Carole Segal, the co-founder of Crate & Barrel, and a co-chairman of the Illinois Business Immigration Coalition Steering Committee, urged President Barack Obama to use an executive order to extend DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] protection to 5 million workers on Wednesday’s “Jose Diaz-Balart” on MSNBC.
“We really would like Congress to become more proactive. However we’re not so sure that that’s going to take place. So we, really, at this point in time, are asking for some deferred action from the president and some administrative relief” she said, adding, “There are 5 million workers right now that we think really could qualify under this [the group’s proposals].”
Segal detailed the coalition’s proposals, stating “we have many, many children in the United States who are born in the United States who are US citizens born here, but their parents are undocumented. So we ask for the DACA be extended to them … and it could be extended to these parents as well.”
She also seemed to suggest that the illegal immigrant parents of children born in the United States should be given protection under DACA, arguing, “In 2012, 150,000 US citizen children born in America had a parent or both parents deported, for really trivial kind of things. Nothing, they were not really criminals. We really feel that maybe only 1 percent of those parents were criminals.”
When asked about what impact extending protection 5 million people would have the American workforce, Segal responded “they [the workers she wants to extend protection to] are working here, and they’re not taking jobs away from anybody else, and that’s a fallacy. They are working, hard working. Not, doing the jobs that people would do.” And “they do jobs that other people don’t want to do.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.