A Typical ‘Dreamer’ Lives in Los Angeles, Is From Mexico and Came to the U.S. at 6 Years Old

The future of hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants remains in doubt as lawmakers struggle to pass a deal to maintain protections for the beneficiaries of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

President Trump ordered an end to the program in September, and lawmakers have until March 5 to come up with a replacement. Here’s who the roughly 800,000 DACA beneficiaries, known as Dreamers, are.

From the start of the program in 2012 to March 2017, 28 percent of initial acceptances were for immigrants living in California. In the first year of the program, 14 percent lived in the Los Angeles metro area. (The Department of Homeland Security has not released detailed geographic data since then.)

Once accepted into the program, which defers deportation for two years, a vast majority of recipients apply for renewal. In the 20 states with the largest DACA populations, 93 percent of those eligible for renewal through last year applied.

A vast majority of DACA recipients are Latino, with 79 percent coming from Mexico. Also, eligible immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador were the most likely to apply for the program. Eighty-four percent of Mexicans and 83 percent of Salvadorans applied in 2016. Immigrants from Asian countries have some of the lowest application rates — less than 30 percent of eligible applicants applied from the Philippines, India and South Korea.

According to a 2017 online survey of more than 3,000 DACA recipients, the median age of entry into the United States was 6 years old, and the most common age was 3. The current age of DACA recipients ranges from 16 to 35 years old. The survey was conducted by Tom K. Wong, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, along with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and immigration advocacy groups.

According to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, immigrant workers who are eligible for DACA have higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs than undocumented immigrants who are ineligible. For example, DACA-eligible workers are more likely to work in sales and office jobs and less likely to work in construction, cleaning and maintenance jobs.

There are several reasons for the differences. Unauthorized immigrants who are DACA-eligible are likely to have been in the United States for longer. They also have higher levels of education: Current enrollment in school or a high school diploma or equivalent is required.

But according to Randy Capps, a research director at the Migration Policy Institute, participation in the DACA program also helps immigrants rise into more white-collar occupations, in part because those jobs may be more likely to validate a Social Security number than some lower-skilled jobs.

Survey participants echoed this trend, with 69 percent saying that they “got a job with better pay” after being approved for DACA and 56 percent saying they “got a job with improved work conditions.”