Immigrants have been front-line warriors fighting the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, providing medical care, picking field crops, disinfecting buildings, and delivering food and groceries to your front door. In the same vein, these workers will be critical, once the pandemic abates, to kickstart a decimated economy — but only if the Trump administration drops its misguided attacks on undocumented workers.
One of those immigrants is Paola Sanchez, an Ashland resident who works at a suburban hospital helping uninsured patients get coverage, mostly through MassHealth. The 30-year-old native of Bolivia is able to work legally because of a program instituted by the Obama administration that protects from deportation those immigrants unlawfully brought to this country as children and grants them work authorization. Sanchez, who was 14 years old when she arrived in the United States, is part of a population of nearly 700,000 immigrants protected by the program whose fate sits in the hands of the US Supreme Court after Trump attempted to kill the protections two-and-a-half years ago.
Now the Trump administration has a straightforward opportunity to ensure that those young adults, known as Dreamers, at the very least remain in the workforce: Trump should reinstate the program, which has had a huge social and economic impact not just on its beneficiaries but also on their entire households, including an estimated 250,000 children who are US citizens. America cannot afford to lose such a productive part of its labor force during a global pandemic.
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