Immigration policy – immigrationcourtside.com

🇺🇸🗽⚖️MORE GOOD NEWS FOR AMERICA AS TRUMP KAKISTOCRACY☠️🦹🏿‍♂️⚰️ FINALLY COMES TO AN END: Biden Will Move Immediately For Sane, Humane, Practical Immigration Policies — Wants To Put Trump’s Cruel, Racist, Stupid Abuses Of Humanity, Common Sense, Rule Of Law, & America’s Immigrant Heritage In The Rear-View Mirror! — Promises Reversal Of DHS’s Role As White Nationalist “Political Police Force”🏴‍☠️☠️ That Beat Up On the Most Vulnerable While Ignoring Real Security Threat Posed By Trump-Inspired Righty Domestic Terrorists!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-immigration-plan/2021/01/18/f0526824-59a8-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html

Seung Min Kim reports for WashPost:

President-elect Joe Biden will roll out a sweeping overhaul of nation’s immigration laws the day he is inaugurated, including an eight-year pathway to citizenship for immigrants without legal status and an expansion of refugee admissions, along with an enforcement plan that deploys technology to patrol the border.

Biden’s legislative proposal, which will be sent to Congress on Wednesday, also includes a heavy focus on addressing the root causes of migration from Central America, a key part of Biden’s foreign policy portfolio when he served as vice president.

The centerpiece of the plan from Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris is the eight-year pathway, which would put millions of qualifying immigrants in a temporary status for five years and then grant them a green card once they meet certain requirements such as a background check and payment of taxes. They would be able to apply for citizenship three years later.

. . . .

The focus on Central America reflects the message that Biden has relayed to senior officials in the region: that he will advocate for policy changes aimed at what drives scores of migrants there to come to the United States illegally to seek safe harbor.

“Ultimately, you cannot solve problems of migration unless you attack the root causes of what causes that migration,” one official said, pointing to the various reasons — from economic to safety — that drive migrants to flee their home countries. “He knows that in particular is the case in Central America.”

Transition officials are aware of recent reports of the increased numbers of migrants at or heading to the border in anticipation of the end of Trump’s presidency, and urged them to stay in their home countries. They emphasized that newly arriving immigrants would not qualify for the legalization program that Biden proposes.

Biden wants to move the refugee and asylum systems “back to a more humane and orderly process,” the official said. But “it’s also been made clear that that isn’t a switch you flip overnight from the 19th to the 20th, especially when you’re working with agencies and processes that have been so gutted by the previous administration.”

Biden hopes to reinstate a program granting minors from Central America temporary legal residence in the United States. The Trump administration terminated the program in August 2017, officials said. The administration also wants to set up a reunification program for Central American relatives of U.S. citizens that would allow those who have been already approved for U.S. residency to be admitted into the country, rather than waiting at home for an opening. The program would be similar to ones that existed for Cubans and Haitians but also were ended by the Trump administration.

The Biden proposal also would put in place a refugee admissions program at multiple processing centers abroad that would better help identify and screen those who would qualify to be admitted as refugees into the United States.

As for border enforcement, the plan calls on the Department of Homeland Security to develop a proposal that uses technology and other similar infrastructure to implement new security measures along the border, both at and between ports of entry. Biden has long vowed not to expand the border wall Trump has marginally extended.

“This is not a wall; this is not taking money from [the Department of Defense],” a transition official said, referring to how Trump helped to finance his wall after pledging Mexico would pay for it. “It’s a very different approach.”

. . . .

**************

Read the complete article at the link.

This is a welcome change from the poorly conceived, often ill-informed approach to immigration by the Obama Administration. It appears that Biden and Harris have actually “listened to the experts” and acted a accordingly.

The concentration on addressing the reality of Central American migration and dealing honestly and constructively with its root causes in a sensible and humane way is also refreshing. Using intelligence and technology to address real border security issues (as opposed to squandering resources on politically manufactured ones) also shows promise.

NBC star reporter Julia Edwards Ainsley just broke a story on how under the Trump regime, DHS wasted lots of time and money “beating up on” and denying the legal rights of migrants and asylum seekers and ripping apart families while ignoring or mishandling the real threats to our national security presented by right wing domestic terrorists. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/capitol-riot-exposed-flaws-trump-s-dhs-focused-immigration-not-n1254464

Many of the latter were energized by the Trump/DHS program of White Nationalist racist fear-mongering and intentionally false anti-immigrant, anti-due-process narratives. That’s what “applied malicious incompetence” looks like — DHS and EOIR are two of the most egregious examples in a regime that raised it to an “art form.” It will take an aggressive and far-reaching “house cleaning” to get these agencies that have abandoned the common good and now operate “on the dark side” back on track.

The immediate “knee-jerk opposition” to rational, practical, fact-based immigration reform by notorious White Nationalist racist Sen. Tom Cotton (R-ARK) shows that Team Biden is on the right track to disavow the toxic institutionalized racism and biased policies of the Trump regime and move America along the path to racial justice and realistic, progressive immigration policies that will further the national interest and lead to a better future for all!

It’s a great, if long overdue, start to getting beyond Jim Crow and “Dred Scottification” and saving and enhancing our democracy! But, the proof will be in the results!

Biden, of course, will also face the formidable challenges of dealing with the human carnage left behind by the Trump regime’s disastrous mis-handling of COVID-19, economic inequality, the environment, racial justice, and foreign policy where American “prestige” has plummeted to levels not seen since the days of the Barbary Pirates.

He also must address a failing Federal Justice System that, particularly at its appellate levels, did not effectively stand up to the Trump regime’s unrelenting assault on human decency and American democracy. Indeed, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a consistently competent and courageous Justice among our failing Supremes, offered this final harsh but true assessment of her GOP colleagues’ malfeasance in a death penalty case: “This is not justice.”https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/not-justice-justice-sonia-sotomayor-offers-fierce-dissent-death-penalty-n1254554

You could say that about almost everything in the departing, defeated White Nationalist regime!

I’ll note for the record that among other things, the Supremes’ tone-deaf majority has been responsible for letting bona fide asylum seekers rot in squalor in camps in Mexico while waiting for non-existent “due process,” and also authorized the imposition of potential death sentences and torture on asylum seekers within our jurisdiction without any whit of due process.

The GOP majority’s disgraceful failure to stand up for voting rights of African Americans, Latinos, and other voters of color has also deepened racial injustice in America and helped usher in a horrible “Jim Crow Revival” pushed, incited, and enabled by the GOP, “The Party of the Failed Insurrection.”

Any competent first-year law student might ask “How could this happen in America?” That’s a question that Roberts and his gang of fellow Trump enablers and apologists will have to answer before the “court of history!”

🇺🇸🗽⚖️👍🏼Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-19-21

WASHPOST EDITORIAL: HOW THE TRUMP REGIME’S NATIVIST IMMIGRATION AGENDA ENDANGERS AMERICA’S FUTURE – “But the fact that starting a new life in the United States has come to seem less attractive, both to prospective parents already living here and to prospective arrivals from abroad, is a warning this country cannot afford to ignore.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americans-dip-in-population-growth-is-a-warning-we-shouldnt-ignore/2020/01/03/4f65d1c0-2d90-11ea-bcd4-24597950008f_story.html

The Post’s View

Opinion

American’s dip in population growth is a warning

By Editorial Board

Jan. 4, 2020 at 1:58 p.m. EST

Like all social change, population growth has costs (increased use of limited resources) and benefits (fresh ideas, more people to do necessary work). On the whole, history — both global and American — refutes the Malthusian belief that more people means more misery. To the contrary, a growing labor force is one factor that determines an economy’s capacity to grow. On that basis alone, it would be concerning that the Census Bureau has released new data showing that the U.S. population grew only 6.7 percent in the past decade, which is the slowest 10-year rate since the census began in 1790. Add that all living members of the baby boom generation will have turned 65 by 2030 — and that 18 percent of the nation will be at least that age, according to Pew Research Center population projections — and demographic stagnation begins to seem uncomfortably realistic.

The good news is that, even at reduced rates of growth, the U.S. population, 328.2 million, is still expanding more rapidly than populations of peer nations such as Japan (whose population of 126 million is actually shrinking). The bad news, though, is that both sources of the U.S. edge in population dynamism — a relatively strong birthrate and immigration — are implicated in the Census Bureau’s report. Net international migration — permanent moves to the United States minus permanent departures — was 595,348 between 2018 and 2019. In 2016, by contrast, the figure was 1,046,709. The Census Bureau and other experts have yet to identify a specific cause, but it’s certainly plausible to link the decline to the anti-immigration posture adopted by President Trump during that interval.

Meanwhile, the natural increase in the population between 2018 and 2019 — births minus deaths — was 956,674, the first reading under 1 million in “decades,” according to the Census Bureau. As of 2018, the United States’ total fertility ratestood at 1,728 births per 1,000 women over their lifetimes, well below the replacement rate of 2,100 births per 1,000 women. The causes are unknown, though there may be a continued hangover from the economic uncertainty of the Great Recession.

Unchecked, these trends may mean less economic growth and a diminished support base for a large retired cohort. Boosting birthrates, to be sure, is notoriously difficult, as a number of European countries and Japan have already discovered. Of course, compared with those other countries, the United States has done little to provide paid family leave or subsidized child care — and could do more.

Boosting immigration, by contrast, is relatively easy to accomplish. Or it would be, if the president and many in his party were not engaged in a simplistic campaign to demonize it, one result of which has been to slash refugee admissions from 85,000 in fiscal 2016 to 30,000 in fiscal 2019. Immigration should come through legal channels and be more closely tailored to fit labor force needs. But the need for more of it is real.

The recent dip in population growth need not prove irreversible. But the fact that starting a new life in the United States has come to seem less attractive, both to prospective parents already living here and to prospective arrivals from abroad, is a warning this country cannot afford to ignore.

*************************************************

Not surprisingly, largely fact-free policy making based on a White Nationalist agenda and the myths about immigrants it necessarily generates will contravene the national interests in many ways while serving the narrow political and sociological interests of a vocal and motivated minority.

PWS

01-06-19

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL RIPS TRUMP/SESSIONS “GONZO” IMMIGRATION AGENDA AS “ANTI-AMERICAN!”– White Nationalist Inspired Restrictionism Is Suppressing The Real Dialogue We Should Be Having!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-crusade-against-immigrants-is-an-attack-on-america/2017/12/03/0ac43dec-d624-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html?utm_term=.71780d337509

“By Editorial Board December 3 at 8:10 PM

THE TRUMP administration likes to justify its multi-front crusade against immigration and immigrants as a revival of the rule of law, or a recalibration of the rules to favor disadvantaged American workers. In fact, it is largely a resurrection of xenophobia that coincides with a spike, nearly 50 years in the making, in the number of foreign-born residents living in the United States.

“For decades,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a speech in October, “the American people have been begging and pleading . . . for an immigration system that’s lawful and serves the national interest. Now we have a president who supports that.”

Mr. Sessions’s claims are specious. An embrace of legality is not the driving force behind the president’s decision to slash the admission of refugees to levels unseen in nearly 40 years. It is not what compelled Mr. Trump to endorse Republican legislation that would cut the annual allotment of green cards by a half-million, mainly by barring relatives of existing legal permanent residents of the United States. It is not why the Pentagon has considered ending a recruitment program that put skilled foreigners on a fast track for citizenship if they served in this country’s armed forces. And it is not why the administration favors ending the so-called diversity visa lottery program, under which immigrants are admitted from nations underrepresented in other programs.

Those programs were all legally enacted and, by and large, carried out in compliance with the law. The animating force in targeting them, as the administration is now doing, is an effort to turn back the tide of foreigners in our midst and exorcise what the president evidently sees as the demon of diversity.

The administration’s goal is not to reshape America’s immigration policy but to prune immigration itself. While Mr. Trump backs a GOP plan that would give preference to immigrants with skills rather than family connections in the United States, the effect would be not simply to shift the mix while maintaining the current level of legal immigration but to drastically reduce overall numbers of admissions.”

. . . .

Unfortunately, Mr. Trump has poisoned the debate on immigration so thoroughly that he has twisted the frame through which many Americans see the issue. His slurs — labeling Mexican immigrants as rapists and Muslim immigrants as terrorists — form the context from which the administration’s policies arise. They are affronts to U.S. tradition and values.

They’re also an assault on what Mr. Sessions refers to as “the national interest” and specifically the United States’ economic well-being. Legions of employers dependent on immigrant workers, especially to fill low-skilled jobs for which native-born Americans are too well educated and in short supply, will be harmed by choking off the flow of immigrant labor. With unemployment at a 16-year low and approaching levels unseen in a half-century, the Trump policies threaten to sap the economy by depriving it of the energy of striving newcomers who have fueled this nation’s ambitions since its founding.

It is within the president’s discretion to intensify efforts at deportation, though the humanitarian price — in shattered communities and families, including those whose children, born in this country, are Americans — is high. It is reasonable to take steps to tighten border security, though with illegal crossings already at a 40-year low and the Border Patrol’s staffing having already been doubled since the George W. Bush administration, a significant new investment along those lines faces the risk of diminishing returns. The administration may arguably have had a valid legal basis for ending the Obama-era program granting deportation protection for “dreamers” — undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children, often brought by their parents — though only a smallish minority of Americans believes they should be removed from this country.

But what value, other than sheer bigotry, is served by reducing the resettlement of refugees in the United States at a time when the number of displaced people worldwide has soared to staggering levels? In a country founded and in many respects shaped by refugees — a country that has resettled some 3 million refugees since 1980, more than any other nation — why does the Trump administration insist on turning its back on them now, when some 17 million people have been displaced from their homes across international borders around the world due to conflict or persecution, the highest number in a quarter-century?

It is clearly jarring to some Americans that the foreign-born portion of the overall population has nearly tripled since 1970. Many communities, towns and cities have been transformed culturally and socially by that surge, about a third of which was driven by illegal immigrants.

In some places, local government budgets have strained to provide services for immigrants, particularly public education, and the economic dislocation felt by many working-class Americans is a fact. But that dislocation is not mostly caused by immigrants. The United States is a more prosperous place today than it was before the surge in immigration, and immigrants have fed that prosperity — by helping to harvest America’s crops, build its cities, care for its young and elderly, and found some of its most buoyant companies.

. . . .The Trump administration’s crusade against immigration and immigrants is not just a quest to diminish the influence of the “other”; it is an assault on the nation’s future and prospects.”

*********************************

Read the complete editorial at the link.

This is largely (not entirely — I believe that there is a sound legal basis for continuing DACA, for example) what I’ve been saying all along:

Jeff Sessions is a bigoted, xenophobic, anti-American scofflaw whose disingenuous, self-righteous claims to be restoring the “Rule of Law” (that would be the “Jim Crow laws” of Sessions’s Alabama past) are totally outrageous;
The real purpose of the Administration’s xenophobic program is to divide and weaken America by stirring up racial, religious, and ethnic animosities;
The “Gonzo,” arbitrary interior enforcement program serves no useful purpose other than playing to the “biases of the base” and the wishes of some (not all) disgruntled immigration enforcement agents for unbridled authority;
Our xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies are costing us leadership and respect on the world scene (just this weekend, the Administration withdrew from the UN Global Migration Pact);
Our past strength as a nation and our future success and prosperity is based on immigration (and, the US clearly has benefitted from BOTH legal and “extra-legal” migration);
The Trump Administrations’s rhetoric and actions are preventing us from having the serious discussion we need: how we can better regulate (not cut off, diminish, or eliminate) future legal migration of all types to serve our national interest (and to be more “in tune” with “market realities” that drive much immigration), reflect our humanitarian values and the legitimate needs of current and future migrants, and encourage use of our legal immigration system, thereby diminishing the incentives for extra-legal migration.

As long as U.S. immigration policy remains in the hands of White Nationalist xenophobes like Trump, Sessions, Miller, and Bannon (yes, Stevie “Vlad the Lenin” has vacated his perch in the West Wing, but he continues to pull strings through his White Nationalist disciples Sessions and Miller and to stir the pot through his alt-right “news” apparatus Breitbart News) we won’t get the constructive dialogue and the humane, realistic “immigration reform” that we really need. In other words, under current leadership, the real “Rule of Law” will continue to be diminished.

PWS

12-04-17

“Duh” ARTICLE OF THE WEEK: Guess What? Immigration Policy Is Complex And Difficult — The President Should Seek Some Decent Advice!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-hardline-immigration-rhetoric-runs-into-obstacles–including-trump/2017/02/17/37ba2218-f537-11e6-b9c9-e83fce42fb61_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_trumpimmigration-8pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.f7b4a8ac9f52

David Nakamura reports in the Washington Post:

“The Trump administration’s attempts to translate the president’s hard-line campaign rhetoric on immigration into reality have run into two major roadblocks: the complexity of reshaping a sprawling immigration system and a president who has not been clear about how he wants to change it.

In his first four weeks in office, President Trump has sought to use his executive powers to punch through Washington’s legislative and bureaucratic hurdles and make quick progress on pledges to crack down on illegal immigrants and tighten border control.

But Trump has been vague about his goals and how to achieve them and his aides have struggled to interpret his orders.

The resulting turmoil has included a successful legal challenge halting his immigration travel ban, fears among congressional Republicans over the White House’s more extreme measures and widespread anxiety among immigrant communities across the country.

The latest flash point erupted Friday over reports that the Department of Homeland Security was considering mobilizing 100,000 National Guard troops to help round up millions of unauthorized immigrants in 11 states, including some such as Colorado and Oregon far from the southern border.

President Trump said at a press conference Thursday that deciding the fate of illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children is “one of the most difficult subjects I have.” (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)”

******************************

It’s not difficult for anyone who understands the complex field of immigration to see that when you surround yourself with tone-deaf advisors like Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Kris Kobach, and Rep. Steve King your immigration policies are headed straight onto the rocks, where they likely will remain aground for the rest of the Administration.

So, you’re President Donald Trump. You want to make an impact in immigration, and also have everybody love what you’re doing to “make America great.”

Then, why not sit down with some Republicans who have thought carefully about the issue, like, for example: House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senator John McCain, Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Jeff Flake, Congresswoman Illeana Ros-Lehtinen, Senator Marco Rubio, the Koch Brothers, former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, and Ohio Governor John Kasich? Also, it would be a good idea to reach across the aisle and speak with folks like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Dick Durban, Senator Bernie Sanders, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Representative Henry Cuellar who have worked thoughtfully on immigration issues. And, why not invite DHS Secretary John Kelly, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Labor Secretary Alex Acosta (assuming confirmation), and, of course, Vice President Mike Pence to the table too?

Think about how refugees, legal immigrants, and those who are already here and in our workforce can be melded in the best way possible to tap America’s full potential, create meaningful opportunities for all Americans, increase productivity and innovation, and combat the looming problem of future labor shortages. Also, consider how a more realistic, expanded legal immigration system could be a critical tool for discouraging illegal migration, maintaining control of our borders, and insuring national security without over-investing in the (usually ineffective and always expensive) quasi-militarization of our borders.

As one of my colleagues used to tell me when I got going too fast, “Relax, it’s a marathon not a sprint.” There is still plenty of time for President Trump to get the immigration issue right for America. But, it’s not going to happen unless he expands his circle of advisers to include those with a more positive and realistic view of immigration’s essential role in making America great.

PWS

02/17/17

🇺🇸🗽⚖️👍🏼Due Process Forever!

Related posts:

American’s dip in population growth is a warning

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts: