I live in the US as a legal alien with student visa, and none of my family members lives here nor has a green card or citizenship. So, everything going on about DACA or immigration law has been out of my attention.
Well, as a job seeker, not being a green card holder actually affects me on getting a full time job since a lot of companies don’t want to do the paper works for me. But still, I wasn’t really interested in all these issues going on these days until I saw a comment on a YouTube video uploaded by Vox.
Basically, DACA is “a permit that protects you from getting deported and allows you to work legally in the U.S.” (here, “you” meaning by a person who was brought into the U.S. by her/his parents when she/he was under 16)
This video explains the background of how DACA came into effect under Obama’s administration and what is going to happen when it is rescinded as Trump and his administration intend to. (mostly in the perspective of DACA recipients)
So, after watching this video with almost zero knowledge of DACA previously, I was expecting to see comments criticizing Trump. However, surprisingly there was a lot of comments criticizing DACA and its recipients including this Korean American guy who came into the U.S. at the age of 3 for heart surgery.
Under his comments, a lot of replies by people who disagree with DACA and think that its recipients are taking advantage of legal Americans were followed.
The most frequent response was “go back to your country and come back legally” like Aidan Kelly and Maria Smith.
Some people defend Taewoo Kim by saying that the naturalization and immigration process is not as simple and takes way too long, which makes it hard for people to move into America legally and makes a system like DACA inevitable.
Their response might be offensive to a person who already have obtained citizenship after going through the long process and paying a huge amount of money like Maria Smith who mentioned that Taewoo Kim should go back to Korea and do military service.
Seeing all these comments, I couldn’t support any of the sides because both of their points seemed to make sense. (I exclude all the racists and haters’ comments)
People who moved here at a young age had no choice but to follow their parents whether they decided to move for safety reason or financial reason. Since they were raised and went through most of education in America, most likely they are Americanized and would be hard to adjust in a country where they came from or don’t even speak their language if they go back.
But if a program like DACA exists, there will be people who might use it as a means to skip the immigration process and be a citizen eventually using their kids. I’ve actually heard of a case like that and thought that might be one of the biggest problems with DACA.
The thing is, there are already a lot of children of undocumented immigrants who have obtained DACA. What Trump is trying to do is to take it back all of a sudden. It just doesn’t sound right. Are they all going to be deported after DACA is revoked since they are officially illegal immigrants without DACA?
Also thinking about the foundation of America, aren’t they a country of immigrants? If undocumented immigrants are doing well as a part of American society, don’t they need to be accepted as a citizen? But what about the legal immigrants who have been already paying tax and paid their time and money to get citizenship?
It just leaves me a lot of questions that contradict each other, so… like really, I do not know what is right or wrong.
A Korean 