DACA increases diversity in American society and the workforce

The argument

In many counties in different states, there is a lot of diversity in DACA recipients. Recipients come from various countries from Central and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean, so the population the programme covers is not drawn from a single region or background. The presence of people from many different backgrounds and giving them the opportunity to enroll in school and the workforce create a diversity of ideas and styles which helps in creativity and innovation in the United States. Medicine is offered as the clearest case. Giving eligibility for DACA recipients to enroll in medical school has important implications for the medical field. Many dreamers have a low-income upbringing, bilingual skills, racial and ethnic diversity, and unique cultural backgrounds that could be assets to addressing barriers in healthcare and communication with patients. Those qualities are not incidental to the work: a patient who cannot communicate with a clinician, or who does not trust one, receives worse care, and a workforce drawn from the same communities as the patients is better placed to close that gap. The scale of the shortfall shows how much room there is to close. The ethnic diversity in the medical field is very small: only 5.8% of doctors are Latino/Hispanic, 17.1% are Asian, and 5% are black. Measured against figures like those, a programme that opens professional training to a large and varied group of people already living in the country represents a meaningful source of the doctors the field currently lacks. DACA helps increase the diversity of experiences, opinions, and skills in the medical field and in many other environments, which is why proponents argue it should remain and expand.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Most DACA recipients are from one or few ethnicities. For example, about 61% are of Latino origins. DACA does not majorly contribute to the diversity of the United States. With the presence or absence of DACA, the US will still achieve high diversity through other immigration systems which would continue to add different perspectives and promote creativity and innovation in the country.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The range of countries conceals the distribution. Around four in five recipients were born in Mexico, with a further concentration in a small number of Central American countries, so the population is considerably narrower than a list of continents suggests. [Rejecting P2] The link from demographic variety to creativity and innovation is asserted rather than shown, and it is the weakest available case for the policy. Recipients arrived as children and were largely educated in American schools, so a distinctively foreign perspective is not obviously what they bring; and if diversity is the criterion, immigration policy in general delivers it far more directly, this programme being a small part of it. [Rejecting P3] The medical example does not carry the conclusion. Recipients cannot practise in every state, the number who have completed medical training is small in absolute terms, and bilingualism and shared background are advantages that admissions and recruitment policy would secure more directly. The stronger arguments for the programme — that recipients were brought as children with no say, have lived their whole lives in the country, and that removal separates families — are set aside in favour of a workforce-composition claim the numbers do not support.