"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
(Reuters) – More than 2,000 Central American migrants seeking to settle in the United States have given up and accepted free rides home under a 10-month-old program funded by the U.S. government and run by a United Nations agency, according to a U.N. official.
A migrant child stands inside a shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, July 20, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
The “Assisted Voluntary Return” program has paid for buses or flights for 2,170 migrants who either never reached the United States or were detained after crossing the border and then sent to Mexico to await U.S. immigration hearings, according to Christopher Gascon, an official with the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).
The $1.65 million program, funded by the U.S. State Department, is raising concerns among immigration advocates who say it could violate a principle under international law against returning asylum seekers to countries where they could face persecution.
The returned migrants have not been interviewed by U.S. asylum officers. But Gascon said his agency screens all participants to ensure they are not seeking U.S. asylum and want to go back.
Gascon, head of the IOM’s Mexico mission, said the program provides a safer and more humane means of return than the migrants could arrange on their own.
The effort here, whose scope and controversial aspects have not been previously reported, is the first by the State Department and UN to target Central American migrants in Mexico on such a large scale. The State Department would not comment on the record about its role.
Gascon said the State Department reached out to the IOM last year as caravans of thousands of Central American migrants traveled through Mexico toward the U.S. border.
U.S. President Donald Trump called the caravans an “invasion” and has made stemming immigration a centerpiece of his administration and 2020 re-election campaign.
Migrant advocates are particularly concerned about 347 people returned by the IOM who had been stuck in Mexico under a controversial Trump administration policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP).
Under that policy, which began Jan. 29, some migrants who make it across the U.S.-Mexico border are given a notice to appear in U.S. immigration court, then are then turned back to Mexico to wait the months it can take for their court cases to be resolved. In the past seven months, more than 30,000 migrants have been sent back under MPP, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
(For a graphic on the Migrant Protection Protocols, see reut.rs/2MszcsN)
Advocates say that the migrants often face danger and destitution in Mexican border towns, leaving them no good options.
“How can it be a voluntary decision (to return home) given the conditions they face in Mexico? It’s a choice between two hells,” said Nicolas Palazzo, an attorney with El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.
Besides any danger they might face back home, there is another significant downside to leaving: If migrants do not show up for a U.S. court hearing, they can be ordered deported “in absentia,” reducing their odds of ever being granted refuge in the United States.
AFRAID TO GO, AFRAID TO STAY
Denia Carranza, a 24-year-old Honduran returned to Mexico to await a court hearing set for October, decided instead to board a bus back home last week.
She said she and her 7-year-old son had fled her hometown and a good job at a shrimp packing company after gang members threatened to kill her if she did not deal drugs to fellow employees. She had hoped to apply for U.S. asylum.
But she said she was frightened in Ciudad Juarez – a battleground for drug cartels where the bulk of migrants await their hearings. Also, she had no job and no way to provide for her son.
“I am scared of going back to Honduras. But I am more afraid to stay,” she said.
The U.S.-based nonprofit Human Rights First said it had documented more than 100 violent incidents perpetrated against migrants waiting in Mexico for U.S. court hearings this year, including rape, kidnapping, robbery, assault and police extortion.
The IOM documented 247 deaths of migrants near the US-Mexico border this year through Aug. 15.
In a July 30 letter to the IOM’s Director General, 30 U.S. and international advocacy organizations said they feared the U.N. organization was returning migrants to countries they had fled “out of desperation, not choice, and where they may not fully understand the consequences of failing to appear whenever summoned by a U.S. immigration court.”
There is no way of knowing how many of the migrants who opt to go home with IOM help might have been able to present a successful asylum claim. U.S. courts ultimately deny most such claims brought by Central Americans and the Trump administration has said many are fraudulent.
Migrants who are sent to Mexico under MPP may or may not be seeking U.S. asylum, but they generally have no opportunity to initiate such claims before being sent back across the border. The policy cuts out a traditional asylum screening step in which migrants are interviewed to establish whether they have a “credible fear” of returning home.
Slideshow (35 Images)
SEEING ‘REALITY’
When the U.S. State Department approached IOM last fall, Gascon said, part of the goal was to counter what is saw as misinformation about how easy it was to get into the United States.
IOM set up kiosks at a stadium in Mexico City, which was along the caravan route, and on the U.S.-Mexico border. It also helped spread the word about free rides back in migrant shelters.
“When they saw the reality, some decided to go home,” he said of migrants.
Three quarters of the migrants in the voluntary return program went back to Honduras, a fifth to El Salvador and the rest to Guatemala and Nicaragua, according to IOM figures through July 26 of this year. More than half were “family units” and about 100 were unaccompanied minors. Most of the migrants have been sent back from Mexico, and a small fraction from Guatemala.
The IOM screens all migrants who ask to go home, but those awaiting U.S. hearings in Mexico also undergo an orientation program with Grupo Beta, an arm of Mexico’s National Migration Institute, to ensure migrants understand their options, Gascon said.
So far, Gascon said, two people awaiting U.S. court hearings in Mexico who wanted a ride back were instead referred to the Mexican government to gauge their eligibility for asylum in Mexico.
But advocates said they worried that Grupo Beta is not the best partner for IOM to ensure migrants’ safety.
“Many organizations have documented time and again that Mexican migration officials don’t refer people to (the national refugee office), they don’t register fears of return, and they have even pressured people to withdraw (asylum) claims,” said Kennji Kizuka, a researcher at the nonprofit Human Rights First.
Mexican migration officials did not respond to a request for comment.
More than a dozen migrants awaiting U.S. hearings at the Casa de Migrante shelter in Ciudad Juarez told Reuters the weekly south-bound bus rides held some appeal. Though reluctant to give up on their American dreams, many didn’t have lawyers and saw little prospect for success.
“All that effort we made to get here from Honduras and now we’re going back,” said Angel Estrada, who had hoped to get care in the United States for his 9-year-old son, who has hemophilia. “It’s really sad.”
PHOTO ESSAY: U.S. buys tickets home for Central American migrants – reut.rs/2ZeyOoV
Reporting by Daniel Trotta in Ciudad Juarez, Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Mica Rosenberg New York; Additional reporting by Julia Love in Ciudad Juarez, Lizbeth Diaz in Tijuana and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Julie Marquis and Brian Thevenot
Someday, the full tawdry story will be told of how our rich and powerful nation turned its back on vulnerable forced migrants whose countries we helped destroy. And, the anti-Latino racism throughout our Central American policies will be fully exposed.
Until then, thanks to Mica and her colleagues, we are learning about highly questionable programs and expenditures that our Government has tried to hide from public view.
Madeline Buiano & Susan Ferriss report for the Center for Public Integrity
DATA DEFIES TRUMP’S CLAIMS THAT REFUGEES AND ASYLEES BURDEN TAXPAYERS
In this May 18, 2018, photo, Majed Abdalraheem, 29, a Syrian refugee and chef with meal delivery service Foodhini, prepares Moussaka, a grilled eggplant dish, at Union Kitchen in Washington. (AP Photo/Noreen Nasir)
Researchers found that between 2005 and 2014, refugees and asylees here from 1980 on contributed $63 billion more to government revenues than they used in public services.
In this post, we’re answering a question we received from Jen: What is the economic impact of refugees in the near and long term (transition time between needing assistance and adding to the economy)?
Since the beginning of his presidency, Donald J. Trump and top advisers have portrayed refugees and asylum seekers as a risky, undesirable demographic.
In 2016, Vice President Mike Pence tried to ban the resettlement of Syrian refugees while he was Indiana’s governor. A federal appeals court blocked the attempt, finding that Pence lacked evidence supporting claims that Syrian refugees were a threat to the people of Indiana. Trump, for his part, issued an order in March 2017 with language suggesting that refugees are a fiscal burden.
The order demanded that U.S. officials produce a report “detailing the estimated long-term costs of the United States Refugee Admissions Program at the Federal, State, and local levels, along with recommendations about how to curtail those costs.”
The draft report didn’t support that assumption of burden, though.
In fact, researchers found that during the 10 years between 2005 and 2014, refugees and asylees here from 1980 on contributed $63 billion more to government revenues than they used in public services. Senior administration officials, possibly including White House aide Stephen Miller, quashed the 55-page draft and submitted a three-page report instead, The New York Timesreported. Soon after, the White House released a fact sheetselectively borrowing from the draft report by noting that the U.S. “spent more than $96 billion on programs supporting or benefitting refugees between 2005 and 2014.”
There were no references to the $63 billion more in taxes that refugees put into public coffers than the value of the services they used.
This pattern of cherry picking one side of the ledger isn’t unusual for those seeking to bolster a political argument. Trump used similar cherry-picked numbers to link immigration, in general, with American wage decline and fiscal strain during his 2016 campaign, as the Center for Public Integrity reported previously.
Before diving deeper into fiscal research on refugees, though — including what the quashed draft report found in detail — it helps to understand how refugees and asylum seekers differ. Some fiscal studies, including the study Trump ordered, scrutinize both groups. It’s also helpful to understand the size of these groups compared to the U.S. population.
HOW DOES SOMEONE GAIN REFUGEE OR ASYLEE STATUS?
Refugees are fleeing persecution or war and are admitted from abroad. To vet them, U.S. officials are dispatched to interview candidates as part of a lengthy screening process. United Nations or U.S. embassy officials refer candidates to the U.S. State Department. Refugees often seek temporary shelter in neighboring countries to escape violence and threats. Many Syrian war refugees, for example, have fled to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. After intensive screening, approved refugees enter the U.S. with the help of resettlement organizations and must sign promissory notes to repay the U.S. government for travel costs. About 75 percent of loans are repaid within 15 years and 64 percent within five years, according to the U.S. State Department.
Asylum seekers claiming to be fleeing violence or persecution, by contrast, can present themselves at a U.S. port of entry and request to apply for asylum, as outlined in international treaties the U.S. has signed, as well as U.S. law. The law also allows foreigners to apply for asylum after they’re already inside the United States, whether they entered originally on visas or entered illegally, with some restrictions. Immigration judges review cases to determine whether the asylum applicant’s fear meets the criteria for granting refuge. Asylum seekers have a right to retain an attorney at their expense — or seek pro bono help — but they don’t have a right to an appointed attorney in proceedings.
In 2018, even as refugee numbers surged globally, the Trump administration capped refugee admissions at 45,000. Only 22,000 were ultimately admitted, mostly from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burma and Ukraine. Trump used his executive power to cap refugee admissions this year to a new low, for annual caps, of no more than 30,000. In 2016, under President Barack Obama, the U.S. admitted 85,000 refugees.
Trump has also sought to deter mostly Central American migrantswho are arriving often with children at the southern border and asking for asylum.
“The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility … not on my watch,” Trump said last year. In April of this year, after tweeting that the “country is full,” Trump unveiled an unprecedented proposal to require that asylum seekers pay an application fee. Trump argues that changes to the asylum system are needed because he believes that the vast majority of migrants are faking or exaggerating their fears — despite U.S. State Department recognition that murder rates, gang rapes and extortion are rampant in Central America, especially the main source countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Refugees and asylees are a tiny fraction of the U.S. population, so it’s hard to credibly pin major national fiscal impact on either group.
Between 2009 and April 2019, a total of 648,482 refugees were admitted to the U.S., according to U.S. Department of State refugee data. That admissions total is equivalent to about 0.2 percent of the U.S. population of 328 million. Separately, between 2007 and 2017, a total of 263,215 people were granted asylum, according to the 2017 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. That cumulative number is equivalent to about 0.08 percent of the U.S. population.
But isn’t there a backlog of asylum requests, potentially adding more people?
Yes. As of January 2019, 325,277 asylum request cases were pending. But even if all those cases were approved (they won’t be), that number would be equivalent to 0.1 percent of the U.S. population of 328 million. Further, if you were to multiply all those asylum cases by 10 — to account for an exaggerated number of family members who could benefit — that number would add up to the equivalent of 1 percent of the U.S. population.
But can’t refugees or asylees have a noticeable fiscal impact on communities, especially if the newcomers settle in groups, as immigrants often do? Yes. Let’s see what reputable studies show.
REFUGEES COME WITH NOTHING
Randy Capps is the director of research at the Migration Policy Institute, or MPI, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., that’s studied how refugees with a range of language skills and education integrate over time.
“Refugees come to the U.S. with nothing,” Capps said, but they “start making economic contributions right away and they’re not living off government assistance for very long.”
A 2015 MPI refugee-integration study found that between 2009 and 2011, the proportion of refugee men working was 7 percentage points higher than among their U.S.-born counterparts. Refugee women were as likely to work as U.S.-born women. Refugees’ income increased the longer they were in the country. The median income of refugees in the U.S. for at least 20 years was $31,000 higher than the median income of refugees here for five years or less.
MPI researchers also found that refugees’ use of public benefits decreases substantially over time.
Unlike other immigrants, refugees can access public health insurance and some other forms of aid when they arrive. Between 2009 and 2011, food-stamp assistance was a relatively high 45 percent for refugees for their first five years or less, the MPI study found. But food-stamp assistance fell to 16 percent among refugees here at least 20 years. Cash aid dropped from 7 percent to 2 percent for refugees in these same respective cohorts. And reliance on public health insurance fell from 24 percent to 13 percent.
Capps and his fellow authors suggested that providing English classes and job training for refugees while they’re still in camps undergoing the long vetting process could lead to even better outcomes. Ironically, the report also suggests, refugees’ high rate of employment in the U.S. could make it difficult for many to find the time to pursue more education to upgrade skills and earning potential.
Even so, as the Center reported in 2017, refugees are readily sliding into jobs in areas where labor is in short supply. Refugees from various countries are filling jobs at a Chobani facility in Twin Falls, Idaho, the world’s largest yogurt factory. And newly arrived refugees from rural areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Asia are finding work at dairy farms.
In 2017, a draft of the refugee fiscal report that Trump had ordered was leaked to The New York Times, which posted it. The report was produced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement is involved in refugee arrivals and initial integration. Research looked at both refugees and asylees.
Researchers looked at local, state and federal expenditures on refugees — as well as refugees’ tax contributions to those government coffers over the 10 years between 2005 and 2014.
The study found that 8 percent of refugees received Social Security or Social Security Disability benefits compared to 15 percent of the U.S. population. About 12 percent of refugees relied on Medicare benefits compared to 15 percent of the U.S. population.
On the other hand, 21 percent of refugees used SNAP, or food stamps, compared to 15 percent of the U.S. population. But only about 2.3 percent of refugees received TANF benefits, or cash aid, close to the same percentage as the U.S. population generally.
Overall, during the 10-year period, refugees and their non-refugee family members received $326 billion in government benefits and services, 60 percent from the federal government and 40 percent from state and local government. K-12 education accounted for 11 percent of expenditures on refugees. But that K-12 spending was only 0.4 percent of spending on K-12 nationally.
In the end, because of taxes they paid, refugees and their family members contributed more than $343 billion in revenue to federal, state and local coffers. On balance, refugees contributed $63 billion more than they received in benefits from various programs.
“In general,” researchers wrote, “after 10 years of residence those who entered the U.S. as refugees were similar to the U.S. population in terms of income and employment.”
The HHS draft also referenced research produced in various regions.
A 2012 analysis of the Cleveland, Ohio, area credited refugees with the creation of 650 jobs and $48 million worth of economic impact. A 2015 study of the Columbus, Ohio, area found that about 16,600 refugees supported more than 21,200 jobs and added $1.6 billion to the local economy.
Randy Capps of the Migration Policy Institute cautioned against putting too much faith in fiscal studies that zero in on costs alone. For example, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, a group that advocates slashing legal immigration, published a study in 2018 focusing on the first five years of refugee settlement and arguing that “the American taxpayer is being asked to feed, clothe and shelter” people with “few marketable job skills.”
In 2017, the Center for Public Integrity reported that U.S Department of Homeland Security staff were discussing adding an assessment of a refugee applicant’s “skills” to criteria that’s part of the foundation for the vetting process. The skills idea, confirmed by a Homeland Security spokesperson, upset U.S. refugee officers who screen applicants who’ve fled the trauma of war and persecution. It hasn’t gone anywhere.
“The [current] litmus test is: Does the person have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political
Adding a skills test would mark a profound change, Knowles said, for U.S. criteria developed in the wake of World War II, a time when the U.S. and other countries turned away some desperate Jewish refugees.
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A number of things are absolutely clear: 1) refugees and asylees are a huge benefit to the United States from any legitimate perspective; 2) we could easily absorb everyone applying for asylum status right now; 3) there is no “invasion;” 4) the country is not “full;” 5) Trump, Pence, Miller, Cotton, Perdue, and the rest of their “White Nationalist Gang” are liars.
