticking. But the question of the treatment of Dreamers is, in the end, an ethical one. What kind of people are we? How do we treat the strangers at our door? The Dreamers aren’t even strangers. We’ve known them almost all their lives. ♦