The United States has always asked more of immigrants than it promises in return. Each generation arrives tied to labor, building, tending, healing, inventing, while permanence remains just beyond reach. The country has grown accustomed to this imbalance. Work is welcomed. Belonging is postponed. For the young people later known as DACA recipients, that postponement became policy. They were allowed to contribute, but never allowed to arrive fully.
Immigration Attorney Hillary Walsh has made her work about confronting that unfinished invitation.
A Life Lived in Intervals
When DACA was introduced in 2012, it was described as temporary relief. It offered protection from deportation and the ability to work legally, but nothing more. More than a decade later, roughly 580,000 people still live under its terms. Many are now in their thirties. They are lawyers, physicians, engineers, educators, journalists. They hold advanced degrees and leadership roles. Yet their legal status continues to reset every two years.
Walsh sees this as a structural contradiction. People are encouraged to build lives, careers, and families, while the law quietly refuses to acknowledge permanence. “DACA allowed people to work,” Walsh has said, “but it never allowed them to feel secure in the lives they built.”
That insecurity shapes daily decision-making. Promotions that require travel are avoided. Families delay buying homes. Medical and financial planning remains provisional. A work permit authorizes labor, but it does not authorize peace.
What Demography Makes Plain
Behind the political arguments, the demographic reality is clearer. The U.S. fertility rate has fallen to about 1.6 births per woman, well below replacement level. Large segments of the workforce are aging out, with fewer native-born workers positioned to replace them. Federal projections consistently show that immigration will account for nearly all population growth in the coming decade.
Immigrants already make up close to one fifth of the U.S. labor force, with particularly high participation rates among DACA recipients. These workers are not peripheral. They are embedded across health care, technology, education, media, and research driven sectors.
Walsh’s contention is simple and uncomfortable. A country that relies on this labor while denying long-term security is choosing fragility. “This is not about special treatment,” she has said. “It’s about being honest about who the economy already depends on.”
The Paths Few Are Told About
U.S. immigration law is often described as immovable, but Walsh argues it is more often misinterpreted. Employment-based green card categories still exist. PERM labor certification, National Interest Waivers, and EB-1 classifications remain available to individuals with documented professional contributions.
Doctors working in underserved communities. Researchers producing original findings. Journalists with national bylines. Engineers advancing artificial intelligence. Even content creators with formal education and measurable impact. These profiles were anticipated by the law, even if they are rarely discussed in DACA conversations.
For years, many DACA recipients were told that politics was their only path forward. Walsh’s practice focuses on a different premise: that achievement can translate into permanence if the law is applied as written. “People were taught to wait for reform,” she has said. “Waiting became a substitute for strategy.”
Freedom as a Legal Condition
Walsh does not romanticize the system. The process remains slow, intricate, and unforgiving. Agency backlogs stretch for years. Evidence must be exacting. Outcomes are never guaranteed. Still, she insists that freedom begins when a life is no longer temporary.
That principle extends beyond immigration law. It challenges employers who benefit from insecure labor to recognize their role. It challenges institutions to reconcile economic reliance with legal exclusion. And it challenges the country to examine what freedom means when permission must be renewed on a schedule.
“Freedom isn’t the right to work without fear,” Walsh has said. “It’s the right to plan a future without asking for permission every two years.”
By treating law as a tool for permanence rather than delay, Walsh is reframing what legal work can do. Not as symbolism. Not as mercy. But as a language capable of translating contribution into belonging, and labor into something lasting.
