President Donald Trump has created a new rift between his party and corporate America with the decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which helped protect from the threat of deportation thousands of young undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as minors.
The chief executives of many companies were outraged by the move, calling the decision immoral and likely to cause chaos in the labor market. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, said it was a sad day for the US, and that the decision was not just wrong, but cruel to young people, with the government encouraging them to pursue the American dream, only to now punish them for doing so.
The chief executive of Apple, Tim Cook, was equally unimpressed, saying that he was “deeply dismayed” that around 800,000 Americans, which includes over 250 of his company’s employees, could soon be ejected from the only country they have ever known. Business leaders echoed the President’s call for deferred action beneficiaries to gain help from Congress, but the conflict has grown between Trump and corporate America for some time, with a multitude of companies, including Ford, and Google also expressing their support for Dreamers.
The tech lobbying group, Fwd.us, co-founded by Zuckerberg, had warned that ending the deferred action program would see around 30,000 young immigrants lose their jobs every month. This would cause an estimated loss of as much as $460 billion to the gross domestic product of the US over the next decade.