Michael Smolens: It’s a no-brainer — DACA is good for San Diego, America vice today.”

San Diego leaders across the spectrum lay out economic and social benefits of program providing temporary legal status for young immigrant "Dreamers"

A broad spectrum of San Diego business, labor, community and political leaders sent a straightforward message this week.

The Trump administration must stop suspiciously long delays in approving renewal applications for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients that are threatening their ability to work and remain in the country.

But they had a broader, equally important goal: to remind the public that people with DACA status are a boon to the economy in San Diego and the country at large. Not only should renewals be expedited, they said, but recipients should be given permanent residency status.

At a Tuesday news conference outside the downtown office of the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS), Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, noted that to qualify for DACA, immigrants must show they are working or in school or in the military — and, he added, “most important, you can’t be in trouble with the law.

“By definition, people covered by the DACA program are the kind of people we want to join us as Americans,” he said.

In 2025, the median wait time for renewals was 15 days. In February of this year, it was 70 days, according to USCIS data, an increase of more than 400 percent. About 8,000 immigrant “Dreamers,” as DACA recipients are often called, reside in the San Diego region and some 500,000 across the country.

“For more than a decade, Dreamers have strengthened our economy,” said Chris Cate, president and CEO of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce and a former Republican City Council member.

He said DACA recipients contribute about $968 million annually to the regional economy.

The DACA boost to the economy is not a new story. But given that Trump is ramping up efforts to undermine the program — courts so far have blocked him from ending it outright — it’s a story that needs to be revisited regularly.

In terms of raw dollars and cents, the country would lose a great deal if DACA no longer existed, in addition to negative cultural and societal impacts.

More than 80 percent of DACA recipients are in the workforce, according to FWD.us, an organization focused on immigration and criminal justice reform.

Years ago, the Democratic Joint Economic Committee in Congress estimated DACA recipients could add $460 billion to the U.S. economy over the next decade. That was based on 2017 data, when there were about 800,000 DACA recipients.

“DACA recipients contributed, on net, roughly $3.4 billion annually to the federal balance sheet” in 2018, according to the American Action Forum.

DACA was created by President Barack Obama in 2012 to give temporary protection from deportation and grant work permits to qualified undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children. Recipients must reapply every two years to keep their status.

The average DACA recipient is 33 years old and has lived in the U.S. for 27 years, according to FWD.us. It’s the only country most have ever really known.

Almost all have graduated from high school, and nearly half have some college education. About a third are married, and a little more than that have at least one child at home.

Public support for Dreamers has been strong for years. A Gallup poll released this month found 81 percent of Americans support allowing immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.

Democrats and independents overwhelmingly were in favor, as were 56 percent of Republicans.

Courts have kept DACA alive amid challenges by the Trump administration and Republican-run states. While judges allowed renewals for existing participants, they blocked any new applications.

The program has been under assault by Trump since 2017, his first year in the White House, when he tried to kill the program. The fate of DACA is still in the hands of the courts.

Trump has said a lot of nasty things about undocumented immigrants over the years, but his tone has been different about DACA recipients, for whom he has expressed empathy while trying to take away their temporary status.

“We love the Dreamers,” he has said. Just before the start of his current term, he said “we have to do something” to help them.

But the president, who at times has shown disregard for the Constitution, contends that the Obama-created program is unconstitutional and must be approved by Congress.

At one point, Trump probably could have ordered his compliant Republican congressional majorities to achieve a DACA remedy along with like-minded Democrats, but he hasn’t in recent years. Long-ago efforts to give DACA recipients certainty had bogged down in partisan jockeying between Republicans and Democrats.

Prospects of him doing so now seem even more remote, given his dreadful polling numbers — including slippage among Republicans — and potential for alienating his core MAGA base.

DACA critics also have said the program acts as an incentive for illegal immigration, rewards law-breaking, and is unfair to immigrants seeking to come here legally.

Meanwhile, the USCIS has added requirements and expanded security checks for DACA renewals that have slowed the process. Recipients are being advised to reapply much earlier than before.

It’s a familiar Trump administration tactic to deny people government benefits. People are falling out of Medicaid and food stamp programs after the administration enacted more onerous qualifying requirements.

Frustration among the San Diego leaders over DACA delays was palpable on Tuesday.

“They’ve already been approved and vetted,” said Trevor Moore, vice president of the commercial real estate firm Cush Enterprises, whose company counts many small businesses among its clients, including restaurants.

Arcela Nuñez-Alvarez, co-founder and co-director of Universidad Popular, a community-based civic organization, said renewals of 54,000 DACA recipients nationwide are being held up.

“The American Dream has turned into a nightmare overnight,” she said.

The community leaders largely stayed away from Trump’s broader immigration crackdown, which is also impacting the workforce, though no doubt some have strong opinions about it.

They were trying to keep DACA in the public eye as immigration headlines are often dominated by Trump’s mass deportations and aggressive federal immigration raids that have resulted in agents shooting and killing protesters and targets of enforcement.

Carol Kim, executive secretary-treasurer of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, said the Trump squeeze on DACA and immigration in general is impacting numerous sectors, including construction and healthcare research. That, in turn, she said, can impact such things as infrastructure projects and medical advancements.

“We all pay the price,” she said.