The One Point

• Fiscal responsibility – taxes: It is a waste of our tax money to detain and deport students, veterans and working people. Time and money spent on targeting DACA recipients is not being spent going after any actual “bad guys,” so this does nothing to make America safer.

 

• Fiscal responsibility – economy: Economists at the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and other sources say that ending DACA “would be incredibly costly to the economy while accomplishing little.” Ending DACA will have a negative impact on the economy due to loss of revenue and interference with the labor market.

 

• Law and order – DACA recipients have done the right thing by following the regulations to become registered under the program. Targeting them punishes people who are playing by the rules and discourages others from choosing to act lawfully.

 

• Common sense – You may feel that by giving their children official status, DACA in effect rewards undocumented parents. If this bothers you, you are entitled to your feelings. But in the U.S.A. you are not legally responsible for others’ choices and you cannot be punished because your family member acts unlawfully. DACA children are not responsible for their parents’ actions. They have done nothing but grow up in America to become ordinary students, service members, working people and taxpayers. Regardless of their parents’ choices, spending our tax dollars to deport DACA recipients makes no sense.

Race is in the news again. A black or brown person has been treated in a certain way. And going by the Golden Rule, it’s not a way that you would want to be treated – they were thrown out of a public place, or had the authorities called on them, or were shot by an officer of the law.

The person who treated them that way was white or lighter-skinned, and people are saying that race was a factor.

You want to show that it wasn’t about race. That we shouldn’t accuse the person who did this of being prejudiced. That the officer had reason to fear, the neighbor who called the police had reason to be concerned, etc. You are giving that person the benefit of the doubt.

In doing that, you are giving the black or brown person in this story the opposite – the deficit of the doubt. You are looking for reasons why it made sense to treat them in a way that you wouldn’t want to be treated. Looking for how they might have been suspicious or threatening or disruptive. Looking for reasons why treating them badly was justified.

When you give people with lighter skin the benefit of the doubt, while giving people with darker skin the deficit of the doubt, you cannot claim that you see and treat everyone equally regardless of race.

Looking for the best in lighter-skinned people and the worst in darker-skinned people. . . that is what prejudice is.

We all have prejudices. Making assumptions and snap judgments is a habit all humans fall into. But it’s a bad habit, and one that we need to resist in ourselves. Because the habit of seeing darker-skinned people as less worthy of benefit and more worthy of deficit is the seed of racism.