For years, many young immigrants have been walking on eggshells as the program giving them temporary legal status has been threatened with termination.

Ending DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, could mean the loss of a job and livelihood and possible deportation for hundreds of thousands of people — with negative economic consequences for the nation.

Keep in mind, this is the only country a lot of them have ever really known, given they were brought into the United States illegally when they were children and have lived here for decades. DACA participants, often referred to as “Dreamers,” are — on average — now in their mid-30s, with some in their early 40s.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden may have given many DACA recipients a greater sense of certainty with a directive that allows them to quickly gain employer-sponsored work visas.

That would enable them to apply for green cards. Importantly, this would give those Dreamers permanent legal status to live and work in the United States so they would no longer have to rely on DACA, a program created in 2012 under President Barack Obama which President Donald Trump tried to kill in 2017.

DACA’s future is hanging on litigation that ultimately will be decided by the Supreme Court.

It is not yet clear who would be eligible for the work visas.

Biden’s move on DACA was overshadowed by his other announcement on the same day aimed at protecting a half-million undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens from deportation while they seek to gain legal status. That could also put the spouses on the pathway to gain citizenship.

The announcements are part of a two-pronged immigration strategy: slowing cross-border migration by limiting asylum, which the president did earlier this month, while giving long-term undocumented immigrants avenues to legal residency. Among other things, the latter is seen as an attempt to mollify immigrant advocates upset by Biden’s emphasis on stronger enforcement.

This contrasts with tougher border and immigration proposals by Trump and Republicans. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., immediately labeled Biden’s new policies as “amnesty,” a term conservatives use as a pejorative when it comes to immigration.

Trump, meanwhile, for years has used incendiary language about immigrants. He has talked about setting up detention camps for undocumented immigrants and deporting them en masse if he is elected president again. Currently, the undocumented population in the U.S. is estimated at  between 10 million and 11 million.

In a surprising turn, Trump said foreign-born college graduates should automatically be granted green cards — a position once championed by former rival Hillary Clinton. The Washington Post reported Trump made his comments in an interview on a podcast called “All-In” released Thursday.

Trump previously expressed support in 2015 for green cards for college graduates, according to the Post. But the idea was more widely associated with Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, whose campaign website said she would “staple” a green card to master’s and doctoral diplomas in science, technology, engineering and math.

The Clinton proposal was attacked by immigration hard-liners in Trump’s camp and some of his supporters.

Jeremy Beck, vice president of NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for restricting immigration,  on Thursday criticized the proposal. “You’d turn colleges into visa mills,” he said, driving up tuition costs and increasing competition for admission and jobs with domestic students.

Whether Biden’s policies and Trump’s green-card proposal shift the politics surrounding immigration remains to be seen. Polls show public support for Trump on border and immigration issues.

The main criticism of DACA, and much of the basis for the legal challenges, focus on the claim that Obama didn’t have the authority to establish the program without congressional approval. Obama introduced DACA after Congress once again failed to overhaul the broken U.S. immigration system.

Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president, has long supported DACA and expressed frustration that his own proposal for a comprehensive immigration overhaul unveiled on his first day as president was a nonstarter with congressional Republicans.

Biden enacted his asylum restrictions after Republicans, at the behest of Trump, blocked a bipartisan bill solely focused on border enforcement that, among other things, would have made it more difficult to apply for asylum.

Critics of Biden’s new visa plan said it goes beyond the intent of DACA to provide a temporary solution for undocumented young people.

“The program was defended as something that would not lead to permanent status,” Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, told The New York Times. “Now those guard rails are being tossed aside.”

The Times also noted some businesses applauded the new work visas.

“You cannot overstate the significance of having some hope of certainty and a pathway to stability for Dreamers,” said Jack Chen, associate general counsel for U.S. immigration at Microsoft.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has expressed strong support for DACA and urged Congress to make it permanent.

Polls have shown DACA has substantial public support. But while Democrats and independents continue to strongly back the program, Republican support that some polls once had in the majority has faded, according to a September survey by Data for Progress.

Over the years, some Republican members of Congress have backed DACA, but efforts to codify the program typically became tangled with other immigration issues.

Several studies — from the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress to the libertarian Cato Institute — have documented that DACA is not only beneficial for recipients, but the nation at large. They have estimated the end of DACA would cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars in lost economic activity and taxes over the next decade.

The DACA population now hovers around 600,000, a drop from about 800,000 at its peak. A few years back, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal think tank, estimated approximately 700,000 DACA participants contributed more than $6 billion in income taxes annually.

Yet Dreamers are prohibited from taking advantage of various federal benefits their taxes help fund, including Social Security and food stamps.

In court, states suing to end DACA said they spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to provide social benefits such as health care and education to DACA recipients. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said his state alone incurred $250 million in annual costs because of DACA.

However, the author of the research Paxton relied on said the attorney general’s statement is a “complete mischaracterization of my research,” and that DACA recipients actually have positive economic and fiscal impacts on the state.

Biden’s latest move also likely will face legal challenges.

Like Obama, Biden has faced Republican intransigence on immigration changes. His action on DACA and border enforcement essentially is an another attempted work-around.