We may throw away the dreamers...

...but the judgment of history will be severe

If Congress cannot reach agreement on legislation that will save the Dreamers from deportation, the consequences will include existential and psychological trauma for hundreds of thousands of individuals and their families. It will create real economic and social disruption in the communities where the Dreamers live (by and large, they are concentrated in a few cities and states around the country, where they work, raise families of their own and pay taxes). And most of them will be deported to countries where they have never lived and where, in many cases, even the language is unfamiliar or seems foreign.

But it will also be only the most recent example of legislative or court action by a majority to throw away a treasure of human resources, both untapped and already developed. Of course, there are plenty of monumental precedents for such action; a constitution that formally enshrined slavery, for example, or the Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson decisions by the Supreme Court, or centuries of legislation limiting or denying women's rights. All such formal decisions to limit the life and work possibilities of women and people of color came at a huge cost both to them individually and to the collective benefit we might have shared had we opened the way for their fullest participation in our economic, social and cultural life. And an equally strong argument could be made outlining the economic and social costs of witch hunts, lynchings and ad hoc and systemic abuse of excluded or marginalized groups.

But what will be clarified in the moment that Congress and the President make the final decision to fail the Dreamers is that the United States will continue its historic commitment to throwing away human lives and talent regardless of the price we pay individually and collectively. An estimate of the abandoned investment in the Dreamers based on the cost of education alone suggests that we are talking about deporting a minimum of 700,000 people in whom the country has already invested tens of billions of dollars.

 The average cost of elementary and secondary public education is upwards of $10,000 per year. That means that we have spent more than $7 billion annually for 12 years--$84 billion total--to get the Dreamers through high school and into college or the work force. That estimate goes way up if we assume that there are another 300,000 to 500,000 individuals across the United States who might have qualified under the Dream Act who didn't even bother to apply, but have also been educated in the public schools. Even assuming that a bare minimum of those, say 50,000, were further educated at community colleges or state universities our investment in the education of the entire Dreamer cohort is well over a hundred billion dollars, perhaps much higher.

Now, as the moment arrives for the Dreamers to begin and/or advance their full participation in the workforce, we are poised to throw them away. When we do, we are throwing away not only the money we have already invested but also the economic value of their future careers. That number is likely on the order of, say, two or three million dollars per Dreamer; spread over careers lasting a minimum of forty years, perhaps much more. During those careers, they easily would earn more than $2 trillion dollars and pay at least $350 billion in local, state, federal and social security taxes.

The total value  of the collective benefit from what they might have invented and created that may not materialize without them is incalculable. How, after all, do we calculate the value of the things we fail to achieve? Of the hardware and software and art that might have been?

All that we will know for certain after Congress and the White House conspire, once more, to undermine our collective American Dream, is that our long national nightmare of racism, sexism, homophobia and persistent wastefulness is manifested once more. How does it happen that inexhaustible bigotry, and the waste associated with that bigotry, turns out to be an organizing principle in American life? How does it happen that a majority of American citizens endorse (or acquiesce in) that outcome?