Healthcare – Page 6 – immigrationcourtside.com

MAINE AND OTHER STATES ARE HURTING BECAUSE OF POPULATION LOSS — The Answer — More Legal Immigration Across The Board — Is Staring Us Right In The Face — But, Trump’s White Nationalist Nativist Agenda Stands In The Way Of Rational Solutions!

Boothbay Harbor, ME
Looking West from the Whales Tails Restaurant & Seafarer Pub

From the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-rational-immigration-system-is-the-answer-to-us-worker-shortages/2019/08/25/b396bada-c5c4-11e9-b72f-b31dfaa77212_story.html

A rational immigration system is the answer to U.S. worker shortages

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By Editorial Board

August 25

OCCUPATIONAL AND physical therapists. Religious workers. Plant operators. Railway personnel. Construction workers. Maintenance and repair workers. Firefighters. Social workers. Nurses. Funeral workers. Truckers. That’s only a brief sampling of the jobs in the United States for which there are severe shortages of available employees, and way more openings than applicants.

A recent article in The Post detailed the heartbreaking effects of a drastic deficit in just one employment category — home health aides — in just one state, Maine, which has the nation’s second-highest percentage of people over age 65 . They and their relatives who cannot afford private home health aides (who charge roughly $50 an hour) are suffering. Nursing homes, similarly, are closing for want of workers. Even attempts to lure employees by raising wages have hit a brick wall; there simply aren’t enough job applicants in the state nor, apparently, enough people willing to move there.

Maine’s problems in that regard will soon be a national epidemic. Within a decade or so, at least a fifth of the population in roughly 28 states will be 65 or older. The effects of aging baby boomers will be compounded by a national fertility rate that has fallen to its lowest level in nearly five decades. That means younger people will not be available to replenish the ranks of older workers as they retire.

A rational immigration system, one that meets the labor market’s demands for workers in an array of skill categories and income levels, is the obvious antidote to chronic and predictable labor deficits. Unfortunately, the Trump administration, heedless of the pleas of employers, has implemented and proposed measures whose effect will deepen existing and future shortages. And it has done so even as the unemployment rate, now 3.7 percent, continues to bump along at near-historic lows.

A policy announced by the administration this month would impede large numbers of low-income legal immigrants from remaining in the United States, or coming in the first place, if they are judged likely to use public benefits to which they are entitled, including noncash ones such as housing subsidies and health care. The impact would be a dramatic reduction in newcomers, and in existing immigrants eligible to become legal permanent residents, or green-card holders, the final step before full citizenship. By targeting low-income and low-skilled migrants, the rule would perpetuate severe worker shortages in a variety of sectors.

Earlier this year, the administration unveiled a blueprint for legal immigration that, in a reversal, maintained overall levels of immigrants. That recognized that slashing immigration is a recipe for economic decline. However, the Trump plan, by favoring educated, skilled English speakers with strong earnings prospects over relatives of current residents, ignored the reality that retail, landscaping, food processing and dozens of other industries rely on relatively low-skilled labor — and are desperate for workers.

The critical role ICE plays in Trump’s immigration push

President Trump has found a crucial tool to carry out his sweeping immigration polices: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (John Parks, Luis Velarde/The Washington Post)

President Trump has leveraged nativist policies to his political advantage. He has been indifferent to their corrosive long-term economic impact. Far from making America great again, the president’s policies are likely to transform the United States into a second Japan, where an aging population and barriers to immigration have sapped the dynamism and prospects of what was once one of the world’s most dynamic economies.

Here’s a link to Jeff Stein’s August 14 article on the crisis in Maine:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/this-will-be-catastrophic-maine-families-face-elder-boom-worker-shortage-in-preview-of-nations-future/2019/08/14/7cecafc6-bec1-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html

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One reason our current immigration system is failing is that it has ignored market forces both in the U.S. and in sending countries.

That’s particular true with what we consider “manual labor” (which usually takes skills that most Americans either lack or have no interest in developing).

Working with market forces, rather than futilely trying to override or reverse them, would be a win-win-win. It would benefit the migrants, our country, and would greatly reduce the amount of time and money we waste on cruel, controversial, legally questionable, and ultimately ineffective “civil enforcement” of unrealistic and unworkable restrictive immigration laws.

Even now, what if we welcomed qualified asylum seekers, screened and processed them rapidly for legal status, and worked with NGOs and states like Maine to place them in localities where their skills could be put to immediate use or they could be trained to make critical contributions to our society’s needs while improving their own situations?

Indeed, Maine already has an outstanding record of welcoming refugees and asylum seekers. Notwithstanding initial climate and cultural differences, an amazing number of forced migrants from Africa have resettled in Maine and contributed to their communities and the state’s well-being, as well as adapted to the “Maine way of life.” It’s a process of give and take integration that enriches both the immigrants and the communities in which they settle.

PWS

08-29-19

WASHPOST: Catherine Rampell Takes The Measure Of Stephen Miller’s Neo-Nazi View Of American Immigration History – Exposing A Lifelong Hater’s Knowingly False, Misleading & Existentially Dangerous Narrative!

WASHPOST: Catherine Rampell Takes The Measure Of Stephen Miller’s Neo-Nazi View Of American Immigration History – Exposing A Lifelong Hater’s Knowingly False, Misleading & Existentially Dangerous Narrative!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/20/stephen-miller-is-right-about-immigration-not-way-that-he-means/

By Catherine Rampell

Columnist

August 20 at 4:58 PM

In a Post profile over the weekend, White House senior policy adviser and de facto immigration czar Stephen Miller explained why he cares so much about immigration policy:

“Immigration is an issue that affects all others,” Miller said, speaking in structured paragraphs. “Immigration affects our health-care system. Immigration affects our education system. Immigration affects our public safety, it affects our national security, it affects our economy and our financial system. It touches upon everything, but the goal is to create an immigration system that enhances the vibrancy, the unity, the togetherness and the strength of our society.”

Miller is right: Immigration does touch all those realms. Though perhaps not in quite the way he suggests.

For instance, immigration affects our health-care system in many ways — including by supplying it with talent.

In fact immigrants are overrepresented in the health industry. About 16.6 percent of the health industry is foreign-born, 13.7 percent of the U.S. population overall. A whopping 29.1 percent of physicians are foreign-born, according to a recent analysis of Census Bureau data published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Immigrants also are overrepresented among dentists (23.7 percent); pharmacists (20.3 percent); registered nurses (16 percent); and nursing, psychiatric and home health aides (23.1 percent).

Immigration also plays an important role in our education system. International students, who generally pay full freight, have helpedkeep public universities afloat even as state legislatures have slashed their budgets. Their tuition dollars help schools cross-subsidize in-state students. Immigrants also have populated the STEM study programs that Americans show little interest in, especially at the graduate level — where many of those same immigrant students help educate American undergrads.

Here’s the share of students in a selection of STEM graduate programs who are in the United States on temporary visas, according to the National Science Foundation’s Science & Engineering Indicators 2018 report. Note that this measure likely understates the fraction of students who are foreign-born, as it does not include those who are permanent residents or naturalized citizens.

Source: National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, special tabulations (2016), 2015 Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering. (Washington Post)

As for the relationship between immigration and public safety, the data suggest you might conclude that greater immigration leads to greater public safety.

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At least, a study of immigration and crime trends across 200 metropolitan areas over four decades found that “immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g., murder) and property (e.g., burglary) crime throughout the time period.” Other studies have found a similar relationship between the two trends. We don’t know that the link is actually causal, of course, but we do have evidence thatundocumented immigrants commit (non-immigration-related) crimes at lower rates than do native-born Americans.

With respect to national security, Miller might do well to remember that immigrants serve in our military. As of 2018, there were 527,000 foreign-born veterans, according to a Migration Policy Institute analysis of Census Bureau data. About 1.9 million veterans are the U.S.-born children of immigrants.

Some of those noncitizen military members with in-demand skills were expecting that their service would expedite their naturalization process, under a program launched in 2008 called Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest. However, changes in recent years, under first the Obama administration and then under Trump, have effectively frozen that program.

What about our economy?

There’s a lot to be said about how immigrants contribute to the economy, including through high rates of entrepreneurship. For example, immigrants have started more than half of the United States’ start-up companies valued at $1 billion or more, according to a National Foundation for American Policy study. They start lots of smaller companies, too, at much higher rates than native-born Americans, according to data from the Kauffman Foundation.

Without immigration, the U.S. working-age population would be falling, which would weigh on economic growth. (Just look at Japan’s struggles). And as I’ve written elsewhere:

There’s reason to believe that new immigrants may depress wages for earlier waves of immigrants who have similar skill sets. However, recent studies suggest that immigration (both authorized and unauthorized) actually boosts labor force participation rates, productivity and wages and reduces unemployment rates for native-born American workers, whose skills these immigrants tend to complement.

But don’t these people drain the public coffers?

Immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, pay taxes — taxes that fund government benefits that in many cases they are not legally eligible to collect.

A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that the net fiscal impact of first-generation immigrants, compared to otherwise similar natives, is positive at the federal level and negative at the state and local levels. That’s due mostly to the costs of educating their children. When their children grow up, though, they are “among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the U.S. population, contributing more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population.” In other words, by the second generation, immigrants are net-positive for government budgets at all levels.

What about the most destitute immigrants who come here, though? Surely they’re sucking the government dry!

Nope.

An internal government report commissioned by Trump found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in tax revenue over the past decade than they cost the government. Finding those results inconvenient, the administration suppressed them, though they were ultimately leaked to the New York Times last year.

So by all means, Miller, please remind the public that immigration has consequences for the broad policy landscape. But remembering the directionality of those consequences seems pretty important, too.

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Thanks, Catherine, for setting the record straight!

Catherine’s wonderful article would have fit well within the readings for the Bjorklunden Seminar that Professor Jenn Esperanza and I did earlier this month. Basically, those who oppose and demean immigrants have forgotten that we are all immigrants, we are all very similar, and without immigrants there would be no America.

No, our country isn’t “full” by any means and no, the “quality” of recent immigrants hasn’t “dropped off.” If anything, we are more dependent on the skills, hard work, and loyalty (sometimes hard to fathom, considering how they are treated) of recent immigrants, both documented and undocumented, than at any time in our history since the founding.

Unlike Miller, “Cooch Cooch,” Pence, Trump himself, and the other political hacks charged with making immigration policy these days, I actually spent years dealing face to face with migrants of all types, races, religions, backgrounds, and situations in performing my duties as a U.S. Immigration Judge. Contrary to the false narratives promoted by the “Millers of the world,” most of them wanted just three things 1) the chance to live a relatively safe and stable life; 2) an opportunity to use their skills to support themselves and others; and 3) a better future for their children.

That’s largely what I wanted out of life and accurately describes the aspirations of probably 90%+ of the people I have known as I move into my seventh decade of life.

I don’t know what entitles folks like Trump, Miller, and their followers to demean and dehumanize the contributions of other humans who are just as, or in many cases more, worthy as they are – simply because they didn’t have the same fortune of birth or circumstances.

Undoubtedly, there is somewhere out there a point at which admitting larger numbers of refugees and other types of immigrants would be counterproductive, at least for our country, if not for the migrants themselves. Even then, there might still be moral and religious arguments for helping our fellow men even when it ceases to demonstrably benefit our economy and our society.

But, the factual and moral bankruptcy of the “case for fewer immigrants” put forth by Trump, Miller, and the White Nationalists shows that whatever that “magic number’” might be, it’s multiples of the number of legal immigrants we are admitting at present. That’s why Trump, Miller, and the White Nationalists don’t want to have the real national dialogue that we should be engaging in: How do we expand our current refugee and legal immigrant admission systems to more realistically reflect the market forces that cause migration, and how do we as a country put ourselves in the best position to benefit from the ongoing phenomenon of human migration?

The longer we screw around with and are diverted by the racist myths of the Trumps and Millers, the longer it will take us to get around to the hard work of addressing immigration issues in a smart, humane, and realistic way that benefits the immigrants, our country, and humanity as a whole.

PWS

08-21-19

COURTSIDE HAS BEEN SAYING IT FOR YEARS: For Survival As A Nation, We Need To Keep All The Law Abiding (95+%) Legal & Undocumented Immigrants Already Here, PLUS Enact A Robust Increase In Legal Immigration In All Categories & Allow Many More Legally Admitted Refugees & Asylees — Unless & Until Congress Works Up The Courage (E.G., “Balls”) To Do This, Even Over The Objection Of The White Nationalist Racist Restrictionists, Large Scale “Civil” Immigration Enforcement Is A Beyond Stupid, Highly Unprofessional, Cruel Hoax — An Abuse Of Authority, & A Grotesque Waste Of Taxpayer Resources That Makes America Infinitely Worse As A Nation — FINALLY, THE SO-CALLED “MAINSTREAM MEDIA” IS STARTING TO “GET IT!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ice-sweeps-are-cruel-without-immigration-reform-theyre-pointless-too/2019/08/11/88d212b8-bad4-11e9-bad6-609f75bfd97f_story.html

From the WashPost Editorial Board:

By Editorial Board

August 11

THE DEPORTATION sweep Wednesday by hundreds of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at several food processing plants in Mississippi left a trail of tears, business jitters and widespread anxiety in places where undocumented immigrants are so tightly woven into communities that the towns would struggle to exist without them. The raids inflicted predictable suffering — especially among children whose parents were suddenly carted off — to such a degree that just 24 hours afterward, ICE had released some 300 of the 680 migrants it had arrested, including those who had no criminal records.

President Trump, whose own family business has for many years employed migrants who entered the country illegally , pronounced the Mississippi action a “very good deterrent ” to unauthorized immigration. The evidence for that assertion is nil. Still, the sweep provided some useful reminders, not least that the United States cannot deport its way out of a dysfunctional immigration system.

First, the raids underline American agriculture’s deep dependency on undocumented workers, who in 2014 accounted for 17 percent of employees in the sector — and considerably more than that on farms and in many food processing plants. Little wonder that plant managers and local residents in towns targeted by ICE last week worried that the raids would sap their businesses and vitality.

The fact is that relatively few Americans want dirty, dangerous jobs that pay $12 per hour, while requiring some employees to report to work at 3 a.m. One study commissioned by the dairy industry suggested 3,500 dairy farms would close if half the country’s foreign-born workers were deported; another survey, from North Carolina, showed that in 2011, a minuscule number of the state’s nearly half-million jobless workers applied for 6,500 available farm jobs, and most of those who were hired couldn’t hack the work; most of the jobs were then filled by Mexicans.

Second, any large-scale enforcement action will inevitably result in families being broken apart — including those whose children are U.S. citizens. In 2017, two-thirds of unauthorized adult migrants had lived in the United States for more than a decade, according to the Pew Research Center; their median duration of residence was 15 years. Officials may not like the optics of crying toddlers and preteens whose parents have been taken away, but they shouldn’t be surprised.

Third, businesses like the ones in Mississippi that employ undocumented workers are subject to federal prosecution. But it was Republican leaders in the House of Representatives last year, on Mr. Trump’s watch, who blocked legislation that would have required private employers to use E-Verify, a data system used to check whether employees are legally present in the country. Farm groups, including those who represent major employers in Republican districts in California and elsewhere, are dead set against requiring E-Verify, knowing it would produce severe labor shortages.

ICE officials and federal prosecutors are right that deportation sweeps are within their purview as lawful enforcement actions. The problem is that the law is so blatantly misaligned with economic, social and political realities that it is magical thinking to believe that enforcement alone, in the absence of sweeping reform of existing laws, can make a dent in the nation’s population of 10.5 million undocumented immigrants.

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Best Point: Immigrants at the “lower levels” of our economic ladder make just as much, probably more, contribution to the national prosperity, continued existence, and welfare as those at the top. And, certainly they do more for the good of the nation than Trump and the useless civil enforcement authorities at DHS.

While I’m not going to turn away a “rocket scientist” who wants to immigrate, we certainly need more qualified agricultural, home health care, and construction workers than “rocket scientists.” And, yes, logical choices to enforce and administer the law in a rational manner, including declining to enforce useless and counterproductive provisions, and to resist political pandering stemming from racist motives are well within the lawful discretion of all law enforcement agencies.

Quibble: Just because enforcement is technically “lawful” does not mean that it’s prudent or appropriate. Most of today’s civil immigration enforcement is immoral, wasteful, and corruptly intended to support racism and White Nationalism.

I suspect that the majority of the criminal statutes and ordinances now on the books in the U.S. are largely unenforced or only sporadically enforced. That’s good policing, good public policy, and poor legislating.

What if your local police devoted 100% of their resources to “busting” anyone who drove 1 mile over the speed limit while failing to investigate and prosecute homicide, rape, robbery, and other violent felonies? That’s technically “legal,” but both inane and fundamentally corrupt. Those responsible would likely be quickly removed from office.

And, let’s be clear: While DHS resources are being concentrated on White Nationalist nonsense like the “Mississippi Raids,” REAL CRIMES, such as fraud, wage and hour violations, abuse of migrants, hate crimes directed at migrants, human trafficking, drug trafficking, domestic violence, rape, bribery, soliciting of sexual favors by DHS agents, extortion, perjury, tax evasion, and other felonies are NOT being aggressively investigated or prosecuted by Trump’s White Nationalist regime.

That’s basically the way the immigration laws are being (mal)enforced in Trump’s name by folks like McAleenan, Albence, Morgan, Provost, and others. Don’t fall for their nonsensical apologist “we’re only enforcing the law” BS. (Also, what about the laws protecting refugees, asylum seekers, and encouraging legal immigration that these complicit clowns are unlawfully perverting or failing to enforce?)

Instead, vote to insure they and everyone associated with Trump are removed from office, required to make an honest living in the future, and replaced with competent, humane, and ethical folks who will resist and when necessary “out” racism and White Nationalism in all of its toxic forms. Just because enforcement of obsolete, unworkable, and discriminatory laws might be technically “legal” doesn’t make it right, sensible, or moral. And, in the case of the Trump Administration, it’s downright immoral, dishonest, and counterproductive.

PWS

08-12-19

CMS RESEARCH DOCUMENTS TRUMP’S “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE” — “Mass Deportation Strategy” Is As Stupid As It Is Cruel — Removing Most Of Those Already Here Without Documents Would Have A Huge NEGATIVE Impact On America!

Donald M. Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies

CMS RESEARCH DOCUMENTS TRUMP’S “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE” — “Mass Deportation Strategy” Is As Stupid As It Is Cruel — Removing Most Of Those Already Here Without Documents Would Have A Huge NEGATIVE Impact On America!

The New York Times reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will soon begin conducting a large-scale enforcement action aimed at those with final removal orders, but that “might detain immigrants who happened to be on the scene, even though they were not targets of the raids.” The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) opposes mass deportations because of the immense cost to families, communities, and the US economy.

According to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, “the vast majority (58%) of individuals in ICE custody June 30 [2018] had no criminal record. An even larger proportion—four out of five—either had no record, or had only committed a minor offense such as a traffic violation.” CMS recommends deprioritizing the arrest and removal of long-term residents, persons with US family members, and those without criminal records or with only minor offenses. Here are two of CMS’s recent reports about the effects of deportation.

Mass Deportations Would Impoverish US Families and Create Immense Social Costs

In this paper for the Journal on Migration and Human Security, Donald Kerwin and Robert Warren offer a demographic analysis of the potential impact on US families and children of large-scale deportation of US undocumented residents. Here are some of the key findings:

Removing undocumented residents from mixed-status households would reduce median household income from $41,300 to $22,000, a drop of $19,300, or 47 percent, which would plunge millions of US families into poverty.

If just one-third of the US-born children of deported undocumented residents remained in the United States following a mass deportation program, which is a very low estimate, the cost of raising those children through their minority would total $118 billion.

2.9 million undocumented residents were 14 years old or younger when they were brought to the United States.

About 1.2 million, or 23 percent, of the 5.3 million households that have undocumented residents have mortgages.

READ THE REPORT.

Communities in Crisis: Interior Removals and Their Human Consequences

With the Kino Border Initiative (KBI) and the Office of Justice and Ecology (OJE) of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, CMS studied both the quantitative and qualitative effects of deportation and surveyed 133 deportees, as well as interviewed 20 family members and other persons affected by deportation. Here are some key findings:

More than half (56 percent) of those surveyed first entered the country as minors (below age 18), and 21 percent below age 10.

Twenty-six percent had been US homeowners.

Respondents identified a range of close family members who depended on them financially prior to their deportation, including their mothers (72 percent), fathers (57 percent), and siblings (26 percent). Seventy-eight percent had US citizen children.

Roughly one-fourth of survey respondents reported spending no time in criminal custody and 22.6 percent spent a week or less prior to their deportation. However, 17.3 percent spent more than one year.

“My 14-year-old son wants to take on his dad’s responsibilities. Now he wants to go to work with his uncles. He asked them for work, but he doesn’t have the physical ability or age to work in construction, which was his dad’s occupation,” said a mother of three US citizen children and wife of detained immigrant who was interviewed for the report.

READ THE REPORT.DESCARGAR EL REPORTE [ESPAÑOL].

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Notwithstanding Trump & his White Nationalist propagandists, facts still matter in the immigration debate. Download and read these CMS reports at the above links and find out the truth about Trump’s “maliciously incompetent” immigration and human rights policies.

PWS

07-12-19

TRUMP WILL SUBMIT D.O.A. ELITIST PROPOSAL TO REPLACE REFUGEES & FAMILY IMMIGRANTS WITH SO-CALLED “MERIT BASED” IMMIGRANTS — Likely To Please Neither Dems Nor GOP Nativists!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-to-launch-fresh-immigration-overhaul-bid-11557956429?emailToken=e91bcce392c236a27eb93bec537f274d3Xya4bEDbDZFodGbWxJ/4u0NUXuEAvnPgbSb156wwi6WWZEFlWQFJx37NiRp5fBg1aDR4xXis2M/73eDEh0S7VsigposAuJSIWJu7s2zRoE%3D&reflink=article_email_share

Louise Radnofsky and Natalie Andrews report for the WSJ:

WASHINGTON—President Trump will make a fresh bid Thursday to remake U.S. immigration policy, propos-ing an expansion of skills-based visas offset by new restrictions on family members’ immigration—a proposal likely to ignite a dispute over issues that divide political parties and the country.

Mr. Trump is set to unveil an immigration plan devised in part by son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner that incorpo-rates several ideas that have been gaining currency in Republican circles.

Chief among them: a bill crafted by conservative Republicans that would establish a visa system prioritizing immigrants based on criteria such as education, English-language ability and high-paying job offers.

The proposal also would eliminate the diversity-visa lottery long derided by Mr. Trump as well as immigra-tion routes for family members such as siblings. Moreover, it would limit the number of refugees offered permanent residency to 50,000 a year.

. . . .

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Those with WSJ access can read the complete article at the link.

More Trump “smoke and mirrors.” No, it isn’t about “diversity” as one Trump toady falsely claims. Trump eliminates the current diversity visas.

It’s largely about the (likely false) assumption by Trump and others in the GOP that they have cleverly defined “merit” in a restrictive way that will bring in more white, English-speaking, highly-educated individuals from Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. and fewer Africans, Hispanics, Haitians, and Syrians, etc.

Contrary to nativist expectations when the basic current system was enacted in 1965, “immigrants of color” have dramatically increased their share of legal immigration over the past half-century. That has led to a diverse, talented, innovative, dynamic, successful yet “less white” America. According to nativist stereotypes, dumping on family members and refugees and increasing skill, educational, and English-language requirements will result in a “whiter” (that is “more meritorious”) immigrant population going forward.

However, like the nativists of 1965, Trump and his nativists might be surprised by the likely results of their own stereotypical assumptions. Actually, English-speaking immigrants from Africa, Haiti, the Middle East, Mexico, and Venezuela are among the highest skilled and best educated.

Of course, Trump’s elitist proposal also ignores that some of our greatest needs for immigrants pertain to important, but less glamorous, occupations for which neither education nor instant English language skills are a requirement. To keep our economy moving, we actually need more qualified roofers, construction workers, agricultural workers, child care workers, health assistants, security guards, janitors, landscapers, and convenience store operators than we do rocket scientists.

And, no, Tom Cotton and David Purdue, there aren’t enough “American workers” available to fill all these positions, even at greatly increased wages (which, incidentally, your fat cat GOP business supporters have no intention of paying anyway)! How high would the wages have to be to make guys like Cotton and Purdue give up their legislative sinecures (where they do nothing except show up for a few judicial votes on far right candidates scheduled by McConnell) and lay roofs correctly in 100-degree heat?

Rather than working against market forces to artificially restrict the labor supply, those wanting to improve wages and working conditions for American workers should favor higher minimum wages, aggressive enforcement of wage and hour and OSHA laws, and more unions. But, the GOP hates all of those real solutions.

The proposal also ignores “Dreamers,” which is sure to be a sore point with the Democrats. On the other side, it fails to sharply (and mindlessly) slash overall legal immigration levels as demanded by GOP nativists. While this proposal does not directly target children or dump on refugees from the Northern Triangle based on race and nationality, the ever slimier Trump sycophant Lindsey Graham has introduced a bill that promises to do both.

Beyond the purely humanitarian considerations, refugees make huge contributions to our economy and society. So, why would we want to screw them over? Family immigrants arrive not only with skills, but with a “leg up”on adjustment and assimilation. So, why would we want to dump on them?

For the most part, this looks more like a Trump campaign backgrounder or a diversion from his endless stream of lies, unethical behavior, and downright stupid actions that are a constant threat to our national security. What it doesn’t look like is a serious bipartisan proposal to give America the robust, expanded, more realistic, market responsive legal immigration, asylum, and refugee systems we need to secure our borders from real dangers (which doesn’t include most asylum seekers and would-be workers) and move America forward in the 21st century. Without regime change and a sea change that would break the GOP’s minority hold on Congress through the Senate, immigration is likely to remain a mess.

PWS

05-17-19

TRUMP IS FULL OF IT, BUT OUR COUNTRY ISN’T – Outside The White Nationalist World, Nearly All Experts Agree That We Need More Immigration

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/upshot/trump-america-full-or-emptying.html

Neil Irwin & Emily Badger report for the NY Times:

Trump Says the U.S. Is ‘Full.’ Much of the Nation Has the Opposite Problem.

An aging population and a declining birthrate among the native-born population mean a shrinking work force in many areas.

By Neil Irwin and Emily Badger

President Trump has adopted a blunt new message in recent days for migrants seeking refuge in the United States: “Our country is full.”

To the degree the president is addressing something broader than the recent strains on the asylum-seeking process, the line suggests the nation can’t accommodate higher immigration levels because it is already bursting at the seams. But it runs counter to the consensus among demographers and economists.

They see ample evidence of a country that is not remotely “full” — but one where an aging population and declining birthrates among the native-born population are creating underpopulated cities and towns, vacant housing and troubled public finances.

Local officials in many of those places view a shrinking population and work force as an existential problem with few obvious solutions.

“I believe our biggest threat is our declining labor force,” said Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont, a Republican, in his annual budget address this year. “It’s the root of every problem we face.

“This makes it incredibly difficult for businesses to recruit new employees and expand, harder for communities to grow and leaves fewer of us to cover the cost of state government.”

Or if you look at a city like Detroit, “many of the city’s problems would become less difficult if its population would start growing,” said Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist. “All sorts of things like the hangover pension liability become much more solvable if you’re actually looking at new people coming in.”

A road less traveled in Rutland, Vt., last spring. Vermont’s governor has described the state’s shrinking labor force as “at the root of every problem we face.” CreditCaleb Kenna for The New York Times

Image
A road less traveled in Rutland, Vt., last spring. Vermont’s governor has described the state’s shrinking labor force as “at the root of every problem we face.” CreditCaleb Kenna for The New York Times

This consensus is visible in official government projections. The Congressional Budget Office foresees the American labor force rising by only 0.5 percent a year over the coming decade, about one-third as fast as from 1950 to 2007. That is a crucial reason that economic growth is forecast to remain well below its late 20th-century levels.

And that, in turn, is reflected in the national fiscal outlook. There are now 2.8 workers for every recipient of Social Security benefits, a rate on track to fall to 2.2 by 2035, according to the program’s trustees. Many state pension plans face even greater demography-induced strains.

In smaller cities and rural areas, demographic decline is a fundamental fact of life. A recent study by the Economic Innovation Group found that 80 percent of American counties, with a combined population of 149 million, saw a decline in their number of prime working-age adults from 2007 to 2017.

Population growth in the United States has now hit its lowest level since 1937, partly because of a record-low fertility rate — the number of children born per woman. The United States increasingly has population growth rates similar to slow-growing Japan and Western Europe, with immigration partly offsetting that shift.

The Trump administration has portrayed the surge of asylum seekers at the southern border as a crisis, and applied aggressive tactics to deport undocumented immigrants already in the United States. But it has also announced plans to issue up to 30,000 additional H-2B visas for temporary workers.

“That immigrants keep showing up here is a testament to our freedom and the economic opportunity here,” said Matthew Kahn, an economist at the University of Southern California. If immigrants weren’t trying to come — if they believed the United States to be full — that would be a problem, Mr. Kahn said.

A particular fear, said John Lettieri, president of the Economic Innovation Group, is that declining population, falling home prices and weak public finances will create a vicious cycle that the places losing population could find hard to escape.

He proposes a program of “heartland visas,” in which skilled immigrants could obtain work visas to the United States on the condition they live in one of the counties facing demographic decline — with troubled counties themselves deciding whether to participate.

Although some of the areas with declining demographics are hostile to immigration, others, cities as varied as Baltimore, Indianapolis and Fargo, N.D., have embraced the strategy of encouraging it.

“One of the key solutions is to welcome immigrants into these communities,” said Brooks Rainwater, director of the National League of Cities’ Center for City Solutions.

Many parts of the country that are growing in population and that are more economically dynamic have depended on the arrival of immigrants for that success.

Sun Belt metros like Dallas and Phoenix have been built on the logic of rapid expansion — of quickly built homes, of poached employers, of new highways paved to ever-newer subdivisions. Their economic development strategy is growth. Their chief input is people — the more, the better.

“Growth cities need immigrants to continue their growth,” said Joel Kotkin, executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism, which promotes policies to help cities grow. “The older historically declining cities need immigrants to reinvigorate their economies. And the expensive cities need them because, frankly, white people, African-Americans and middle-class people are leaving for more affordable areas.”

As many industrial cities have lost population since the mid-20th century, Americans have built whole new metropolises on land that was virtually empty then. The Las Vegas metropolitan area, with more than two million people today, had barely 50,000 in 1950.

Still, only about 3 percent of the country’s land is urbanized.

America’s metropolitan areas remain among the least dense in the world, said Sonia Hirt, a professor of landscape architecture and planning at the University of Georgia. Nationwide, the United States has less than one-third of the population density of the European Union, and a quarter of the density of China.

“Factually speaking, the country is not actually full — that’s impossible,” Ms. Hirt said. “The real question is, if you continue on the current path of immigration, does this bring more benefits than it brings costs?”

Economists, too, argue that countries, or even cities, can’t really fill up. Rather, communities choose not to make the political choices necessary to accommodate more people. At the local level, that means neighbors may be unwilling to allow taller buildings or to invest in more schools or improved infrastructure. At the national level, it means that politicians may be unwilling to take up immigration reform, or to address workers who fear unemployment. The president’s comments echo such local fights.

“We’re full” has often been a motto for people to keep out poorer renters, minority households or apartment buildings, among both conservatives and liberals. The claim can be a way of disguising exclusion as practicality. It’s not that we’re unwelcoming; it’s just that we’re full.

When it comes to the economy, at least, the country looks more like one that is too empty than too full.

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

The White Nationalist agenda, which is being pushed not only by the White House but also by a number of GOP Senators and Representatives, prevents us from having the discussion we really must have: how many more individuals should we admit through our legal immigration system and how should we allocate those admissions to:

Best respond to market needs;
Reduce the need for a “black market system” that will continue to flourish as long as our system is out of whack with supply, demand, and humanitarian needs and obligations; and
Assist legitimate law enforcement by shifting the focus away from (often futile and always wasteful) efforts to prevent entry of those we should be welcoming through our legal immigration system.

PWS

04-10-19

NY TIMES: David J. Bier @ CATO Tells How Trump is Skirting Congress & The Law To Destroy Legal Immigration & Darken The Future Of America!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/opinion/trump-legal-immigrants-reject.html

David J. Bier writes in the NY Times:

At his postelection news conference, President Trump said of immigrants traveling to the United States, “I want them to come into the country, but they need to come in legally.” Yet newly released government data show that so far in 2018, the Trump administration is denying applications submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services at a rate 37 percent higher than the Obama administration did in 2016.

This makes no sense: Depriving immigrants of legal immigration options works against the president’s stated goal of increasing economic growth.

A new analysis for the Cato Institute has found that the Department of Homeland Security rejected 11.3 percent of requests to the immigration agency, which include those for work permits, travel documents and status applications, based on family reunification, employment and other grounds, in the first nine months of 2018. This is the highest rate of denial on record and means that by the end of the year, the United States government will have rejected around 620,000 people — about 155,000 more than in 2016.

This increase in denials cannot be credited to an overall rise in applications. In fact, the total number of applications so far this year is 2 percent lower than in 2016. It could be that the higher denial rate is also discouraging some people from applying at all.

In 2018, the D.H.S. turned away 10 percent of applicants for employment authorization documents compared with 6 percent in 2016, and it rejected applications for advanced parole — which gives temporary residents the authorization to travel internationally and return — at a clip of 18 percent, more than doubling the rate in 2016. Even skilled workers are being rejected at higher rates. The denial rate for petitions for temporary foreign workers shot to 23 percent from 17 percent. The application for permanent workers saw denials rise to 9 percent from 6 percent.

The largest increase in the denial rate for family-sponsored applications, for petitions for fiancés, rose to 21 percent from 14 percent.

Greg Siskind, a Memphis-based immigration attorney with three decades of experience, told me that these numbers back up the anecdotes that he has been hearing from colleagues across the country. The increase in denials, he said, is “significant enough to make one think that Congress must have passed legislation changing the requirements. But we know they have not.”

So what is going on?

Last year, the Trump administration increased the length of immigration applications by double, triple or even more, making them more time-consuming and complicated than ever. This made mistakes far more likely. This year, it also made it easier to deny applicants outright without giving them an opportunity to submit clarifying information. The agency has also made moves to police caseworkers who may be, in its view, too lenient.

Mr. Trump’s political appointees to the D.H.S. have also seized on his rhetorical attacks on immigrants, as well as executive orders like the “Buy American and Hire American” order and another mandating extensive vetting of foreigners, as a justification for a crackdown on legal immigration.

As a result of all this, total immigration to the United States has declined under President Trump, and fewer foreign travelers have been entering the country. These trends are surprising, because the economies of the United States and almost all other countries are growing, which usually generates more travel and immigration. The best explanation for this discrepancy is that the president’s policies are having their intended effect: reducing legal immigration to this country.

This is happening at a time when there are more job openings than job seekers in the United States. This month, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell stated that fewer immigrants and foreign workers would slow economic growth by limiting the ability of businesses to expand.

On some level, President Trump appears to understand this reality, but his policies are making the situation worse.

David J. Bier is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

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

The answer is actually pretty simple, David. Trump lies, particularly when he repeats the racist restrictionist disingenuous claim that he “just wants legal immigrants.” I call BS! His pejorative use of the term “chain migration” and his bogus proposals for a fake “merit based” (read “no”) immigration system clearly belies any such claim.

In addition to being a congenital liar and proudly ignorant in an intellectual sense, Trump is a White Nationalist racist who hates all immigrants except, perhaps, his current wife and a few White Christian guys from Europe with PhDs. (Although, he really doesn’t like Europeans, Canadians, or any other type of “foreigner” who isn’t a human rights violating despot, leading to the conclusion that he truly despises human rights of any kind.)

His policies are driven by a toxic combination of intentional ignorance, hatred, White Nationalism, and political opportunism. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that policies driven by such evil and irrational motives are going to produce irrational and highly counterproductive results.

Welcome to the Age of Trump & His GOP, David! Where’ve you been? What have you and your colleagues at CATO been doing to insure that Trump and the GOP are sent packing and replaced with leaders (e.g., Democrats, at least at present) who both understand and are willing to stand up for the national interest?

CATO is supported to a large extent by the Koch Bros. While I actually agree with some of their ideas, respect that they actually employ folks producing useful goods and apparently treat them reasonably well, and I occasionally attend CATO seminars, the “Bros” generally have been supporters and enablers of Trump, Pence, and the current GOP kakistocracy.

They helped prop up the truly reprehensible Scott Walker who wasted money, divided Wisconsin, demeaned education, tanked the infrastructure, screwed the environment, and diminished the state in almost every way. It turned what had been a fairly progressive, “midwest friendly,” and cooperative state into a leader in the “race to the bottom.” And, their support for the ugly and unprincipled opposition to Senator Tammy Baldwin was beyond despicable!

I think you and your CATO colleagues largely see where history is going. But, until you get out there and actively work for the Constitutional removal of Trump (and his toady Mike Pence), the defeat of the “Trump GOP,” and the return of “government for all the people” you will remain on the “wrong side of history.” Your dream of an economically prosperous and powerful America continuing to lead the world into the future will be just that — a dream that will never be fulfilled as long as racism and White Nationalism overrule reason!

America needs a two party system (or more). And, I believe there’s plenty of room and a need for a fiscally conservative, pro business, labor friendly, non-racist, non-White-Nationalist, non-homophobic party that challenges the idea that we can solve all problems by just throwing money at them. Not saying I’d join it, but I can see the need for it. But, the current GOP is nothing of the sort — talk about disingenuous rhetoric and total fiscal irresponsibility!

PWS

11-16-18

NOLAN’S LATEST IN THE HILL: “Undocumented immigrants shouldn’t replace legal ones”

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/390812-undocumented-immigrants-shouldnt-replace-legal-ones

Nolan writes in The Hill:

President Bill Clinton’s 1995 State of the Union included the following remarks:

“All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.”

“We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.”

Clinton is not the only Democrat who has spoken out against illegal immigration. The Republicans provide a number of examples in a blog they posted recently: “The Democrat Hard Left Turn on Illegal Immigration.”

In 1993, then-Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said, “When it comes to enforcing laws against illegal immigration, we have a system that will make you recoil in disbelief. … Yet we are doing almost nothing to encourage these people to go home or even to deter them from coming here in the first place.”

In 1994, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) ran a political ad showing illegal immigrants crossing the border and promised to get tough on illegal immigration with more “agents, fencing, lighting, and other equipment.”

In 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said “Better fences and better security along our borders” would “help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country.”

In 2009, during a speech at Georgetown Law, Senator Chuck Schumer(D-N.Y.) said, “When we use phrases like ‘undocumented workers,’ we convey a message to the American people that their government is not serious about combating illegal immigration, which the American people overwhelmingly oppose.”

The blog also provides video clip links, including one that shows Clinton receiving a standing ovation for his remarks about Americans being disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering the country.

. . . .

A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) on the labor laws California has enacted to protect unauthorized immigrant workers indicates that many of the immigrants who have been attracted to California by its sanctuary policies are being exploited by unscrupulous employers.

In fact, the main beneficiaries of California’s sanctuary policies are the employers who exploit undocumented immigrant workers and deportable immigrants in police custody who otherwise would be turned over to ICE when they are released.

California has had to enact seven laws to protect undocumented workers from being exploited by their employers.

EPI found that the ability of U.S. employers to exploit unauthorized workers undercuts the bargaining power of U.S. workers who work side by side with them. When the wages and labor standards of unauthorized immigrants are degraded, it has a negative impact on the wages and labor standards of U.S. workers in similar jobs.

In reality, we could meet all of our immigration needs with legal immigration. We do not need nor ultimately benefit from uncontrolled illegal immigration.

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

Go on over to The Hill to read Nolan’s complete article.

I’m all for replacing the uncontrolled flow of undocumented migrants with legal migrants. That’s why I favor a “smart” immigration policy that would:

Legalize the vast majority of those currently here without documentation who are working in needed jobs, law-abiding, and contributing to our society. Legalization would allow them to be screened, brought into the tax system (if they aren’t already), and protected by U.S. labor laws.
Expand legal immigration opportunities, particularly for so-called “non-professional,” manual labor skills and jobs that are badly needed in the U.S. and which now often are filled by undocumented labor. That would allow screening of visa applicants abroad, a controlled entry process, and protections under the labor laws. To the extent that undocumented migration is being driven by unfilled market forces, it would decrease the flow of undocumented individuals, thus saving us from expensive, unneeded, inhumane, and ineffective “enforcement overkill.” Immigration enforcement would be freed to concentrate on those who might actually be a threat to the U.S.
Create more robust, realistic refugee laws that would bring many more refugees through the legal system, particularly from the Northern Triangle. This, along with cooperation with the UNHCR and other nations would reduce the need for individuals to make they way to our borders to apply for asylum. Asylum processing could be improved by allowing the Asylum Office to review and grant “defensive” as well as affirmative applications, thus lessening the burden on the Immigration Courts.
More investment in Wage and Hour, NLRB, and OSHA enforcement to prevent unscrupulous employers from taking advantage of workers of all types.
We have full employment, surplus jobs, a declining birth rate, and we’re losing the “STEM edge” to the PRC, Canada, Mexico, the EU and other nations that are becoming more welcoming and attractive to “high skill” immigrants. We’re going to need all of the legal immigration we can get across the board to remain viable and dynamic in a changing world.

PWS

06-06-18

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LARGELY IGNORES POPULAR PROGRAM FOR REDUCING UNDOCUMENTED EMPLOYMENT!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-is-very-weak-on-this-one-popular-way-to-curb-illegal-immigration/2018/05/22/adf5f85e-399b-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.236543271dc2

Tracy Jan reports for the Washington Post:

In President Trump’s many vocal pronouncements about stopping illegal immigration, one solution he promoted during the campaign has been conspicuously missing — a requirement that employers check whether workers are legal.

Eight states require nearly all employers to use the federal government’s online E-Verify tool for new hires, but efforts to expand the mandate to all states have stalled, despite polls showing widespread support and studies showing that it reduces unauthorized workers.

The campaign for a national mandate has withered amid what appears to be a more pressing problem — a historic labor shortage that has businesses across the country desperate for workers at restaurants, on farms and in other low-wage jobs.

The urgency around that shortage was clear at a congressional hearing last week when senators pressed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on additional visas for seasonal foreign workers.

“There’s not one manufacturing plant in Wisconsin, not one dairy farm, not one resort that can hire enough people,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

With the unemployment rate at a 17-year low and the Trump administration cracking down on foreign workers, lawmakers are reluctant to champion a measure that could exacerbate the labor shortage and hurt business constituents — even one that is popular among a broad swath of Americans.

House Republicans are forging ahead with a debate over the future of young undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, but the fate of an E-Verify provision remains in limbo.

Despite his administration’s “Hire American” stance, Trump and the GOP leadership have gone quiet on mandating E-Verify, draining momentum from a top policy goal of grass-roots Republicans.

. . . .

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

Two problems that I can see:

The Trump/GOP bogus position that we don’t need more immigrant labor, which would point toward a program both a) legalizing undocumented workers already here; and 2) expanding (not contracting) future legal immigration opportunities;
“E-Verify” depends heavily on timely action by USCIS to grant extensions of stay and renew work authorizations. But, under Trump, Cissna, Nielsen, and Sessions, USCIS has eliminated customer service to both migrants and U.S. employers from their mission and joined the “mindless enforcement bureaucracy.”
When immigration policy decisions are based on bias and prejudice rather than facts, bad things are going to happen. Whatever might be done to fix our broken immigration system is highly unlikely to happen under the Trump White Nationalists.

PWS

05-24-18

“NEO KNOW NOTHING” KELLY LOBS RACIAL GRENADES AT HARD-WORKING MIGRANTS & THEIR “ASSIMILATION” — “Like Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Kelly has made it clear that ‘law and order’ — perhaps based on stereotypical ideas of outsiders — will be the dominant philosophy he employs when responding to immigrants seeking the American Dream that Kelly’s ancestors pursued.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/05/11/john-kellys-assimilation-into-a-hard-line-stance-against-illegal-immigrants/?utm_term=.e2507001a73c

Eugene Scott writes in “The Fix” @ WashPost:

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly provided another reminder that he continues to support President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies in an NPR interview that aired Friday.

Kelly was defending the Justice Department’s policy that includes separating children from parents being prosecuted for immigrating illegally into the United States, when he told NPR that undocumented immigrants do not “easily assimilate” into American culture. Here’s what he said:

The vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13. … But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. … They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. … The big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.

Kelly’s belief is a popular one from hard-line conservative groups, and that line of thinking often extends to claims that undocumented and legal immigrants are more of a drain on the American economy than an asset.

In a 2016 piece on welfare use in immigrant households published by the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit group advocating for lower immigration, Jason Richwine claims that both legal and illegal immigrant households cost taxpayers more than native citizens in welfare dollars than the average household of native-born citizens, and that “The greater consumption of welfare dollars by immigrants can be explained in large part by their lower level of education and larger number of children compared to natives.”

However, other right-leaning think tanks disputed the findings in the CIS report. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, picked apart the methodology used by CIS to support their claims, calling their findings “exaggerated.”

CIS — and many hard-liners on immigration — don’t want to see less illegal immigration. They want to see less immigration period, wrote Alex Nowrasteh, a senior immigration policy analyst at Cato. If they can argue that immigrants struggle to “Americanize” well and instead end up draining this country’s resources, they hope lawmakers will back policy ideas that keep immigration numbers as close to zero as possible.

It’s true that immigrants from rural communities, with little education, no command of English and a lack of skills to gain meaningful employment do not find assimilating into “modern society” easy. But it’s not impossible. Beginning more than a century ago, nearly 2 million immigrants from Ireland — the country from which Kelly’s ancestors descend — came to the United States, where they faced harsh backlash from native citizens. People of Irish heritage now make up 10 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau.

As with previous cases, not all of Kelly’s statements Friday totally meshed with the president’s.

In the same NPR interview, Kelly spoke in favor of granting a path to citizenship for immigrants who have been in the United States under temporary protected status from countries like El Salvador, Haiti and Honduras, if they had been here long enough to assimilate.

You take the Central Americans that have been here 20-plus years. I mean if you really start looking at them and saying, “Okay, you know you’ve been here 20 years. What have you done with your life?” Well, I’ve met an American guy and I have three children and I’ve worked and gotten a degree or I’m a brick mason or something like that. That’s what I think we should do — for the ones that have been here for shorter periods of time, the whatever it was that gave them TPS status in the first place. If that is solved back in their home countries they should go home.

Still, Kelly’s strong stance against illegal immigration will probably land well with Trump’s base, and could help him remain in good favor with his boss despite frequent reports that Trump is often frustrated with Kelly’s performance in other areas. Kelly spoke to NPR the same day Trump reportedly unleashed a tirade on Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, a close Kelly ally, over what Trump views as unsatisfactory border security.

But it’s worth highlighting that significant percentages of Americans don’t share the Trump White House’s hardest positions on immigration. And separating children from their parents has previously been a line that even conservatives did not want to cross.

Like Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Kelly has made it clear that “law and order” — perhaps based on stereotypical ideas of outsiders — will be the dominant philosophy he employs when responding to immigrants seeking the American Dream that Kelly’s ancestors pursued.

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

Also in the Post, Karen Tumulty provides a little history lesson to Kelly:

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly wants you to know that he does not think most immigrants who come to this country illegally are bad people. His concern, as he explained it in an interview with National Public Radio on Thursday, is that they are “overwhelmingly rural people,” with little education. “They’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society,” he said.

It would be disturbing to hear any person in a position of trust express such lack of regard for the fundamental values that have made this country what it is. But in Kelly’s case, it was particularly egregious because … well, because his name is Kelly.

His ancestors came from Ireland, as mine did. He grew up on Bigelow Street in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, where reminders of his heritage — and of the opportunities made possible by his immigrant forebears — would have been everywhere he looked.

The Irish came to America with plenty of assimilation challenges of their own. They had mostly lived in rural areas, which made it difficult for them to adjust to the big cities in which they found themselves. They had little education. As they were fleeing seven years of famine, few had been able to scrape together more than the fare to get them on the boat over. They arrived hungry and sick after a journey that lasted four weeks. They were seen as lazy and shiftless. In the 1850s, 70 percent of charity recipients in New York City were Irish.

They were hated for their religion as well. In Boston, posters proclaimed: “All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are … vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.” Some back then might have said that when Ireland sent its people, they were not sending their best.

That wave of Irish immigration arrival sparked a nativist backlash, and even a new political party, The Know-Nothings. This was no mere fringe movement, as Smithsonian Magazine has noted:

At its height in the 1850s, the Know Nothing party, originally called the American Party, included more than 100 elected congressmen, eight governors, a controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California, and thousands of local politicians. Party members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation’s highest values.

Does all that sound familiar? There are still Know-Nothings among us. They are the people who forget their own history.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/05/11/john-kellys-know-nothingism/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3f18462ae01f

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

Yeah, but Kelly’s ancestors were (presumably) White. So, in the long run that outweighed their (presumed) Catholicism and made them OK (but only in retrospect).

I met migrants, legal, undocumented, first generation, second generation in my courtroom every working day for more than a decade. The vast majority have skills, lots of them, along with courage, resourcefulness, a work ethic, determination, and persistence that would put most “native-born Americans” to shame, particularly Trump, his family, and his boorish, overprivileged, under-humanized cronies.

The skills migrants often bring — working with crops, construction, child care, elder care, cleaning, repairing, building, cooking, teaching, coaching, running small businesses are absolutely essential to our economic survival. They just aren’t the skills that are recognized and respected by arrogant, bigoted, members of the privileged classes like Trump, Kelly, Sessions, Cotton, Pence, etc. But, as I’ve pointed out before, none those restrictionists would last very long or be very valuable picking lettuce or laying shingles in the hot sun.

And, many migrants don’t “choose” to come here outside the legal system. Conditions in their home countries, along with the US’s stubborn refusal (magnified by this Administration) to set up viable overseas refugee processing in Central America leaves many no realistic choice but to come here to seek refuge through our asylum system.

Under both U.S. and international law they have every right to seek refuge in the U.S. and to receive humane treatment and a fair and unbiased determination of their claims for protection — something that is not happening under the current system as administered under the toxic, biased, and often lawless leadership of Trump & Sessions. Such refugee migrations have been taking place for decades and will continue, in some form or another, until the problems causing individuals to flee their home countries are addressed by leaders much wiser, more talented, and less bigoted than Trump, Sessions, Pence, and Kelly.

Also, just how are folks being encouraged to “assimilate” by an Administration that spreads racial slurs, bias, and false narratives, encourages racists within its own “base,” advances bogus rationales to terminate the legal status of many long-time residents, rails mindlessly against legal immigration, and actually prides itself on destroying migrant families and spreading terror and fear among ethnic communities?

Another of my predictions coming true: Kelly’s reputation and integrity will fit in a thimble with plenty of space left over by the time he finally parts ways with “Don the Con” and his ugly, dysfunctional White House Circus.

PWS

05-14-18

HERESY IN THE HOUSE?: DID RYAN AX CHAPLAIN FOLLOWING UNWELCOME REMINDER THAT “THE POOR ARE CHILDREN OF GOD?” – Is He Seeking WASP Male Evangelical Replacement Qualified To Minister To Needs Of House GOP Kleptocracy!👹👹👹

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/paul-ryan-patrick-conroy?mbid=nl_th_5ae255955bf9e03bdb5e6fd3&CNDID=48297443&spMailingID=13395516&spUserID=MjMzNDQ1MzU1ODE2S0&spJobID=1382357241&spReportId=MTM4MjM1NzI0MQS2

Bess Levin writes in Vanity Fair:

Levin Report

DID PAUL RYAN FIRE THE HOUSE CHAPLAIN FOR TAX-CUT BLASPHEMY?

It sure seems like something he’d do.

BY

BESS LEVIN

APRIL 26, 2018 6:27 PM

“I don’t care who you are, you bite your god damn tongue!”

By Alex Edelman/Getty Images.

The December 2017 passage of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” was thrilling to a great many people, among them Donald Trump, corporate America, and the uber-rich, whom the legislation was structured to disproportionately benefit. But in truth, the day belonged to one man: CrossFit devoteeand Eddie Munster doppelgängerPaul Ryan, who had fantasized about redistributing wealth to those at the top since his boyhood days in Wisconsin, devoted his entire career to making it happen, and promptly announced his retirement when it became clear that his other lifelong dream—dismantling the social safety net and cutting off the lazy takers—wasn’t going to happen ’til at least 2021. So we imagine it must have really frosted Ryan’s cookies when, in the midst of many a late night and early morning on the Hill devoted to dragging this sucker across the finish line, Reverend Patrick Conroy, the House chaplain since 2011, had the stones to include these outrageous lines in one of his prayers:

“God of the universe, we give You thanks for giving us another day. Bless the Members of this assembly as they set upon the work of these hours, of these days. . . . As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all Members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great Nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”

Ryan, one assumes, had never heard such sacrilegious words from a man of the cloth and was probably of a mind to drag Conroy out of the room by his collar and throw him out on the Capitol steps then and there. But because he is a disciplined lawmaker whose Holy Grail was so close he could taste it, he stayed focused and decided to deal with the blasphemy at a later time. And apparently that time came earlier this month, per The Hill:

House Chaplain Patrick Conroy’s sudden resignation has sparked a furor on Capitol Hill, with sources in both parties saying he was pushed out by Speaker Paul Ryan. Conroy’s own resignation announcement stated that it was done at Ryan’s request.

“As you have requested, I hereby offer my resignation as the 60th Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives,” the April 15 letter to Ryan, obtained by The Hill, states.

While one source claimed that “some of the more conservative evangelical Republicans didn’t like that the Father had invited a Muslim person to give the opening prayer,” others offered a more compelling reason: Ryan “took issue with a prayer on the House floor that could have been perceived as being critical of the G.O.P. tax cut bill.” According to a Democratic aide, Conroy’s ouster was “largely driven by [the] speech on the tax bill that the speaker didn’t like.” The New York Times notes that a week after his sermon, a staffer from Ryan’s office told Conroy “We are upset with this prayer; you are getting too political,” and that the next time he saw the Reverend in person, Ryan told him “Padre, you just got to stay out of politics.” AshLee Strong, a spokesperson for the speaker, declined to explain the personnel decision, noting only Minority Leader Nancy Pelosiand her office “were fully read in and did not object.”

Now, could Ryan have forced the guy to resign for completely legitimate reasons? Sure! But it also seems entirely plausible that this is exactly the sort of thing that would constitute a bridge too far in his book. Stand up for neo-Nazis? Water off a duck’s back. But suggest that a $1.5 trillion tax cut should help all Americans and not just the already-rich? That’s obviously a (potentially!) fireable offense right there. And don’t bother saying sorry after the fact to Ryan, Reverend. Say sorry to God. As a major corporate shareholder and beneficiary of the legislation, you’re in the doghouse with him, too.

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

Read the rest of the “Levin Report” at the link!

Obviously, it takes a very special type of pastor to provide spiritual counseling to a bunch of guys who have devoted their entire careers to taking from the underprivileged and giving to the over-privileged. It also takes a very special kind of theological scholarship, since almost all of Christian theology suggests that exactly the opposite is required and that greed, promoting inequality, and abusing the less fortunate are actually sins that could have serious repercussions in eternal life.

These dudes have to face the very real chance that they will pass into an another world where those whom they have dispossessed, mistreated, mocked, dumped on, and scorned in life will be the “honored ones” and the GOP lifetime grifters will be at their mercy. The day of reckoning for today’s GOP and their evangelical backers could get ugly — they almost have to hope that there is no God, or if there is, that She is not a “Just God” or they will have “Hell to Pay” so to speak! No wonder they are in need of serious spiritual help!

Ryan apparently had to act quickly to scotch the blasphemous rumors floating around the Hill: JESUS WASN’T REALLY A RICH WASP. HE WASN’T EVEN A CHRISTIAN, AND HE DIDN’T BELONG TO ANY CHURCH AT ALL. HE SUPPOSEDLY TURNED FISH INTO LOAVES OF BREAD AND DIDN’T EVEN DENY BREAD (let alone cake) TO THE LGBTQ GUYS IN THE CROWD!

Some misguided souls are even claiming that ”our very own” Jesus Christ actually was an indigent swarthy Palestinian disgruntled Jew who led a ragtag band of vagrants — some of whom had quit gainful employment and abandoned their families — around Palestine undermining legal authority, failing to respect THE LAW, and spreading seditious lies like “The meek shall inherit the earth,” “Blessed are the poor,” and “Fat Cats riding camels will never make it through the eye of a needle or pass through the gates of Heaven!” They were “takers” — non-self-supporting, non-contributors to the community, and lived on handouts and public charity!

Some apparently have the audacity to claim that Jesus spoke of a “spiritual kingdom” unrelated to material possessions and tax breaks where rich White Guys would be judged equally with everyone else. Shucks, what’s the purpose of being rich & White if it won’t even buy you preferential treatment? Heck, even a poor guy who wasn’t a lobbyist would have direct access to Mick Mulvaney under that scenario!

This obviously false Prophet reputedly was so poor that he couldn’t afford a lawyer for his trial, not even Rudy Guiliani. He tried to represent himself, and the result was pretty ugly.

False news, false news, false news! Gotta find a true minister who preaches the gospel according to Fox & Friends!

PWS

04-28-18

TRUMPSTERS’ WHITE NATIONALIST IMMIGRATION POLICIES HURT SENIORS: No, There Was No Legal Requirement To Terminate TPS — It Was Just A Combination Of Disingenuousness, Stupidity, Racism, & Plain Cruelty!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/as-trump-targets-immigrants-elderly-and-others-brace-to-lose-caregivers/2018/03/24/72d5a0d0-2d3e-11e8-8ad6-fbc50284fce8_story.html

Melissa Bailey reports for Kaiser Health News in the Washing gton Post:

BOSTON — The two women have been together since 2011, a 96-year-old originally from Italy and a Haitian immigrant who has helped her remain in her home — giving her showers, changing her clothes, taking her to her favorite parks and discount grocery stores.

“Hello, bella,” Nirva greets Isolina Dicenso, using the Italian word for “beautiful.”

“Hi, baby,” Dicenso replies.

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But changes to federal immigration policy are putting both at risk. Haitian caregivers like Nirva, who got temporary permission to stay in the United States after the 2010 earthquake destroyed much of their homeland, now face a July 22, 2019 deadline for returning. If they and tens of thousands of other immigrants with similar jobs and tenuous legal status are forced to leave the country, Americans living with disabilities, serious illness or, like Dicenso, the frailties of old age could find themselves with few options besides nursing homes.

And many of those facilities could themselves be caught short of staff, at a time when more of the country’s aging baby boom generation could need care.

The situation reflects the crosscurrents that often roil immigration debates, with a central question being how many Americans are willing to fill the arduous, low-pay positions that immigrants often work. The expected fallout offers a glimpse into how such policy changes under President Trump will affect older Americans nationwide, especially those in large cities.

Some 59,000 Haitians live in the United States under temporary protected status (TPS), a humanitarian program that has given them permission to live and work in this country since the earthquake. Many are nursing assistants, home health aides and personal care attendants — the trio of jobs that often defines direct-care workers.

The Trump administration decided last November to curtail that protection, saying the island no longer faced the same adverse conditions and giving the immigrants until mid-2019 to leave or face deportation. In Boston, the city with the nation’s third-highest Haitian population, the action has prompted panic from TPS holders and pleas from health-care agencies that rely on their labor.

The decision “will have a devastating impact on the ability of skilled nursing facilities to provide quality care to frail and disabled residents,” Tara Gregorio, president of the Massachusetts Senior Care Association, warned in a letter published late last year in the Boston Globe. Nursing facilities in the state, which already are grappling with a shortage of several thousand workers, employ about 4,300 Haitians, according to Gregorio.

Nationwide, 1 in 4 direct-care workers are immigrants, said Robert Espinoza, vice president of policy at the New York-based Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute.

It’s not clear how many of those workers rely on the TPS program, but the Institute calculates that there are 34,600 who are non-U.S. citizens from Haiti, Nicaragua (for which TPS will end in January), El Salvador (in September 2019) and Honduras (in July, unless the Trump administration decides to renew protected status for individuals from this country). TPS decisions cannot legally take economic considerations into account, a Department of Homeland Security official said.

In addition, another 11,000 workers come from countries affected by Trump’s travel ban, primarily from Somalia and Iran, and about 69,800 are non-U.S. citizens from Mexico, according to the Institute.

Even immigrants with secure legal status may be affected when family members are deported, Espinoza noted: Under Trump, noncriminal immigration arrests have doubled. The “totality of the anti-immigrant climate” threatens the stability of the workforce — and “the ability of older people and people with disabilities to access home health care,” he said.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports more restrictive immigration policies, disputes such dire scenarios. Since three-quarters of direct-care workers are U.S. citizens, spokesman David Ray argues, then “these are clearly not ‘jobs that Americans won’t do.’ ” He does the math this way: The country has 6.7 million unemployed people, and if the health-care industry can’t find enough workers to replace those who lose TPS and other protected statuses, “then it needs to take a hard look at its recruiting practices and compensation packages.”

Yet nursing homes in Massachusetts are already losing immigrant workers who have left the country in fear, because of the White House’s immigration proposals and public remarks , according to Gregorio. Nationally, thousands of Haitians have fled to Canada.

“What people don’t seem to understand is that people from other countries really are the backbone of long-term care,” said Sister Jacquelyn McCarthy, chief executive of Bethany Health Care Center in Framingham, Mass., which runs a nursing home with 170 patients. She has eight Haitian and Salvadoran workers with TPS, mostly certified nursing assistants, who show up reliably for 4:30 a.m. shifts and never call out sick, she said. She already has six CNA vacancies and can’t afford to lose more, she said.

“There aren’t people to replace them if they should all be deported,” McCarthy said.

Nirva, who asked that she be identified only by her first name, works 70 hours a week taking care of senior citizens, sick and disabled patients. She started working as a CNA shortly after she arrived in Boston in March 2010 with her two sons.

She said she chose this work because of her harrowing experience in the earthquake, which destroyed her home and killed hundreds of thousands, including her cousin and nephew. After the disaster, she walked 15 miles with her sister, a nurse, to a Red Cross station to try to help survivors. When she got there, she recounted, the guards wouldn’t let her in because she wasn’t a nurse.

“So, when I came here — I feel, people’s life is very important,” she said. But at first, caring for elderly patients was difficult. “At the beginning, it was very tough for me,” she acknowledged, especially “when I have to clean their incontinence. . . . Some of them, they have dementia, they are fighting. They insult you. You have to be very compassionate to do this job.”

Nirva, 46, works with a soft voice, a bubbling laugh and disarming modesty. She says her faith in God — and a need to pay the bills to support her sons, now in high school and college — help her get through each week.

She started caring for Dicenso in her Boston home as the older woman recovered from surgery in 2011. With support from Nirva, another in-home aide and her daughter, Dicenso has been able to continue living alone. She now sees Nirva once a week for walks, lunch outings and shopping runs. The two have grown close, bonding in part over their Catholic faith. At home, Dicenso proudly displays a bedspread that Nirva gave her, emblazoned with the word LOVE.

Nirva also fills three shifts a week at a chiropractor’s office as a medical assistant. Five nights a week, she does an overnight shift at a Boston rehabilitation center.

The Trump administration’s immigration restrictions may exacerbate a serious shortage of direct-care workers, warns Paul Osterman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. He forecasts a national shortfall of 151,000 workers by 2030 and of 355,000 workers by 2040. If immigrants lose their work permits, the gap would widen further.

“People aren’t going to be able to have quality care,” he said. “They’re not going to be able to stay at home.”

Angelina Di Pietro, Dicenso’s daughter, worries about who could help her mother if Nirva can’t. “There’s not a lot of people in this country who would take care of the elderly,” she said. “Taking care of the elderly is a hard job.”

“Nirva, pray to God they let you stay,” said Dicenso, sitting in her living-room armchair after a long walk and ravioli lunch. “What would I do without you?”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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

Restrictionist myths:

Health care workers are unskilled;
At virtually 100% employment, there are other American workers to take these jobs;
There wasn’t a rational basis for continuing Haitian TPS;
There is a legal prohibition on taking humanitarian factors and US interests into account in making discretionary, unreviewable TPS determinations;
That legal requirements are a factor in the actions of the Trump Administration (the most lawless and dishonest Administration in US history).

What will happen when xenophobes like David Ray of FAIR need help in their old age? Will they will get the benefit of the qualified, compassionate care that they would deny the rest of us? Or, will they be cared for by “anybody off the street” as they propose for others?

PWS

03-24-18

TRUMP ON PACE TO DEPORT ALL 11 MILLION UNDOCUMENTED AMERICANS BY 2070!

Tal Kopen reports for CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/2018/02/23/politics/trump-immigration-arrests-deportations/index.html

“Arrests of immigrants, especially non-criminals, way up in Trump’s first year

By Tal Kopan, CNN

In his first year in office, President Donald Trump’s administration’s arrests of immigrants — especially those without criminal convictions — were up substantially, but actual deportations lagged behind his predecessor, according to statistics released Friday.

The jump corresponds to Trump’s central pledge to crack down on illegal immigration, at least in terms of casting a wide net to catch undocumented or deportable immigrants.

Days after being inaugurated, one of Trump’s first actions was to release immigration agents of specific prioritization of who to go after, giving them wide discretion to target almost any undocumented immigrant as a priority.

According to new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, there was a 41% increase in the number of undocumented immigrants who were arrested by the agency in 2017 compared to 2016.

But the increase was driven by the agency arresting a significantly higher rate of immigrants without a criminal background. While the share of criminals arrested was up 17%, there was an increase 10 times that — of 171% — in the share of non-criminals arrested.

ICE had previously released fiscal year data, but on Friday released additional numbers from the last three months of 2017 as well, allowing for the year-to-year comparison.

In 2017, ICE made routine arrests of more than 155,000 immigrants, 30% of whom were not criminals. The final three months of the year, the rate of non-criminals arrested was even higher, at 35%.

That number was far lower, though, in 2016. That year the Obama administration arrested almost 110,000 immigrants, nearly 16% of whom were not criminals. In 2014, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security set priorities for ICE that focused first on serious criminals and national safety threats, followed by other public safety threats and immigrants who had recently had an order of deportation signed.

Unlike the increased arrests, at the end of 2017, deportations continued to lag behind the Obama administration’s pace, despite Trump’s repeated pledges to get undocumented immigrants “out” of the country.

In 2017, the administration deported nearly 215,000 immigrants, 13% fewer than the nearly 250,000 deported in 2016. The percentage of those individuals who were non-criminals was steady at just over 40%.

Deportations are a complex statistic to compare, however, because it can take many years to work an individual case through the immigration courts. The administration has also cited a decrease in the number of people apprehended at the border as part of the lagging numbers.”

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

While “Gonzo” immigration enforcement is demonstrably bad for America, the good news here is that the pace at which it is proceeding insures its own ultimate failure. That’s great news for America and our future!

If Trump, Sessions & Co were actually able to remove all 11 million so-called “undocumented” Americans tomorrow, the American agriculture, hospitality, technology, construction, dairy, teaching, health care, child care, technology, restaurant, and sanitation industries, to name just a few, would cease to function, thus throwing our country into an economic and social tailspin from which we likely would never recover. When you are being governed by idiots, sometimes your only protection is in the idiocy and self-defeating nature of their own policies.

PWS

02-26-18

DESTROYING AMERICA, ONE PRECIOUS, TALENTED LIFE AT A TIME — “Can something that irrational happen in America?” — In The Trump/Sessions/Miller White Nationalist Regime? — You Betcha!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/immigration/with-three-months-left-in-medical-school-her-career-may-be-slipping-away/2018/02/22/24a7a780-10f3-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_dacadoctors-830pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.ed15d711fa8f

Maria Sacchetti reports for the Washington Post:

MAYWOOD, Ill. — Rosa Aramburo sailed into her final year of medical school with stellar test scores and high marks from professors. Her advisers predicted she’d easily land a spot in a coveted residency program.

Then President Trump announced the end of the Obama-era program that has issued work permits to Aramburo and nearly 700,000 other undocumented immigrants raised in the United States.

“Don’t be surprised if you get zero interviews,” an adviser told her.

She got 10, after sending 65 applications.

But as she prepared to rank her top three choices last week, Congress rejected bills that would have allowed her and other “dreamers” to remain in the United States, casting new doubt on a career path that seemed so certain a year ago.

Employers and universities that have embraced DACA recipients over the past six years are scrambling for a way to preserve the program. They are lobbying a deeply divided Congress, covering fees for employees and students to renew their permits, and searching for other legal options — perhaps a work visa or residency through spouses or relatives who are citizens. Some companies have considered sending employees abroad.

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They are also awaiting the outcome of a court challenge to the Trump administration’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has granted the young recipients a temporary reprieve and allowed them to continue renewing work permits for the time being. The Supreme Court could decide as soon as Friday whether to intervene in the case.

Nationwide, more than 160 DACA recipients are teaching in low-income schools through Teach For America. Thirty-nine work at Microsoft, 250 at Apple and 84 at Starbucks. To employers, the young immigrants are skilled workers who speak multiple languages and often are outsize achievers. Polls show strong American support for allowing them to stay.

Based in part on that data, many DACA recipients say they believe that the United States will continue to protect them, even as a senior White House official has indicated that Trump and key GOP lawmakers are ready to move on to other issues.

Human-resources experts warn that employers could be fined or go to jail if they knowingly keep workers on the payroll after their permits have expired. And while the White House has said that young immigrants who lose DACA protections would not become immediate targets for deportation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says anyone here illegally can be detained and, possibly, deported.

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“I’ve gotten emails saying, ‘Oh, we loved you,’ ’’ Aramburo, 28, said one recent morning as she hurried to predawn rounds at a neurology intensive-care unit. “But in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘What if I can’t finish?’ ”

Dreams and disbelief

Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine has 32 DACA recipients enrolled in its medical program. (Alyssa Schukar/for The Washington Post)

Cesar Montelongo is a third-year student in the school’s MD-PhD program. (Alyssa Schukar/for The Washington Post)
Nearly 100 DACA recipients are medical students enrolled at schools such as Harvard, Georgetown and the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University Chicago, which this May will graduate its first five dreamers, including Aramburo.

Loyola, a Catholic school, changed its admissions policies to allow DACA recipients to apply soon after President Barack Obama — frustrated by Congress’s failure to pass an immigration bill — declared in 2012 that he would issue the young immigrants work permits. Trump and other immigration hard-liners criticized the program as executive overreach.

Thirty-two students with DACA are enrolled at Stritch, the most of any medical school in the country, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Most are from Mexico, but there are also students brought to the United States as children from 18 other countries, including Pakistan, India and South Korea.

The school helped the students obtain more than $200,000 apiece in loans to pay for their education. Some agreed to work in poor and rural areas with acute physician shortages to borrow the money without interest.

Mark G. Kuczewski, a professor of medical ethics at Loyola, said the school was inspired to launch the effort after hearing about Aramburo, a high school valedictorian who earned college degrees in biology and Spanish and yearned to study medicine but could find work only as a babysitter because she was undocumented.

He said it is unthinkable that Congress may derail the chance for her and the other DACA recipients at Loyola to become doctors and work legally throughout the United States.

“We just can’t believe that that will happen,” Kuczewski said. “Can something that irrational happen in America?”

2:52
This nurse found hope in DACA, now his life is in limbo

Jose Aguiluz is a 28-year-old registered nurse who may face deportation from the United States if Congress doesn’t come to an agreement on DACA recipients. (Jorge Ribas, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post)
Teach For America said its lawyers have pored over immigration laws to find ways to sponsor workers who lose their DACA protections. But the process often requires workers to leave the United States and return legally, a risk many young teachers are unwilling to take. The organization also offered to relocate teachers close to their families in the United States.

“They’re desperate. They’re stressed,” said Viridiana Carrizales, managing director of DACA Corps Member Support at Teach For America. “They don’t know if they’re going to have a job in the next few months.”

A spokesman for a major tech company who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of political negotiations, said it asked DACA employees whether they would like to be transferred to another country where their work status would not be in jeopardy.

“It fell completely flat,” he said. “The employees were polled, and with virtual unanimity, the resounding answer was a ‘No, thank you.’ They considered it giving up.”

The Society for Human Resource Management said companies can defend workers and lobby Congress on behalf of DACA recipients. But the group, which has 240 member organizations, is also urging employers to consider what might happen if their employees’ work permits expire.

“The bottom line is, if people don’t have documents that allow them to work in the United States, they have to be taken off the payroll,” said Justin Storch, a federal liaison for the society.

Cesar Montelongo, a third-year medical student and a DACA recipient. (Alyssa Schukar/for The Washington Post)
‘Not just farmworkers or housekeepers’
On the snow-covered campus at Loyola University Chicago, medical students with DACA permits say they are continuing with their studies and renewing their work permits even as they keep one eye on Washington.

Cesar Montelongo, 28, a third-year medical student who attended the State of the Union address last month, spent part of one recent day examining bacteria in petri dishes in a school laboratory. His family fled a violent border city in Mexico when he was 10.

He is earning a medical degree and a PhD in microbiology, a high-level combination that could land him plenty of jobs in other countries. But he said he prefers the United States, one of “very few places in this planet you can actually achieve that kind of dream.”

Less than a mile away, Alejandra Duran, a 27-year-old second-year medical student who came to the United States from Mexico at 14, translated for patients at a local clinic for people with little or no insurance.

With help from teachers in Georgia, she graduated from high school with honors. She wants to return to the state as a doctor and work to help lower the rate of women dying in childbirth.

“A lot of things have been said about how illegal, how bad we are; that’s not the full story,” Duran said. “We’re not just farmworkers or housekeepers. We’re their doctors. We’re their nurses, their teachers, their paramedics.”

Alejandra Duran, a second-year student who intends to practice obstetrics and gynecology, translates for Dr. Matt Steinberger at the Access to Care clinic. (Alyssa Schukar/For The Washington Post)

Cesar Montelongo, a third-year medical student, examines Petri dishes in which he conducted an experiment looking at interactions of viruses with bacteria in the bladder. (Alyssa Schukar/For The Washington Post)
During rounds at the Loyola University Medical Center, Aramburo studied computer records, then examined stroke victims and patients with spinal and head injuries. Some may never regain consciousness, but she always speaks to them in the hope that they will wake up.

“That’s my dream: to make a difference in people’s lives,” she said. “I hope I can do it.”

In the glass-walled neurology intensive care unit, she and two physicians stood before a 45-year-old stroke victim who spoke only Spanish. The woman struggled to grasp what the two doctors were saying.

Aramburo stepped forward.

“You’ve had a small stroke,” she explained in Spanish, as the woman listened. “It could have been a lot worse. Now we’re going to figure out why.”

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

Some of the WASHPOST comments on this article were predictably idiotic ands racist., Really, what’s happening to our country that folks have such perverted, ill informed, anti-social, and inhuman views?

These are American kids. Raised, educated, and residing in our country. They aren’t “taking places” from anyone, except, perhaps those of their classmates who are less talented or less ambitious. But, why would we want to reward mediocrity over merit just because someone was born here? Other American kids have the same opportunities that Dreamers have. If some chose not to take advantage of them, so be it!

When the Arlington Immigration Court was located in Ballston, Virginia, the kids from nearby Washington & Lee High would come over to the Mall for lunch. Undoubtedly, some of them were undocumented.

But, I couldn’t tell you who. They were just American kids. Even when they showed up in my courtroom, I couldn’t tell you who was the “respondent” and who was the “support group” until I called the case and the respondent came forward. Contrary to the White Nationalists, folks are pretty much the same.

As usual, Trump and his White Nationalist cronies have taken a win-win-win and created a lose-lose-lose! When Dreamers get screwed, they lose, US employers lose, and our country loses, big time! But, that’s what happens when policies and actions are based on bias, ignorance, and incompetence.

PWS

02-23-18

THE HILL: NOLAN RAPPAPORT THINKS A COMPROMISE TO SAVE DREAMERS IS STILL POSSIBLE!

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/374580-make-the-compromise-ending-chain-migration-is-a-small-price-to-legalize

Nolan writes:

. . . .

Compromise.

A compromise is possible. It does not have to be a choice between the current chain migration system and a purely merit-based system. The two systems can be merged with the use of a point system.

Visas currently allocated to extended family members can be transitioned to a merit-based point system that provides extra points for family ties to a citizen or LPR. The merit-based aspect of the point system would eliminate the main objection to chain migration, which is that it allocates visas to extended family members who do not have skills or experience that America needs.

Trump’s framework also would terminate the Diversity Visa Program. Those visas could be transitioned to the new point system too.

This would be a small price to pay for a legalization program that would provide lawful status for 1.8 million Dreamers.

Nolan Rappaport was detailed to the House Judiciary Committee as an executive branch immigration law expert for three years; he subsequently served as an immigration counsel for the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims for four years. Prior to working on the Judiciary Committee, he wrote decisions for the Board of Immigration Appeals for 20 years.“

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

Go on over to The Hill at the link to read Nolan’s complete article.

I disagree with Nolan’s statement that extended family members don’t bring needed skills. As David J. Bier of the Cato Institute recently pointed out in the Washington Post, that argument is one of a number of “Myths” about so-called chain migration.

Bier writes:

“MYTH NO. 5
Chain immigrants lack skills to succeed.
In making his case for the president’s proposals last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, “What good does it do to bring in somebody who is illiterate in their own country, has no skills and is going to struggle in our country and not be successful?” This description distorts the picture of immigrants who settle in the United States.

Nearly half of adults in the family-sponsored and diversity visa categories had a college degree, compared with less than a third of U.S. natives. America would lose nearly a quarter-million college graduates every year without the family-sponsored and diversity programs.

Even among the 11 percent who have little formal education, there is no evidence that they aren’t successful. By virtually every measure, the least-skilled immigrants prosper in America. Immigrant men without high school degrees are almost as likely as U.S.-born men with college degrees to look for a job and keep one.

Family-sponsored immigrants are the most upwardly mobile American workers. Whether high-skilled or not, chain or not, immigrants succeed in and contribute to this country.”

I highly recommend Bier’s article

All of my many years of first-hand observation of family immigration at every level supports Bier’s analysis.

Indeed, even if I were to assume that the majority of extended family were so-called “unskilled” (meaning largely that they have skills elite restrictionists don’t respect) that would hardly mean that they aren’t greatly benefitting the US. In many ways, immigrants who perform important so-called “unskilled jobs” essential to our economy but which most Americans neither will nor can do well, are just as important to societal success as more doctors, professors, computer geeks, and baseball players. Fact is, immigrants of all types from all types of countries consistently benefit the US.

That being said, why not try something along the lines that Nolan suggests by taking the Diversity visas and establishing a “pilot program” that combines skills and family ties in a numerical matrix? Then, track the results to see how they compare with existing employment-based and family-based immigration.

PWS

02-21-17

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