Businesses Fight for DREAMers

Dozens of the world’s biggest multinational and technology firms have teamed up in an attempt to help ‘Dreamers’ to remain in the US as time runs out on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, created by President Barack Obama.

 

65 industry and business groups, including the likes of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple, signed a petition to Democratic and Republican lawmakers. The petition says that 800,000 working, studying, and serving Dreamers will soon lose their jobs and be forced to leave the country they have grown up in, and that a failure to act on this issue by Congress would also cost the nation as much as $215 billion via the national GDP, and a further $24.6 billion from Medicare and social security tax contributions.

 

General Motors, IBM, Uber, Mars, and Hewlett-Packard are also among those taking action. Hospitality firms, such as Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott, together with dozens of tech groups are also putting their names to the petition. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is set to expire in March 2018. DACA allows undocumented immigrants who came to the US as minors to legally work in the country and protects them from deportation.

 

A group of bipartisan lawmakers has raised hopes of a legislative solution. But there are fears that political wrangling, as well as other issues such as healthcare and tax reform, could see the failure of a resolution reached before the deadline.