By Valeria Fernández, New America Media
A year after a deportation reprieve became available to undocumented youth, analysts are noticing a trend: Very few Chinese immigrants are applying for it.
“We suspected this was the case, that there would be low numbers,” said Anoop Prasad, a staff attorney from the Immigrant Rights Program at the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco who has worked with many Chinese applicants.
Mexican youth make up the largest number of those eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and also had the highest rate of applications, with 64 percent or 637,000 applications according to the Migration Policy Institute. But the absence of Chinese youth from the top 20 countries that applied for deferred action came as a surprise to researchers – especially since Chinese rank in ninth place in terms of eligibility.
“Even though Chinese are eligible, they’re not applying at a high rate to appear in the statistics the Department of Homeland Security put out,” said Jeanne Batalova, the policy institute’s senior policy analyst and demographer. “Some did apply, but they didn’t make it to the top.”
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