I met someone recently from one of the countries south of the US border that came to the US as a kid. Very talented and hardworking but undocumented. She may be here on the Dream act, but I did not feel it appropriate to ask at the time. Currently she is doing a masters degree in mechatronics and robotics. Schools are are not allowed to ask about status, so she is taking the opportunity to invest as much as possible in her education, however given her skills she also has the ability to earn well.
I was fortunate to be born as a citizen in the US so I don't know how to navigate such issues. As I understand it, it is a minefield for a company to hire undocumented workers, even if they are highly skilled workers. Are undocumented individuals allowed to start companies? Does YC have a stance on this from an investment perspective?
FWIW: there is no DREAM act, it never passed. DACA is an executive order, not a law, and (somewhat hilariously in context) it remains in effect, allowing undocumented immigrants who arrived as children to get a renewable work permit.
That permit allows someone to live and work in the country. Anyone can hire her as long as she has it.
As far as starting a company: that's an interesting question. That's not an employment issue. My guess is that even people without work permits could found a company, as foreigners are always allowed to hold property in the US. But having done so, I guess it would be possible to prohibit the founder from working for their US company from within the borders? Would love to hear the poster chime in on this.
Thanks for clarifying, I wasn't aware how it all worked.
Not sure I have much to add. Some of my closest friends have been immigrants and refugees with an unbelievable amount of courage in the face of a red-tape system.
This friend is many years younger to me (I'm enrolled in the university as an adult working-professional student). Generally, given her ability to earn based on her skills, I am simply trying to understand what opportunities are available to people in her situation.
To add to this DACA could have been repealed in the recent SCOTUS ruling but due to improper legal proceedure it wasnt cancelled. I don't know if anything else would threaten DACA.
What part of the ruling said that DACA was illegal?
My understanding was that they said that the current administration did have the power to end DACA, but that the justification they gave for doing so (that DACA was illegal) was incorrect, so it could not be ended until they gave a proper justification for it.
>Today Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by the court’s four more liberal justices, agreed with the challengers that the decision to terminate DACA violated the APA. Before they could reach that key issue in the case, however, they had to dispose of a threshold question: whether courts have the power to review the decision to end DACA in the first place.
>Roberts reiterated that the court was not deciding “whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies.” Instead, he stressed, the court addressed “only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action” – which, in the majority’s view, it did not.
That's not right. They didn't rule on its legality at all (though they have in the past, in other cases, and let it stand as it exists). They ruled that the executive branch (under Trump) has the authority to cancel the EO written under the Obama administration (which is sort of a "duh" thing, of course it does), but that the justification provided for the action was arbitrary and capricious (in the technical sense defined by the Administrative Procedures Act).
Loosely: any president can undo any executive action by a previous president, but you can't chuck a law simply because you don't want immigrants in the country.
Really all the Trump administration needs to do is write up a reasonable plan for rolling this back and they can do it.
> Roberts then went on to the second step in the court’s inquiry. The Duke memorandum, he observed, concluded that DACA was illegal and should be terminated because it made DACA recipients eligible for benefits such as Social Security, Medicare and the ability to work legally in the United States. Roberts declined to weigh in on whether the Trump administration was correct in concluding that DACA was illegal
I was fortunate to be born as a citizen in the US so I don't know how to navigate such issues. As I understand it, it is a minefield for a company to hire undocumented workers, even if they are highly skilled workers. Are undocumented individuals allowed to start companies? Does YC have a stance on this from an investment perspective?