Hillary Walsh. Photo credit: Katie Levine
The first promise extended to the young people now known as DACA recipients was never permanence. It was reprieve. In 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals offered something narrow but profound: the ability to work legally without the daily fear of deportation. For many, it meant a driver’s license, a paycheck, and a chance to imagine adulthood. What it did not offer was an end.
More than a decade later, that unfinished sentence defines an entire generation of professionals – doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists – living their lives in two-year increments. Every renewal reopens the question of belonging. Every expiration notice reinforces the truth many would rather avoid: DACA was designed as a pause, not a future.
Hillary Walsh has built her work around disrupting that quiet cruelty.
The Two-Year Interval as a Way of Life
Roughly 580,000 people currently hold active DACA status. Most entered the program as teenagers. Today, many are in their thirties, embedded in the American economy, raising families, supervising teams, publishing research, building companies. Yet their legal lives remain frozen in time.
The documents expire every two years. Careers do not.
This is the contradiction Hillary Walsh confronts. As an immigration lawyer whose practice focuses on employment-based green cards for DACA recipients, she works at the intersection of ambition and legal constraint – where success does not guarantee security.
“DACA gave people PERMISSION TO WORK,
but it NEVER gave them permission to stay,” Walsh has said.
“THAT GAP has real CONSEQUENCES
when people are PLANNING THEIR LIVES.”
Those consequences are not abstract. A delayed renewal can mean job loss. A denied advance parole can derail professional opportunities. A policy shift can turn long-term plans into overnight contingencies. Stability, for many DACA professionals, remains conditional.
What the Economy Already Knows
For all the political noise surrounding immigration, the economic picture is clearer than the rhetoric suggests. The U.S. fertility rate has fallen to about 1.6 births per woman – well below replacement level. As older workers retire, fewer young Americans are entering the labor market to replace them.
Federal forecasters have warned that immigration will account for nearly all population growth in the coming decade. Without it, labor force growth slows, tax revenue weakens, and industries already strained – health care, technology, education – face deeper shortages.
DACA recipients sit squarely inside this reality. They are statistically more educated than the national average, highly employed, and deeply integrated into sectors the economy depends on. The idea that their status should remain temporary is less a policy position than a failure of imagination.
“We talk about LABOR SHORTAGES and INNOVATIONS
as if TALENT appears on ITS OWN. But many
of the PEOPLE already doing THIS WORK are being told
to wait INDEFINITELY.”
The Legal Paths Hidden in Plain Sight
The dominant narrative around DACA treats its recipients as politically trapped – dependent on legislative action that never arrives. Walsh’s work challenges that assumption. U.S. immigration law already contains employment-based pathways to permanent residence: PERM labor certification, National Interest Waivers, and EB-1 categories for individuals with substantial professional records.
These routes are complex. They require planning, evidence, and, often, employer participation. They are also lawful and present.
Doctors serving underserved communities, researchers advancing applied science, journalists with national recognition, engineers building AI systems, even content creators with demonstrable cultural and economic impact can, in certain circumstances, qualify. What has been missing is not eligibility, but attention.
“MOST people have been told their ONLY HOPE
is POLITICS. That keeps them STUCK, even when
the LAW already gives them OPTIONS.”
Redefining Stability
Hillary Walsh’s argument is not sentimental. It is structural. Stability is not a feeling; it is a legal condition that determines where a life can go. Without it, even success becomes fragile.
In reframing the conversation, she is challenging two audiences at once. To DACA professionals, she is insisting that achievement can, and should, translate into permanence. To employers, she is pressing a quieter question: what responsibility accompanies reliance?
“If someone is ESSENTIAL to your
ORGANIZATION, then helping them
secure LASTING STATUS is not
extraordinary. It’s PRACTICAL.”
The future of work in America will be shaped less by slogans than by decisions like these – by whether institutions see the people sustaining them as temporary labor or permanent citizens-in-waiting.
For a generation raised on deferred action, that distinction is everything.
Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam
