"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Children catch bubbles Aug. 17 at a free barbecue organized by the Lewiston School Department to mark the end of its summer outreach program that provided numerous services for students and families. It also gave the School Department the opportunity to connect with students and parents, hand out schedules, sign students up and make connections before the start of school. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
With just a week to go before the first day of school, staff from Freeport schools headed to a local hotel to meet their newest students.
The 67 students, all from asylum-seeking families, had just moved to the Casco Bay Inn from the Portland Expo, where nearly 200 people had been staying in the temporary shelter before it closed. The families all decided to send their kids to Freeport schools instead of busing them to Portland to attend classes, said Jean Skorapa, superintendent of Regional School Unit 5 in Freeport.
“Our first goal is to get them enrolled and in a class,” she said. “That piece is done. Now we look at how to best serve their needs.”
The scramble to welcome new students and connect them with the services they need is becoming a familiar challenge in Freeport and other Maine communities where the families are settling.
For the past several years, school districts in southern Maine have had to make quick adjustments as they enroll dozens of students from asylum-seeking families, many of whom come from African countries and speak little or no English when they arrive. To meet their needs, they’ve had to hire more teachers for English learners, add social workers and support staff, and make sure translation services are in place to communicate with parents.
“For us, this is a new experience,” said Steve Bussiere, assistant superintendent in Sanford, where 38 students enrolled in May when their families arrived in the city. There will be 55 students from asylum-seeking families in Sanford schools this year, he said.
School leaders say the work can be challenging and puts a significant strain on resources, but it’s also a privilege to welcome new students into the community.
“We’ve had new Mainers with us over the past year and a half. They’ve made us a more well-rounded, diverse district,” Skorapa said. “They’re a wonderful addition to our school community and we welcome them with open arms and are thrilled to have them with us.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
Congrats to educational and political leaders in Maine for making the system work as it should! Immigrants becoming Mainers and settling down there is making a positive difference! Seems like the Feds, not to mention other states and localities, could use some of this same positive approach and enlightened, courageous leadership.
The Portland’s Press Herald’s Editorial Board echoed this view in an editorial published yesterday:
Our View: To invest in immigrant pupils is to invest in the future
A big effort by Maine schools to accommodate English language learners will have a big return for their communities.
A new experience.
That’s how Steve Bussiere, assistant superintendent in Sanford, described Sanford schools’ addressing the needs of 55 new students from asylum-seeking families this coming school year.
It’s a new experience for the kids, too, and thanks to thoughtful, time-intensive efforts by Bussiere’s colleagues and other schools around Maine – hiring additional teachers to teach English to English language learners, hiring more social workers and more support staff and refining translation services so that school staff and administrators can communicate with new pupils’ parents – it can be a good experience.
The focus on multilingual learners requires a serious effort and will make a serious difference to our state.
Thankfully, the Maine Legislature expressed its understanding of that fact in July, including $3.5 million for the support of English language learners – via the English Language Learner Hardship Fund – in the special supplemental budget.
This valuable funding becomes available to schools at the end of October. Portland’s public schools will receive more than $784,000; Lewiston, $631,000; South Portland, $302,000; Biddeford, $192,000, Brunswick, $150,000; Saco, $110,000; Freeport, $109,000, and Westbrook, $93,000.
In Freeport, arrangements have been made for 67 new students who recently moved with their families from the temporary shelter at the Portland Expo to the Casco Bay Inn. Jean Skorapa, superintendent of Regional School Unit 5 in Freeport, struck a crystal-clear and exceedingly warm note earlier this week – sounding like many other Maine educators on the same subject in recent years.
“We’ve had new Mainers with us over the past year and a half. They’ve made us a more well-rounded, diverse district,” Skorapa said. “They’re a wonderful addition to our school community and we welcome them with open arms and are thrilled to have them with us.”
In other school districts, efforts such as these have been up and running for a while. According to our reporting Monday, Lewiston schools work with students who speak a total of 38 languages. The school district there has a multilingual center that works with families and offers vital help with paperwork and orientation. Portland has been supporting new students from asylum-seeking families for years; in July, we reported that one-third of the district’s roughly 6,500 students were multilingual.
The numbers make it clear as day: The downside risk of underfunding English language learning is now way too steep for these parts of Maine to run. Yes, there’s a moral imperative here; it is also a legal requirement of our public schools. We trust that, on the strength of existing work in this realm, the practice of funding multilingual learning education becomes just that – a practice. Rep. Michael Brennan, D-Portland, House chair of the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee, expressed his commitment to continue funding the program “in the coming years.”
Appropriate investment in these students fosters a sense of belonging, reduces the risk of pernicious, hard-to-close learning gaps and, as students find themselves better and better equipped to support their families locally, has wide-reaching benefits. To say nothing of what it means for school graduates of the future. On top of that, successive studies have shown that the teaching techniques that assist English language learners assist all students.
That’s not to say there won’t be hurdles to overcome. In recent days, tense and ugly anti-immigrant rallies in Manhattan, Staten Island and Woburn, Massachusetts, laid bare the style of racist, isolationist thinking that continues to oppose even the most commonsense steps towards integration and inclusion.
Our schools need more support, and they need it to be specific. The calls for increased attention to the new members of the student body need to be sustained in their volume and their clarity. It makes sense, at every level, to seize this opportunity to enrich our classrooms and our communities.
Kids are our future. It’s definitely worth the effort!
A Helping Hand.jpg Image depicts a child coming to the aid of another in need. Once we have climbed it is essential for the sake of humanity that we help others do the same. It is knowing that we all could use, and have used, a helping hand. Safiyyah Scoggins – PVisions1111 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 White Nationalist Xenophobes like Trump, DeSantis, Abbott, & Ducey have abandoned Traditional Judeo-Christian values in favor of neo-fascism. But, the rest of us should hold true to our “better angels.”
Somewhat reminiscent of how the Chinese workers who were key to building the transcontinental railroad were “rewarded” with the Chinese Exclusion Act and more than a century of anti-Asian bias and hate that continues today.
☹️Unfortunately, America has a long unhappy history of mistreating, exploiting, and demonizing immigrants whose hard work, courage, and perserverance against the odds built our nation into what it is today! Old habits of bias, ingratitude, false racial supremacy, and vilification of “the other” — or at least the “perceived other,” since in truth we’re all important parts of the real America— are hard to break. But, it would be a real boost for our nation and humanity if we could overcome the darker part of our past and move forward as one.
Thanks for sending this important piece my way, Julia!
Donald J. Trump Famous American Clown (Officially titled “Ass Clown”) Artist: Scott Scheidly Orlando, FL Reproduced by permissionD. Vader Minister of Justice Banana Republic of TrumpTrump Regime
Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.
Mr. Trump’s ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds.
Unemployment is in double-digits, renters are scared of eviction notices, aid is stuck, and economic recovery seems to have slowed.
By Tara Golshan
For HuffPost
Republicans want Americans to believe that Joe Biden would “demolish” the American dream.
“This election will decide whether we save the American dream,” Trump said while accepting the Republican nomination for president on the final night of the Republican National Convention. “Or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny.”
Speaker after speaker repeated the same message: Trump is the only candidate who can save the American dream, Democrats’ insistence on expanding the social safety net will stymie individuals’ opportunities, and Republicans are the party of dreaming big.
“Let me assure you, socialism doesn’t offer opportunity. Socialism deprives,” Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez said on the second night of the convention. “We can go down a dark road of chaos and government control, or we can choose the path of freedom and opportunity that was paved by those who sacrificed everything to preserve the American dream for future generations.”
But for many working Americans, policies under the Trump administration and Trump’s response to the pandemic have put the American dream further out of reach.
Trump’s message that he’s the savior of the American dream comes as the nation is in the middle of a widespread coronavirus outbreak, which public health experts and a vast majority of Americans say was worsened by Trump’s slow response. Unemployment sits at 10 percent, and the economy’s recovery has slowed over the summer months. Federal aid, which economists say kept upwards of 10 million people out of poverty, has been slashed or cut completely, as Republicans remain reluctant to continue unemployment benefits at the same levels.
Even before the pandemic hit and the economy appeared to be doing fine, Americans were dubious that there was an equality of opportunity afforded to everyone under Trump’s leadership.
In a January Pew Research Center survey, 70% of Americans said the economy was rigged in favor of the wealthy. There are partisan divides in the poll, with Republicans generally seeing the economy under Trump as fairer than Democrats do. But notably, 79% of lower-income Republicans said the wealthy had too much power today, and Democrats and Republicans agreed that small businesses were being overtaken by major corporations.
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Thanks, Tara! Read Tara’s complete article at the link. Tara is a UW-Madison grad!
IMMIGRANTS & THEIR ADVOCATES NEED TO MAKE THEIR VOICES HEARD, NOW!
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
Courtside Exclusive
Aug. 29, 2020
Truth is, Trump has no plan for reviving the American economy and is firmly opposed to equality. He hopes that the virus will go away or that he can shift the blame for his abject failure to deal with it to someone else (a false narrative already well underway). He has no clue on how to deal with businesses that will never reopen, jobs that no longer exist, industries (e.g., travel, hospitality, education) whose “traditional models” no longer will be economically viable, and workers whose ability to return to former jobs is limited by the long-term effects of COVID.
What’s the regime’s plan to deal with mental health issues arising from unemployment or loss of loved ones? Beyond berating them for being sick or out of work, Trump and the GOP have no plan! Cut their unemployment, take away their health insurance, promote unsafe and exploitative working conditions, and immunize careless or negligent employers from liability — that’s the Trump/Moscow Mitch plan.
While I’m not a labor economist, I see evidence that the Trump regime’s gross mishandling of the pandemic, it’s glorification of myth over science, its open disdain for workers and their health and safety, and its nativist immigration restrictions will eventually cause a long term shortage of healthcare workers and teachers — essential workers whose lives and expertise are almost daily demeaned and devalued by the Trump regime and the GOP.
What’s Trump’s plan for African-American, Latino, and low-income communities that have been disproportionately affected by COVID and its collateral effects? More police brutality? Terrorism by DHS agents? Forced labor? Starvation? Disenfranchisement? Public assistance cuts? Lousy education? Slash Social Security? Tax cuts for the rich? Dirty air? Polluted water? How will folks living “paycheck to paycheck” (at best) save for retirement? Work till they drop dead to support the Trumps and McConnells of the world and finance more tax breaks for the rich and powerful?
Biden and Harris have an established record of concern for all workers and all communities. They are certainly American worker’s best chance for a better life and a better future!
My observation is that the immigrant and particularly refugee and asylee communities have a disproportionate number of entrepreneurs, businesspeople, innovators, risk takers, and practical problem solvers who have been able to reinvent and often retrain themselves under the most difficult circumstances imaginable with minimal outside assistance. This community, their colleagues, and immigration and human rights advocates need to be working at the highest levels with the Biden/Harris campaign on a plan to reestablish legal immigration (including refugee and asylum programs) as an essential part of the overall plan to create jobs, develop new or improved industries and businesses, and get all Americans back to work in jobs that will be both satisfying and economically viable.
This plan that would include rebuilding, strengthening, and creating new opportunities within our healthcare, safety net, educational, and vocational programs rather than destroying and looting them as Trump and his cronies have done. It’s called “teamwork, innovation, and best practices,” and it’s an anathema to Trump and the GOP —the party that promotes systemic economic inequality and despises and ridicules expertise and cooperative efforts.
Immigrants of all types and statuses have helped all of us get through the pandemic, notwithstanding the racist abuse heaped on them by Trump, Miller, Wolf, and the GOP. Robust legal immigration is, as it always has been, part of the solution, not (as the Trump/Miller false narrative would have it) part of the problem.
And, to state the obvious, most of the so-called “undocumented population” in the US, residing (many with families including U.S. citizens or green card holders) working, paying taxes, and otherwise contributing to our society, mindlessly targeted by Trump and GOP nativists, could and should long ago have been integrated into our legal immigration system at some level.
But, it’s up to the immigration and human rights experts to get into the “inner circles” of the Biden/Harris campaign now, and to place immigration in its rightful place as one of the keys to American equality and prosperity, rather than that being “left on the sidelines” as happened with Obama.
In many ways, Trump and his fundamentally anti-America policies, as masterminded by neo-Nazi Stephen Miller, are the price we have paid for the Obama Administration’s negligent failure to harness the positive power of immigration and of the notable absence of true immigration/human rights policy experts and advocates from the key positions in his Administration.
Immigrants and their advocates can’t let history repeat itself! Policy, legislation, administration, and indeed judging are just variants of “advocacy.” In this case “advocacy” of due process, fundamental fairness, human rights, practical problem-solving, and human dignity. That’s something that the GOP right wrecking crew “gets” but to which Dems and liberals sometimes seem willfully oblivious!
We can’t afford to get it wrong again. And, neither can the Biden/Harris campaign or the American people! The stakes are simply too high!
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
Also, immigration and human rights advocates need to make their voices heard by Biden/Harris campaign! Now!
As he seeks a second term, [Trump has] also made it clear that he hasn’t finished. He still wants to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program once and for all, drive out the millions of unauthorized immigrants living in the US and curb their political power, enact what he calls “merit-based” immigration reform, and pursue a slew of restrictive immigration regulations.
The US has already seen the harms of Trump’s first-term immigration policies, which could cut deeper if he’s given another four years: Legal immigration is plummeting, stymying growth in the labor force and threatening the US’s ability to attract global talent and recover from the coronavirus-induced recession. The US has abdicated its role as a model for how a powerful country should support the world’s most vulnerable people. And the millions of immigrants already living in the US, regardless of their legal status, have been left uncertain of their fate in the country they have come to call home.
Other concerns — including the coronavirus, racial justice, and unemployment — have recently eclipsed immigration as a top motivating issue for voters. But for Trump, who currently lags former Vice President Joe Biden in the polls, restricting immigration proved a winning message in 2016, and he will likely try to replicate that strategy again.
“It’s the thing he keeps going back to,” Douglas Rivlin, director of communication at the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice, said. “It is his comfort zone — to go after people of color and turn them into sort of the specter of scary, violent people as a political strategy.”
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Whether any version of that proposal will get traction would largely depend on the makeup of the next Congress and whether Democrats win a majority in the Senate. Most immigration policy experts aren’t convinced that Trump will see success in negotiating with Democrats, but the political calculus could change if Democrats control both chambers of Congress and need Trump to sign their legislation.
It also depends on Republicans acting as a unified front on immigration. So far, pro-business Republicans aren’t challenging the restrictions and travel bans Trump has imposed during the pandemic, and as the US continues to grapple with its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and more than a million Americans are out of work, they will likely continue to follow the president’s lead. But in the long term, they might find themselves at philosophical odds with the anti-immigrant wing of the party.
“I think the reality of the economics of immigration and the sort of more ideological agenda are going to come into conflict,” Rivlin said.
But if Trump can overcome those hurdles, the prize would be substantial: the ability the leave his mark on the immigration system beyond a series of executive actions that could be reversed by the next Democrat who assumes office.
“Merit-based immigration reform would be a legacy for him on immigration, more so than a border wall,” the Bipartisan Policy Institute’s Cardinal-Brown said. “That would have impacts on the future of immigration for decades.”
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Read the rest of Nicole’s gloomy yet (as always) well-written outlook at the link.
Don’t be fooled. In “Trumpspeak” the term “merit-based” means “race-based” (favoring, of course, White guys, preferably rich, English speaking, and prospective GOP toadies). Again, to state the obvious, a “kakistocracy” by definition lacks the ability to recognize and reward true “merit.” That’s why it’s a “kakistocracy,” not a “meritocracy!”
America is a nation of immigrants. To change that, Trump will have to destroy America, which, as this week’s “clown show of hate, fear, loathing, and complete nonsense” (a/k/a “The GOP Convention”) shows, he and his followers are perfectly willing to do.
This perverted “vision” of America also ties in well with the Trump/GOP approach to racism and social justice: Ignore injustice and double down on violence administered by the largely White power structure against communities of color. Kill, maim, blame, punish, jail, intimidate, disenfranchise, and dehumanize the victims rather than looking for cooperative ways to solve the problems. Sow fear, hate, and division to insure that institutionalized racism and White grievance will be indelibly ingrained in America! As these self-inflicted grievances play out, the Trump family and its cronies will use the ensuing chaos as a diversion to loot the Treasury and use what remains of “government” to further their own personal interests, without regard to the common welfare. Nice folks!
It’s doubtful that America as the majority of us have envisioned it can survive another four years of Trump’s corruption, racism, and malicious incompetence. Despite some liberal wishful thinking, our democratic institutions and apparently overrated “checks and balances” are crumbling before our eyes.
The “JR Five” on the Supremes and the GOP Senate already have reached “Penceian levels” (“Pence” rhymes with “incompetence”) of mindless sycophantic subservience to the “Clown Prince” and his entourage. None of them would be able to extract their collective heads from the more than ample Presidential rear to see any daylight during a second term. Trump’s re-election would inevitably convert the “City on The Hill” to a “wealthy universally despised third world kleptocracy.” That’s the real “vision” of Trump and the GOP. (I think that Nicole’s “hypothetical” of a Trump victory and a Dem Senate is the “least likely scenario.”)
This November, vote like your life and the world’s future depend on it! Because they do!
Equal Justice & A Diverse America For All! Trump’s Dark, Evil, Dishonest Vision Of America, Never!
So again I must ask, where is your outrage? How is this happening? How is it being allowed to happen? Real people, Americans, are being allowed to get sick and die while Trump plays a political game. How long can this continue?
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Read the complete op-ed at the link.
No wonder the rest of the world is aghast at the massive failure of American democracy and our public institutions that were supposed to protect us from an evil, “maliciously incompetent,” totally unqualified “leader!”
While corporations are going on life support thanks to this huge government bailout, undocumented immigrants and their families, among them US citizens, are being allowed to suffer, to starve, and, without access to health care, perhaps even to die. As things already stood, undocumented immigrants were ineligible for any federally funded public health insurance programs. On top of that, the millions who have tax IDs, so that they can work without formal authorization, are now denied help in the form of unemployment benefits—they are the only US taxpayers excluded from the coronavirus stimulus package.
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It’s also troubling to single out immigrants because of the historic scapegoating of immigrants during other health crises. The historian Alan M. Kraut writes that in the 1830s, Irish immigrants were stigmatized as bearers of cholera, and at the end of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was dubbed the “Jewish disease.” Scapegoating also obscures a longer thread in a bigger pattern, regardless of which party or administration is in power. According to Professor Viladrich, the American government’s denying assistance to this group of working immigrants is the historic norm.
“A lot of this is related to a labor force that is disposable,” she said. “There is no contradiction here; it is very consistent with ACA, with welfare reform, all of that. The systematic exclusion of immigrants is parallel with the systematic exploitation of immigrants.”
Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, lobbied hard to ensure that people without work authorization would be excluded from the CARES Act. On the Senate floor, he spoke against child tax credit going to people without social security numbers:
If you want to apply for money from the government through the child tax credit program, then you have to be a legitimate person… It has nothing to do with not liking immigrants. It has to do with saying, taxpayer money shouldn’t go to non-people.
His office later said he was referring to people who fraudulently claimed a child in order to reap the federal benefit. Whatever he meant by “legitimate person” and “non-people,” the effect was the same: in the eyes of the law, undocumented immigrants would be non-people.
Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher, used the term “bare life” to describe a life reduced to plain biological facts, the robbing of a person’s political existence by those who have the power to define who is included as a worthy human being and who is excluded. While the labor of undocumented people is gladly accepted, their humanity has been tidily erased by lawmakers in Washington, D.C.
The immigration and legal historian Daniel Kanstroom reminds us that in times of trouble, like wars or national emergencies, immigrants are the first to get thrown overboard. It was in part due to the ban on Chinese immigrants back in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century that the demand for Mexican workers increased dramatically. In his 2007 book Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History, Kanstroom explained how this ban combined with wartime labor needs in 1917 led to the US government’s systematic recruitment of Mexican workers: “From 1917 through 1921, an estimated 50,000–80,000 Mexican farm workers entered the United States under this program, establishing a legal model and cultural mindset that endured for decades to come.”
Kanstroom cites a line from the 1911 Dillingham Commission, an extensive bipartisan investigation into immigration, that “The Mexican… is less desirable as a citizen than as a laborer.” The precedent was set, and what followed was a cycle of recruitment, restriction, and expulsion. More than one million people of Mexican ancestry were forcibly removed from the United States during the Depression years. Some of the people deported by the government to Mexico were US citizens, but then as now, because of their undocumented relatives, they were subject to the same brutal treatment.
In 1942, as a wartime labor shortage loomed, the US worked out an agreement with Mexico for short-term, low-wage workers to fill in the gap. The Bracero Program, as it was known, continued until 1964, with some 4.5 million Mexican workers legally entering the country during those years. There were enormous contradictions in the way those workers were treated: ad hoc legalization programs designed to help big farmers took place at some times; then, at others, there were huge deportation drives when the demand for labor fell off—most notoriously, the terrifying round-ups of 1954’s so-called Operation Wetback.
According to the scholar of migration Nicholas De Genova, “It is precisely their distinctive legal vulnerability, their putative ‘illegality’ and official ‘exclusion,’ that inflames the irrepressible desire and demand for undocumented migrants as a highly exploitable workforce—and thus ensures their enthusiastic importation and subordinate incorporation.” It is no mistake that there remain millions of “illegal” workers of Latino ethnicity contributing their labor, taxes, and humanity to this country; it suits America very well in the good times, and always has.
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Read the rest of Maev’s outstanding analysis of our sordid history of abusing essential immigrant workers, from enslaved African Americans, to Chinese laborers, to Latino workers who have been propping up our economy and keeping us alive during the time of pandemic. Their reward: dehumanization, degradation, deportation without due process, and sometimes death.
I speak often at Courtside about how Trump’s self-righteous, immoral, scofflaw White Nationalist cabal — folks like Miller, Bannon, Sessions, Barr, Cuccinelli, Paul — have been engineering a vile “Dred Scottification” program to dehumanize, abuse, and exploit the most vulnerable, yet often most essential, among us.
I have also highlighted how the Trump kakistocracy’s efforts to create an extralegal, unconstitutional “Reincarnation of Jim Crow” too often have been supported and encouraged by some of those highly privileged Supreme Court Justices whose job was supposed to be protecting all of us, and particularly the most vulnerable persons, from invidious Executive abuses: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh.
The latest example: In the middle of humanitarian trauma, the “socially distant Justices” managed to find time for a little gratuitous cruelty: denying an application to stay the regime’s irrational, racist, and unlawful “public charge rules” that threaten the lives and safety of immigrants, their U.S. citizen families, and U.S. society as a whole. https://apple.news/ABNL4e_DtRPS4eN5m5gx1ug
Amy Howe writes at Scotusblog:
Under federal immigration law, noncitizens cannot receive a green card if the government believes that they are likely to become reliant on government assistance. The dispute now before the court arose last year, after the Trump administration defined “public charge” to refer to noncitizens who receive various government benefits, such as health care, for more than 12 months over a three-year period. The challengers had argued that the rule is “impeding efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus, preserve scarce hospital capacity and medical supplies, and protect the lives of everyone in the community” because it deters immigrants from seeking testing and treatment for the virus out of fear that it will endanger their ability to obtain a green card. The federal government countered that it has made clear that the use of publicly funded health care related to COVID-19 “will not be considered in making predictions about whether” immigrants are likely to become a public charge.
The Government’s argument doesn’t pass the “straight face” test. The monetary savings from this rule are minuscule; its overriding purpose was to dump on immigrant families and intimidate ethnic, primarily Hispanic, communities. It was the “brainchild” of neo-Nazi Stephen Miller. What greater proof could there be of its White Nationalist purpose? Given the regime’s well-established record of lies and unbridled hostility toward immigrants and communities of color, why would anyone have confidence in the regime’s often hollow or disingenuous “promises?”
Those of us who believe in honoring our immigrant heritage, making our constitutional guarantees reality rather than unfulfilled promises, that human values, empathy, and kindness matter, and that we can and must do better than shallow, often outright evil, folks like Trump, Miller, Cuccinelli, Roberts, Barr, et al. need to retake our Government at the ballot box this November and build a better, fairer, more humane future for America and all persons in our country.
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
Madeline Buiano & Susan Ferriss report for the Center for Public Integrity
DATA DEFIES TRUMP’S CLAIMS THAT REFUGEES AND ASYLEES BURDEN TAXPAYERS
In this May 18, 2018, photo, Majed Abdalraheem, 29, a Syrian refugee and chef with meal delivery service Foodhini, prepares Moussaka, a grilled eggplant dish, at Union Kitchen in Washington. (AP Photo/Noreen Nasir)
Researchers found that between 2005 and 2014, refugees and asylees here from 1980 on contributed $63 billion more to government revenues than they used in public services.
In this post, we’re answering a question we received from Jen: What is the economic impact of refugees in the near and long term (transition time between needing assistance and adding to the economy)?
Since the beginning of his presidency, Donald J. Trump and top advisers have portrayed refugees and asylum seekers as a risky, undesirable demographic.
In 2016, Vice President Mike Pence tried to ban the resettlement of Syrian refugees while he was Indiana’s governor. A federal appeals court blocked the attempt, finding that Pence lacked evidence supporting claims that Syrian refugees were a threat to the people of Indiana. Trump, for his part, issued an order in March 2017 with language suggesting that refugees are a fiscal burden.
The order demanded that U.S. officials produce a report “detailing the estimated long-term costs of the United States Refugee Admissions Program at the Federal, State, and local levels, along with recommendations about how to curtail those costs.”
The draft report didn’t support that assumption of burden, though.
In fact, researchers found that during the 10 years between 2005 and 2014, refugees and asylees here from 1980 on contributed $63 billion more to government revenues than they used in public services. Senior administration officials, possibly including White House aide Stephen Miller, quashed the 55-page draft and submitted a three-page report instead, The New York Timesreported. Soon after, the White House released a fact sheetselectively borrowing from the draft report by noting that the U.S. “spent more than $96 billion on programs supporting or benefitting refugees between 2005 and 2014.”
There were no references to the $63 billion more in taxes that refugees put into public coffers than the value of the services they used.
This pattern of cherry picking one side of the ledger isn’t unusual for those seeking to bolster a political argument. Trump used similar cherry-picked numbers to link immigration, in general, with American wage decline and fiscal strain during his 2016 campaign, as the Center for Public Integrity reported previously.
Before diving deeper into fiscal research on refugees, though — including what the quashed draft report found in detail — it helps to understand how refugees and asylum seekers differ. Some fiscal studies, including the study Trump ordered, scrutinize both groups. It’s also helpful to understand the size of these groups compared to the U.S. population.
HOW DOES SOMEONE GAIN REFUGEE OR ASYLEE STATUS?
Refugees are fleeing persecution or war and are admitted from abroad. To vet them, U.S. officials are dispatched to interview candidates as part of a lengthy screening process. United Nations or U.S. embassy officials refer candidates to the U.S. State Department. Refugees often seek temporary shelter in neighboring countries to escape violence and threats. Many Syrian war refugees, for example, have fled to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. After intensive screening, approved refugees enter the U.S. with the help of resettlement organizations and must sign promissory notes to repay the U.S. government for travel costs. About 75 percent of loans are repaid within 15 years and 64 percent within five years, according to the U.S. State Department.
Asylum seekers claiming to be fleeing violence or persecution, by contrast, can present themselves at a U.S. port of entry and request to apply for asylum, as outlined in international treaties the U.S. has signed, as well as U.S. law. The law also allows foreigners to apply for asylum after they’re already inside the United States, whether they entered originally on visas or entered illegally, with some restrictions. Immigration judges review cases to determine whether the asylum applicant’s fear meets the criteria for granting refuge. Asylum seekers have a right to retain an attorney at their expense — or seek pro bono help — but they don’t have a right to an appointed attorney in proceedings.
In 2018, even as refugee numbers surged globally, the Trump administration capped refugee admissions at 45,000. Only 22,000 were ultimately admitted, mostly from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burma and Ukraine. Trump used his executive power to cap refugee admissions this year to a new low, for annual caps, of no more than 30,000. In 2016, under President Barack Obama, the U.S. admitted 85,000 refugees.
Trump has also sought to deter mostly Central American migrantswho are arriving often with children at the southern border and asking for asylum.
“The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility … not on my watch,” Trump said last year. In April of this year, after tweeting that the “country is full,” Trump unveiled an unprecedented proposal to require that asylum seekers pay an application fee. Trump argues that changes to the asylum system are needed because he believes that the vast majority of migrants are faking or exaggerating their fears — despite U.S. State Department recognition that murder rates, gang rapes and extortion are rampant in Central America, especially the main source countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Refugees and asylees are a tiny fraction of the U.S. population, so it’s hard to credibly pin major national fiscal impact on either group.
Between 2009 and April 2019, a total of 648,482 refugees were admitted to the U.S., according to U.S. Department of State refugee data. That admissions total is equivalent to about 0.2 percent of the U.S. population of 328 million. Separately, between 2007 and 2017, a total of 263,215 people were granted asylum, according to the 2017 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. That cumulative number is equivalent to about 0.08 percent of the U.S. population.
But isn’t there a backlog of asylum requests, potentially adding more people?
Yes. As of January 2019, 325,277 asylum request cases were pending. But even if all those cases were approved (they won’t be), that number would be equivalent to 0.1 percent of the U.S. population of 328 million. Further, if you were to multiply all those asylum cases by 10 — to account for an exaggerated number of family members who could benefit — that number would add up to the equivalent of 1 percent of the U.S. population.
But can’t refugees or asylees have a noticeable fiscal impact on communities, especially if the newcomers settle in groups, as immigrants often do? Yes. Let’s see what reputable studies show.
REFUGEES COME WITH NOTHING
Randy Capps is the director of research at the Migration Policy Institute, or MPI, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., that’s studied how refugees with a range of language skills and education integrate over time.
“Refugees come to the U.S. with nothing,” Capps said, but they “start making economic contributions right away and they’re not living off government assistance for very long.”
A 2015 MPI refugee-integration study found that between 2009 and 2011, the proportion of refugee men working was 7 percentage points higher than among their U.S.-born counterparts. Refugee women were as likely to work as U.S.-born women. Refugees’ income increased the longer they were in the country. The median income of refugees in the U.S. for at least 20 years was $31,000 higher than the median income of refugees here for five years or less.
MPI researchers also found that refugees’ use of public benefits decreases substantially over time.
Unlike other immigrants, refugees can access public health insurance and some other forms of aid when they arrive. Between 2009 and 2011, food-stamp assistance was a relatively high 45 percent for refugees for their first five years or less, the MPI study found. But food-stamp assistance fell to 16 percent among refugees here at least 20 years. Cash aid dropped from 7 percent to 2 percent for refugees in these same respective cohorts. And reliance on public health insurance fell from 24 percent to 13 percent.
Capps and his fellow authors suggested that providing English classes and job training for refugees while they’re still in camps undergoing the long vetting process could lead to even better outcomes. Ironically, the report also suggests, refugees’ high rate of employment in the U.S. could make it difficult for many to find the time to pursue more education to upgrade skills and earning potential.
Even so, as the Center reported in 2017, refugees are readily sliding into jobs in areas where labor is in short supply. Refugees from various countries are filling jobs at a Chobani facility in Twin Falls, Idaho, the world’s largest yogurt factory. And newly arrived refugees from rural areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Asia are finding work at dairy farms.
In 2017, a draft of the refugee fiscal report that Trump had ordered was leaked to The New York Times, which posted it. The report was produced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement is involved in refugee arrivals and initial integration. Research looked at both refugees and asylees.
Researchers looked at local, state and federal expenditures on refugees — as well as refugees’ tax contributions to those government coffers over the 10 years between 2005 and 2014.
The study found that 8 percent of refugees received Social Security or Social Security Disability benefits compared to 15 percent of the U.S. population. About 12 percent of refugees relied on Medicare benefits compared to 15 percent of the U.S. population.
On the other hand, 21 percent of refugees used SNAP, or food stamps, compared to 15 percent of the U.S. population. But only about 2.3 percent of refugees received TANF benefits, or cash aid, close to the same percentage as the U.S. population generally.
Overall, during the 10-year period, refugees and their non-refugee family members received $326 billion in government benefits and services, 60 percent from the federal government and 40 percent from state and local government. K-12 education accounted for 11 percent of expenditures on refugees. But that K-12 spending was only 0.4 percent of spending on K-12 nationally.
In the end, because of taxes they paid, refugees and their family members contributed more than $343 billion in revenue to federal, state and local coffers. On balance, refugees contributed $63 billion more than they received in benefits from various programs.
“In general,” researchers wrote, “after 10 years of residence those who entered the U.S. as refugees were similar to the U.S. population in terms of income and employment.”
The HHS draft also referenced research produced in various regions.
A 2012 analysis of the Cleveland, Ohio, area credited refugees with the creation of 650 jobs and $48 million worth of economic impact. A 2015 study of the Columbus, Ohio, area found that about 16,600 refugees supported more than 21,200 jobs and added $1.6 billion to the local economy.
Randy Capps of the Migration Policy Institute cautioned against putting too much faith in fiscal studies that zero in on costs alone. For example, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, a group that advocates slashing legal immigration, published a study in 2018 focusing on the first five years of refugee settlement and arguing that “the American taxpayer is being asked to feed, clothe and shelter” people with “few marketable job skills.”
In 2017, the Center for Public Integrity reported that U.S Department of Homeland Security staff were discussing adding an assessment of a refugee applicant’s “skills” to criteria that’s part of the foundation for the vetting process. The skills idea, confirmed by a Homeland Security spokesperson, upset U.S. refugee officers who screen applicants who’ve fled the trauma of war and persecution. It hasn’t gone anywhere.
“The [current] litmus test is: Does the person have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political
Adding a skills test would mark a profound change, Knowles said, for U.S. criteria developed in the wake of World War II, a time when the U.S. and other countries turned away some desperate Jewish refugees.
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A number of things are absolutely clear: 1) refugees and asylees are a huge benefit to the United States from any legitimate perspective; 2) we could easily absorb everyone applying for asylum status right now; 3) there is no “invasion;” 4) the country is not “full;” 5) Trump, Pence, Miller, Cotton, Perdue, and the rest of their “White Nationalist Gang” are liars.
Professor Gordon Chang of Stanford University writes in the LA Times:
Immigrants got the job done
History finally has its eyes on Chinese laborers who built transcontinental railroad’s western leg
By Gordon H. Chang
The nation’s first transcontinental railroad, completed 150 years ago today at Promontory Summit in Utah, connected the vast United States and brought America into the modern age. Chinese immigrants contributed mightily to this feat, but the historical accounts that first transcontinental followed often marginalized their role.
Between 1863 and 1869, as many as 20,000 Chinese workers helped build the treacherous western portion of the railroad, a winding ribbon of track known as the Central Pacific that began in Sacramento.
At first, the Central Pacific Railroad’s directors wanted a whites-only workforce. Leland Stanford, the railroad’s president, had advocated for keeping Asians out of the state in his 1862 inaugural address as governor of California. When not enough white men signed up, the railroad began hiring Chinese men for the backbreaking labor. No women worked on the line.
Company leaders were skeptical of the new recruits’ ability to do the work, but the Chinese laborers proved themselves more than capable — and the railroad barons came to consider them superior to the other workers.
My colleagues and I initiated an international research project — based, appropriately, at Stanford University — to investigate the enormous contribution Chinese workers made to the transcontinental project. It proved to be a formidable task, not least because no written record produced by what were called “railroad Chinese” is known to exist. Without letters, diaries and other primary sources that are historians’ stock in trade, we amassed a sizable collection of evidence that included archaeological findings, ship manifests, payroll records, photographs and observers’ accounts.
The material allowed us to recover a sense of the lived experiences of the thousands of Chinese migrants Leland Stanford came to greatly admire. He told President Andrew Johnson that the Chinese were indispensable to building the railroad: They were “quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.” In a stockholder report, Stanford described construction as a “herculean task” and said it had been accomplished thanks to the Chinese, who made up 90% of the Central Pacific Railroad’s labor force.
These workers showed their mettle, and sealed their legacy, on the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Many observers at the time had assumed that Stanford and the railroad were daft for thinking they could link California with the East because an immense mountain range separated the state from Nevada and beyond. The Sierra Nevada is a rugged, formidable range, its inhospitableness encapsulated by the gruesome tragedy of the Donner party in 1847 and 1848. Trapped by winter storms in the mountains, they resorted to cannibalism.
To get to the High Sierra, Chinese workers cut through dense forests, filled deep ravines, constructed long trestles and built enormous retaining walls — some of which remain intact today. All work was done by hand using carts, shovels and picks but no machinery.
The greatest challenge was to push the line through the Sierra summit. Solid granite peaks soared to 14,000 feet in elevation. The railroad bed snaked through passes at more than 7,000 feet. The men who came from humid south China labored through two of the worst winters on record, surviving in caverns dug beneath the snow.
They blasted out 15 tunnels, the longest nearly 1,700 feet. To speed up the carving of the tunnels, the Chinese laborers worked from several directions. After opening portals along the rock face on either side of the mountain, they dug an 80-foot shaft down to the estimated midway point. From there, they carved out toward the portals, doubling the rate of progress by tunneling from both sides. It still took two years to accomplish the task.
The Chinese workers were paid 30% to 50% less than their white counterparts and were given the most dangerous work. In June 1867, they protested. Three-thousand workers along the railroad route went on strike, demanding wage parity, better working conditions and shorter hours. At the time it was the largest worker action in American history. The railroad refused to negotiate but eventually raised the Chinese workers’ pay, though not to parity.
After the Sierra, the Chinese workers faced the blistering heat of the Nevada and Utah deserts, yet they drove ahead at an astonishing rate.
As they approached the meeting point with the Union Pacific, thousands of them laid down a phenomenal 10 miles of track in less than 24 hours, a record that has never been equaled. A Civil War officer who witnessed the drama declared that the Chinese were “just like an army marching over the ground and leaving the track behind.”
Progress came at great cost: Many Chinese laborers died along the Central Pacific route. The company kept no records of deaths. But soon after the line was completed, Chinese civic organizations retrieved an estimated 1,200 bodies along the route and sent them home to China for burial.
The transcontinental railroad’s completion allowed travelers to journey across the country in a week — a trip that had previously taken more than a month. Politicians pointed to the achievement as they declared the United States the leading nation of the world.
The transcontinental railroad has been viewed in a similarly nationalistic way ever since. Chinese workers were often left out of the official story because their alienage and suffering did not fit well with celebration. And attitudes toward them soon soured, with anti-Chinese riots sweeping the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States and placed restrictions on those already here.
Federal immigration law prohibited Chinese citizens from becoming Americans until 1943.
As a faculty member of the university that bears his name, I am painfully aware that Leland Stanford became one of the world’s richest men by using Chinese labor. But I also try to remember that Stanford University exists because of those Chinese workers. Without them, Leland Stanford would probably be at best a footnote in history — and the West and the United States would not exist as we know it today.
Gordon H. Chang is a professor of history at Stanford University.
Sometimes, it takes too long. Often, the “real heroes” die unrecognized (like the more than 1,200 Chinese workers mentioned in this article or the many anonymous enslaved African-Americans whose uncompensated labor and ingenuity “propped up” at least five of our first seven Presdients) long before justice comes. And, frequently, the flawed folks who were wrongly acclaimed “popular heroes” of their day escape judgement within their lifetimes.
But, history has a way of eventually “getting it right.” Trump and his misguided followers eventually will be in for a reckoning.
It won’t be pretty. Once the subpoenas can’t be ignored, the testimony perjured, the innumerable lies, intentional misrepresentations, and squalid distortions presented as “business as normal,” and the full historical record becomes available for study and analysis, free from the political hoopla of the present, it will be much, much worse than we can possibly imagine. The true unpalatable nature of Trump and his enablers will be revealed for some future generations. And, those who stood against them and their racism, greed, dishonesty, and cruelty will be vindicated.
On Monday evening, President Trump issued a memointended to make life more difficult for those seeking asylum in the United States. The memo calls for regulations that, among other things, require asylum seekers to pay a fee to apply for asylum and their first work permit, and denies work permits to immigrants who entered the United States without inspection, or “illegally.”
Since the creation of our asylum system, after the United States signed the Protocol to the Refugee Convention in 1968 and enacted its own Refugee Act in 1980, there has never been a fee to apply for asylum. Filing for asylum is free for a reason under U.S. law and in the vast majority of other countries: Seeking asylum is a human right.
There are already plenty of obstacles and limits to that right in our existing immigration system. For instance, asylum seekers have to wait to receive permission to legally work in the United States. Congress codified a waiting period for work permits for asylum seekers in 1996. Asylum seekers can apply for a work permit 150 days after they have submitted an application for asylum. The work permit is issued sometime after 180 days.
In reality, given the time needed to find and complete the 12-page English-only asylum application and often to find legal assistance to do so, asylum seekers are already waiting nine to 12 months to receive lawful permission to work. That first work permit is currently free to asylum seekers and valid for two years. Requiring a filing fee for the initial work permit and denying work permits to those who enter the United States without inspection adds another significant impediment to lawful authorization, which asylum seekers need to support themselves and their families and contribute to our national economy.
Introducing a fee to apply for asylum and to apply for the first work permit not only is cruel but also goes against common sense and U.S. economic interests. Asylum seekers typically cannot afford to pay even a nominal fee. Trump’s memo does not specify the fee amount, only that it would “cover the cost of adjudication.” But even the rumored $50 fee would be too high for any of our clients. All individuals present in the United States have a legal right to apply for asylum, and that legal right should not depend on ability to pay. Many asylum seekers flee their countries with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and the cash in their pockets. Other asylum seekers come with their life savings, which are often quickly depleted as they pay for living expenses awaiting adjudication of their asylum claims.
Years ago, one of us worked with one client who was homeless and lived in her car while she waited for her day in court. One of our current clients lives in a public storage locker because he cannot afford to pay rent. We have asylum-seeking clients who go hungry so that their children can eat, or who drink water to “feel full.” Other clients go without medication to treat chronic illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure because they lack health insurance and money to pay out of pocket for their medications. Asylum seekers are not a population with an ability to pay extraneous fees.
This new fee would also put asylum seekers further at risk of being exploited, or even physically harmed, abused or trafficked within the United States. Asylum seekers are already vulnerable to such predatory behavior. For example, years ago, one of us worked with a young woman from Niger who fled a forced marriage and female genital mutilation. As an asylum seeker in the United States, she had no way to provide for herself and found herself passed from one abusive situation to another. By the time she filed her asylum application, she had been repeatedly raped, held captive and forced to work in various homes. She was providing free child-care in exchange for lodging but forbidden from leaving the house.
And contrary to some misconceptions among the public (and the Trump administration), asylum seekers are generally ineligible for any form of federal or state aid. Indeed, even after they are granted asylum, they do not receive significant support from the government. Between paying for rent, food and other living expenses, and not being able to work for a significant period of time, how will asylum seekers pay the fee?
Banning asylum seekers from work will deprive the U.S. government of the taxes that asylum seekers, just like other immigrants, pay on the wages they receive. Asylum seekers do make real contributions to our communities. Among the asylum seekers we have worked with over the years are doctors, engineers, lawyers, nurses, computer scientists, teachers, professors and more. Also among those asylum seekers are cleaners, taxi drivers, factory workers, gardeners, child-care providers and elder-care specialists. All of them are generating tax revenue for the government, usually far more per year than whatever nominal fee Trump wants them to pay for their asylum application.
Asylum seekers, who have lost everything and been forced to leave their countries and start over in ours, have a tremendous amount to give to our communities if given the chance. Take Constance, for example, one of our West African clients. In 2015, while she was seeking asylum, she commuted two hours by bus each way to a factory to cut fruit during a 12-hour overnight shift. She now works as a French language newscaster for a major news and radio outlet. Another client is a microbiologist who worked waiting tables until he found a job directing a lab at a hospital. As one of our clients said: “I know I’ve lost my country, but I haven’t lost my skills. I can still contribute.” Requiring these individuals to remain idle while jobs go unfilled and immigration court and asylum office backlogs persist could mean years in limbo and is a waste of talent, expertise and the hard work asylum seekers contribute.
Like so many of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, these new requirements will do nothing to actually modernize our immigration system or make life better for Americans. Instead, the proposal would waste valuable human capital and talent that can be harnessed to truly make America great, and preys on those who have already lost everything and came to seek safety in the United States.
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My good friends Lindsay and Joan are certainly two of the “good guys” — true role models for the “New Due Process Army.”
They have devoted their professional lives to making America a fairer and better place and helping the most vulnerable among us to have a fair shot at asylum and to contribute their full talents to our society. A terrific “win-win” for us and for asylum seekers. And they both work on “shoestring budgets” — giving much and asking little — just like the refugees they are helping!
What if we had a Government that recognized, honored, and worked with such talented folks to solve problems? Imagine what we could achieve with cooperation and positive efforts, involving real expertise from those who actually know and work with asylum seekers, and who therefore recognize asylum seekers as fellow human beings and great potential assets to our country?
But they were willing to do whatever it took. Going back to Guatemala was simply not an option, they said. Monterroso explained that in October, their family was forced to flee after a gang threatened to murder the children if they didn’t pay an exorbitant bribe, five months’ worth of profits from their tiny juice stall. The family hid for a day and a half in their house and then sneaked away before dawn. “There is nobody that can protect us there,” Monterroso said. “We have seen in the other cases, they kill the people and kill their children.” Her voice caught. “The first thing is to have security for them,” she said of her kids, “that nothing bad happens to them.”
All told, more than 159,000 migrants filed for asylum in the U.S. in fiscal year 2018, a 274% increase over 2008. Meanwhile, the total number of apprehensions along the southern border has decreased substantially—nearly 70% since fiscal year 2000. President Donald Trump has labeled the southern border a national crisis. He refused to sign any bill funding the federal government that did not include money for construction of a wall along the frontier, triggering the longest shutdown in American history, and when Democrats refused to budge, he threatened to formally invoke emergency powers. The President says the barrier, which was the centerpiece of his election campaign, is needed to thwart a dangerous “invasion” of undocumented foreigners.
But the situation on the southern border, however the political battle in Washington plays out, will continue to frustrate this U.S. President, and likely his successors too, and not just because of continuing caravans making their way to the desert southwest. Months of reporting by TIME correspondents around the world reveal a stubborn reality: we are living today in a global society increasingly roiled by challenges that can be neither defined nor contained by physical barriers. That goes for climate change, terrorism, pandemics, nascent technologies and cyber-attacks. It also applies to one of the most significant global developments of the past quarter-century: the unprecedented explosion of global migration.
. . . .
They abandoned their homes for different reasons: tens of millions went in search of better jobs or better education or medical care, and tens of millions more had no choice. More than 5.6 million fled the war in Syria, and a million more were Rohingya, chased from their villages in Myanmar. Hundreds of thousands fled their neighborhoods in Central America and villages in sub-Saharan Africa, driven by poverty and violence. Others were displaced by catastrophic weather linked to climate change.
Taken one at a time, each is an individual, a mixture of strengths and weaknesses, hope and despair. But collectively, they represent something greater than the sum of their parts. The forces that pushed them from their homes have combined with a series of global factors that pulled them abroad: the long peace that followed the Cold War in the developed world, the accompanying expansion of international travel, liberalized policies for refugees and the relative wealth of developed countries, especially in Europe and the U.S., the No. 1 destination for migrants. The force is tidal and has not been reversed by walls, by separating children from their parents or by deploying troops. Were the world’s total population of international migrants in 2018 gathered from the places where they have sought new lives and placed under one flag, they would be its fifth largest country.
The mass movement of people has changed the world both for better and for worse. Migrants tend to be productive. Though worldwide they make up about 3% of the population, in 2015 they generated about 9% of global GDP, according to the U.N. Much of that money is wired home—$480 billion in 2017, also according to the U.N.—where the cash has immense impact. Some will pay for the passage of the next migrant, and the smartphone he or she will keep close at hand. The technology not only makes the journey more efficient and safer—smugglers identify their clients by photos on instant-messaging—but, upon arrival, allows those who left to keep in constant contact with those who remain behind, across oceans and time zones.
Yet attention of late is mostly focused on the impact on host countries. There, national leaders have grappled with a powerful irony: the ways in which they react to new migrants—tactically, politically, culturally—shape them as much as the migrants themselves do. In some countries, migrants have been welcomed by crowds at train stations. In others, images of migrants moving in miles-long caravans through Central America or spilling out of boats on Mediterranean shores were wielded to persuade native-born citizens to lock down borders, narrow social safety nets and jettison long-standing humanitarian commitments to those in need.
. . . .
The U.S., though founded by Europeans fleeing persecution, now largely reflects the will of its Chief Executive: subverting decades of asylum law and imposing a policy that separated migrant toddlers from their parents and placed children behind cyclone fencing. Trump floated the possibility of revoking birthright citizenship, characterized migrants as “stone cold criminals” and ordered 5,800 active-duty U.S. troops to reinforce the southern border. Italy refused to allow ships carrying rescued migrants to dock at its ports. Hungary passed laws to criminalize the act of helping undocumented people. Anti-immigrant leaders saw their political power grow in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Italy and Hungary, and migration continued to be a factor in the Brexit debate in the U.K.
These political reactions fail to grapple with a hard truth: in the long run, new migration is nearly always a boon to host countries. In acting as entrepreneurs and innovators, and by providing inexpensive labor, immigrants overwhelmingly repay in long-term economic contributions what they use in short-term social services, studies show. But to maximize that future good, governments must act -rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.
. . . .
But protocols and treaties can, at best, hope to respond to the human emotions and hard realities that drive migration. No wall, sheriff or headscarf law would have prevented Monterroso and Calderón, or Yaquelin and Albertina Contreras, or Sami Baladi and Mirey Darwich from leaving their homes. Migrants will continue to flee bombs, look for better-paying jobs and accept extraordinary risks as the price of providing a better life for their children.
The question now is whether the world can come to define the enormous population of international migrants as an opportunity. No matter when that happens, Eman Albadawi, a teacher from Syria who arrived in Anröchte, Germany, in 2015, will continue to make a habit of reading German-language children’s books to her three Syrian-born kids at night. Their German is better than hers, and they make fun of her pronunciation, but she doesn’t mind. She is proud of them. At a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise, she tells them, “We must be brave, but we must also be successful and strong.” —With reporting by Aryn Baker/Anröchte, Germany; Melissa Chan, Julia Lull, Gina Martinez, Thea Traff/New York; Ioan Grillo/Tijuana; Abby Vesoulis/Murfreesboro, Tenn.; and Vivienne Walt/Paris •
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I strongly encourage everyone to read Haley’s outstanding article at the link. It is one of the best and most easily understandable explanations of a complex phenomenon that I have seen recently. As I always say, “lots of moving parts.” But Haley and her colleagues have distilled the fundamental truths concealed by this complexity. Congrats and appreciation to Haley and everyone who worked on this masterpiece!
Haley debunks and eviscerates the restrictionist, racist “fear and loathing” baloney that Trump and his White Nationalist gang peddle. The simple truth always has been and continues to be that America needs more immigration.
The only real question is whether we are going to be smart and funnel it into expanded legal and humanitarian channels or dumb like Trump and push the inevitable migration into an extra-legal system. The latter best serves neither our country nor the humans pushed into an underground existence where they can be exploited and are artificially prevented from achieving their full potential for themselves and for us. Right now, we have a mix skewed toward forcing far, far too many good folks to use the extra-legal system.
We’ll only be able to improve the situation by pushing the mix toward the legal and the humanitarian, rather than the extra-legal. That’s why it’s virtually impossible to have a rational immigration debate with folks like Trump who start with the racist-inspired fiction that migrants are a “threat” who can be deterred, punished, and diminished.
Contrary to Trump and the White Nationalists, the real immigration problems facing America are 1) how can we best integrate the millions of law-abiding and productive undocumented individuals already residing here into our society, and 2) how can we most fairly and efficiently insure that in the future individuals like them can be properly screened and come to our country through expanded humanitarian and legal channels. Until we resolve these, American will continue to founder with immigration and fail to maximize its many benefits. That’s bad for us, for migrants, and for the future of our nation.
As a reminder, in the context of Congressional negotiations on border security, I recently put together a list of “practical fixes” to the immigration system which would address border security, humanitarian relief, and improved compliance with Constitutional Due process without major legislative changes — mostly “tweaks” and other common sense amendments that would make outsized improvements and certainly would be an improvement on squandering $5.7 billion and getting nothing but a largely symbolic “instant white elephant” border wall in return. So, here it is again in all its hypothetical glory: “THE SMARTS ACT OF 2019:
SECURITY, MIGRATION ASSISTANCE RENEWAL, & TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ACT (“SMARTS ACT”) OF 2019
Federal Employees
Restart the Government
Retroactive pay raise
Enhanced Border Security
Fund half of “Trump’s Wall”
Triple the number of USCIS Asylum Officers
Double the number of U.S. Immigration Judges and Court Staff
Additional Port of Entry (“POE”) Inspectors
Improvements in POE infrastructure, technology, and technology between POEs
Additional Intelligence, Anti-Smuggling, and Undercover Agents for DHS
Anything else that both parties agree upon
Humanitarian Assistance
Road to citizenship for a Dreamers & TPSers
Prohibit family separation
Funding for alternatives to detention
Grants to NGOs for assisting arriving asylum applicants with temporary housing and resettlement issues
Require re-establishment of U.S. Refugee Program in the Northern Triangle
Asylum Process
Require Asylum Offices to consider in the first instance all asylum applications including those generated by the “credible fear” process as well as all so-called “defensive applications”
Immigration Court Improvements
Grants and requirements that DHS & EOIR work with NGOs and the private bar with a goal of achieving 100% representation of asylum applicants
Money to expand and encourage the training and certification of more non-attorneys as “accredited representatives” to represent asylum seekers pro bono before the Asylum Offices and the Immigration Courts on behalf of approved NGOs
Vacate Matter of A-B-and reinstate Matter of A-R-C-G-as the rule for domestic violence asylum applications
Vacate Matter of Castro-Tum and reinstate Matter of Avetisyan to allow Immigration Judges to control dockets by administratively closing certain “low priority” cases
Eliminate Attorney General’s authority to interfere in Immigration Court proceedings through “certification”
Re-establish weighing of interests of both parties consistent with Due Process as the standard for Immigration Court continuances
Bar AG & EOIR Director from promulgating substantive or procedural rules for Immigration Courts — grant authority to BIA to promulgate procedural rules for Immigration Courts
Authorize Immigration Courts to consider all Constitutional issues in proceedings
Authorize DHS to appeal rulings of the BIA to Circuit Courts of Appeal
Require EOIR to implement the statutory contempt authority of Immigration Judges, applicable equally to all parties before the courts, within 180 days
Bar “performance quotas” and “performance work plans” for Immigration Judges and BIA Members
Authorize the Immigration Court to set bonds in all cases coming within their jurisdiction
Fund and require EOIR to implement a nationwide electronic filing system within one year
Eliminate the annual 4,000 numerical cap on grants of “cancellation of removal” based on “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship”
Require the Asylum Office to adjudicate cancellation of removal applications with renewal in Immigration Court for those denied
Require EOIR to establish a credible, transparent judicial discipline and continued tenure system within one year that must include: opportunity for participation by the complainant (whether Government or private) and the Immigration Judge; representation permitted for both parties; peer input; public input; DHS input; referral to an impartial decision maker for final decision; a transparent and consistent system of sanctions incorporating principles of rehabilitation and progressive discipline; appeal rights to the MSPB
International Cooperation
Fund and require efforts to work with the UNHCR, Mexico, and other countries in the Hemisphere to improve asylum systems and encourage asylum seekers to exercise options besides the U.S.
Fund efforts to improve conditions and the rule of law in the Northern Triangle
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No, it wouldn’t solve all problems overnight. But, everything beyond “Trump’s Wall” would make a substantial improvement over our current situation that would benefit enforcement, border security, human rights, Due Process, humanitarian assistance, and America. Not a bad “deal” in my view!
The privatization of ICE detention centers has exacerbated the problems the bureau faces and has given considerable fodder to media exposes of abuses. The DHS Office of Inspector General recently released a scathing report on failures of the private contractors to comply with detention standards. It’s time to restructure the responsibilities to administer detention and removal policies more humanely.
To its credit, ICE also performs critical assignments that include investigating foreign nationals who violate the laws. The main categories of crimes its agents investigate are suspected terrorism, criminal acts, suspected fraudulent activities (i.e., possessing or manufacturing fraudulent immigration documents) and suspected smuggling and trafficking of foreign nationals. ICE investigators are housed in the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) component and are among those who would dismantle ICE.
If ICE is not at the border performing critical background checks and national security screenings, who does? First, the State Department consular officers screen all foreign nationals requesting a visa, employing biometric technologies along with biographic background checks. In some high-risk consulates abroad, ICE assists in national security screenings. Then, DHS Customs and Border Protection (CBP) inspectors examine all foreign nationals who seek admission to the United States at ports of entry. CBP inspectors and consular officials partner with the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to utilize the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment on known and suspected terrorists and terrorist groups.
They also check the background of all foreign nationals in biometric and biographic databases such the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Improvements in intelligence-gathering, along with advances in technologies and inter-agency sharing, have greatly enhanced the rigor of our national security screenings.
The most effective policy for interior immigration enforcement would be one prioritizing “quality of life” enforcement. As I have written elsewhere, it would be aimed at protecting U.S. residents from the deleterious and criminal aspects of immigration. Foremost, it would involve the investigation and removal of foreign nationals who have been convicted of crimes and who are deportable, thus maintaining the important activities of the current ICE investigators.
“Quality of life” enforcement, furthermore, would prioritize investigations of specific work sites for wage, hour and safety violations, sweatshop conditions and trafficking in persons — all illegal activities to which unauthorized workers are vulnerable. “Quality of life” enforcement also would encompass stringent labor market tests (e.g., labor certifications and attestations) to ensure that U.S. workers are not adversely affected by the recruitment of foreign workers, as well as reliable employment verification systems. Many of these functions once were performed by the Department of Labor (DOL), before funding cuts gutted its enforcement duties.
Prioritizing these functions likely would go a long way toward curbing unauthorized migration. Whether DOL or a revamped immigration enforcement be the lead on “quality of life” measures remains a key management question. There is a strong case for re-establishing DOL’s traditional role in protecting U.S. workers and certifying the hiring of foreign workers. Given the critical role that ICE investigators play, it is imperative that they be housed in an agency that provides them with adequate support. These are finer points that can be resolved as the functions are reorganized.
Including a multi-pronged agency or agencies charged with ensuring “quality of life” immigration enforcement measures as part of a package of immigration reforms would only increase the strong public support (roughly two-thirds favor) for comprehensive immigration reform. Good policy. Good politics.
Ruth Ellen Wasem is a clinical professor of policy at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas in Austin. For more than 25 years, she was a domestic policy specialist at the U.S. Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service. She has testified before Congress about asylum policy, legal immigration trends, human rights and the push-pull forces on unauthorized migration. She is writing a book about the legislative drive to end race- and nationality-based immigration.
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Hit the above link to read Ruth’s entire article over at The Hill.
I believe that both Nolan Rappaport and I have previously noted the importance of better wage and hour enforcement in preventing employer abuse of both the legal and extra-legal immigration systems. Sure make lots more sense than “busting” hard-working, productive members of our community who have the bad fortune to be here without documents in an era of irrational enforcement!
There are lots of “smart immigration enforcement” options out there. Although the Obama Administration for the most part screwed up immigration policy, toward the end they actually were coming around to some of the “smart enforcement” initiatives, particularly with DACA at USCIS and more consistent and widespread use of prosecutorial discretion (“PD”) at ICE.
Naturally, the Trump Administration abandoned all of the “smart” initiatives started by the Obama Administration and instead doubled down on every cruel, ineffective, and just plain stupid policy from the past. But, that’s because it’s never been about law enforcement or developing a rational immigration policy. It’s really all about racism and White Nationalism. This Administration, representing a minority of Americans, has absolutely no interest in democracy or governing for the common good.
That’s why it’s critical for the rest of us, who want no part of White Nationalist Nation, to begin the process for “regime change” at the ballot box this Fall! And, in the meantime, join the New Due Process Army and fight the horrible excesses and intentionally ugly policies of the Trumpsters!
President Trump issued three executive orders Friday aimed at overhauling the federal bureaucracy by making it easier to fire poor performers, sharply curtailing the amount of time federal employees can be paid for union work and directing agencies to negotiate tougher union contracts.
The orders could result in the biggest changes in a generation to civil service protections long enjoyed by federal workers.
White House officials said the goal of the executive orders is to make the workforce of two million federal employees more efficient and responsive to the public and to improve morale.
In a briefing with reporters, Andrew Bremberg, the White House’s director of the domestic policy, said that a survey of federal employees has found that many do not believe their agencies adequately address poor performers.
“These executive orders make it easier for agencies to remove poor performing employees and ensure that taxpayer dollars are more efficiently used,” he said.
One of the executive orders, which allows employees accused of misconduct to be fired more easily, expands on legislation that Congress passed last year to bring more accountability at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“President Trump is attempting to silence the voice of veterans, law enforcement officers, and other frontline federal workers through a series of executive orders intended to strip federal employees of their decades-old right to representation at the worksite,” the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, said in a statement.
Joe Davidson contributed to this report.
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An honest, apolitical, expert career Civil Service has been the main difference between America and many of the dictatorships, one-party states, and failed states from which we once distinguished ourselves. Once destroyed, it won’t easily be rebuilt. That could well spell the end of America as an economic superpower and world leader.
Can the “Trump Kakistocracy” and his co-opted “Party of GOP Grifters” be stopped before it’s too late? Only time will tell. But, the clock is ticking!
Crab crisis: Md. seafood industry loses 40 percent of workforce in visa lottery
Celia Serna, a guest worker at the J.M. Clayton processing plant in Cambridge, Md., picks crabs. (Lloyd Fox/Baltimore Sun)
By , Scott DanceMay 3 at 6:35 PM
Maryland’s seafood industry is in crisis: Nearly half of the Eastern Shore’s crab houses have no workers to pick the meat sold in restaurants and supermarkets.
They failed to get visas for their mostly Mexican workforce, including many women who have been coming north to Maryland for crab season for as long as two decades. The Trump administration for the first time awarded them this year in a lottery, instead of on a first-come, first-served basis.
“This is going to cause the price of crabmeat to go out of sight,” said Harry Phillips, owner of Russell Hall Seafood on Hooper’s Island. “There’s not going to be hardly any Maryland crabmeat. . . . It looks like it’s a matter of time before they’re going to shut all of us down.”
Visa shortages have been a perennial issue for the crab industry since the last generations of Eastern Shore women who once picked crabmeat aged out of the tedious seasonal work. In the 1980s, crab houses started bringing workers from Mexico through a program that lets them live and work in the United States during the warmer months and then return to Mexico in the winter, when watermen are prohibited from crabbing.
But crab house owners say these are the most dire circumstances they have faced. They hope federal immigration officials issue more visas in response to skyrocketing demand for seasonal foreign workers. But if they have to compete in another lottery, they say, they worry there won’t be enough workers to fill their facilities.
“Companies that have been relying on this system for 25 years suddenly have no workers,” said Bill Sieling, director of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association. “It’s totally unfair and irrational, really.”
The crisis is hitting just as crab season begins. Watermen were allowed to start dropping crab pots into the Chesapeake and its tributaries on April 1, but with cold weather through the month, crabs were slow to emerge from hibernation.
As temperatures rise, this year’s crop of crustaceans is now emerging.
It’s unclear whether or how quickly the problem could be resolved or what effect it could have on crab prices this year. Many of the crabs sold in Maryland come from the Carolinas and Louisiana, and some meat comes from Asia and Venezuela. But a premium is placed on local meat, with a state program called True Blue to identify and market Maryland crabs.
Crab processors theorized that a drastically reduced supply from a shortage of workers could send the price of picked meat skyrocketing. But it could lower the price of steamed crabs, flooding the market with many of the female and undersize crabs that would otherwise get picked.
“We need these processing plants to keep the market running smooth,” said Bryan Hall of G.W. Hall and Sons on Hooper’s Island.
G.W. Hall was able to get the 30 visas it applied for, but Hall says he doesn’t feel fortunate.
“I got them, but I don’t feel right having them,” he said. “It’s not right for me to have them and my fellow people who I deal with not to have them. They depend on them just as much as I do, and they’ve got families to feed just as much as I do.”
Maryland’s 20 licensed crab processors typically employ some 500 foreign workers each season, from April to November, through the H-2B visa program, Sieling said. The visas are for seasonal workers in nonagricultural jobs. Pickers are paid by the pound of meat they produce, and the most productive ones make up to $500 a week.
“Nobody wants to do manual labor anymore,” Sieling said. “It’s just a very, very tight labor market right now, particularly in industries that are seasonal.”
But in February, Sieling said, applications for about 200 of those visas were denied. That leaves women used to making an annual pilgrimage to Maryland stuck at home, with limited options to feed their families.
“Our families depend on us, and going to the United States is the best option because here in Mexico it is very difficult to find a job, and apart from that, you face the risk of so much crime,” Anayeni Chavarria Ponce, a crab picker from the Mexican state of Hidalgo, said via text message in Spanish. “Not to mention you can’t reach a salary even to buy the basics.”
Federal labor officials said there was “unprecedented” demand for H-2B visas in January. They received applications for 81,000 foreign workers when only 33,000 visas were available for work from April through September. The visas have become increasingly desirable over the past five years as overall U.S. unemployment falls.
In the second part of a two-step visa application process, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received applications to bring some 47,000 workers into the United States for that six-month period. Because there were so many requests, officials decided to award visas by lottery.
Congress included a provision in the $1.3 trillion spending plan it approved in March that authorizes federal immigration officials to issue more H-2B visas. The crab industry is expecting a lottery for 15,000 more to be announced sometime this month. But a spokesman for the federal immigration agency said he had no information about whether or how many new visas might be permitted.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) requested that the federal government “take immediate action” to raise the visa cap in a recent letter to the secretaries of homeland security and labor.
“Many of these businesses operate in rural parts of our state and have relied on guest workers for decades,” he wrote. “They will be forced to shut their doors or start importing crab meat if this issue is not addressed immediately.”
The industry has been in a position of begging for mercy in the past, often to powerful former senator Barbara A. Mikulski. The senior Democrat intervened in the early 2000s when northern ski resorts and Florida landscapers were scooping up visas before Maryland crab houses had a chance to apply. She championed a change that divided the annual 66,000-visa allowance into two semiannual allotments.
Now, businesses are asking President Trump for help, in the hope that the guest worker program doesn’t get lost in the administration’s efforts to tighten immigration policies.
“This is not an immigration issue,” said Morgan Tolley, general manager of A.E. Phillips & Son on Hooper’s Island. “They come here, abide by rules, they pay their state and federal taxes, their social security taxes, and they send the majority of their money home to support their family. They are a very important part of our local economies.”
Tolley said he supports the president and trusts that he has businesses’ interests at heart, but Tolley is skeptical and disappointed with the administration’s changes to the visa program.
“I voted for Donald Trump, and I’d vote for President Trump again,” he said. “But I think in small rural towns in America, we’re getting the short end of the stick on labor.”
Waterside communities such as Hooper’s Island are left hoping this visa scare, like others, will pass — and not be the final blow to their industry.
“Nobody’s ever been closed down,” Harry Phillips said. “No doubt there’s been some threats and there’s been some times we’ve been a little late getting them. But we’ve always gotten them.”
— Baltimore Sun
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Pretty depressing. Even when confronted with direct evidence of the stupidity of their own votes, and the irrationality of the Trump GOP’s bias and restrictionist positions on legal immigration, these folks are still in denial. Can’t connect the dots. I guess that’s how democracies disappear.
Maybe guys like Jeff Sessions and Tom Cotton will go out and do some ‘pickin for these employers. Who needs foreign workers? They take all these really great jobs that every American wants! Why, I’ll bet almost every kid over at TC Williams High here in Alexandria aspires to be a seasonal crab picker after graduation! And, the truth is that picking crabs is actually skilled work that arrogant, out of touch, White GOP politicos couldn’t actually do very well. Guys like Sessions & Cotton would last 10 minutes max on the line.
Ruth Ellen Wasem The University of Texas at Austin
6 Journal on Migration and Human Security 97 (2018)
KEY QUOTE:
Even with fragmented governance and strained resources, the US immigration system has enjoyed successes. Each year, approximately one million foreign nationals legally become permanent residents in the United States. In FY 2015 and FY 2016, the Bureau of Consular Affairs issued over 10 million visas each year to foreign nationals coming to the United States as nonimmigrants (i.e., for a temporary purpose and a temporary period of time) and over half a million visas to LPRs (Bureau of Consular Affairs 2017). CBP admitted almost 77 million foreign nationals as nonimmigrant admissions to the United States in FY 2015 (Office of Immigration Statistics 2016). That year, DOL processed 711,820 employer applications for 1,580,778 positions for temporary and permanent labor certifications Immigration Governance for the Twenty-First Century 117 (Office of Foreign Labor Certification 2016). In FY 2015, there were 730,259 LPRs who became US citizens. That same year, the United States admitted 69,920 refugees, and USCIS approved 26,124 asylees. DHS apprehended 462,388 foreign nationals and deported 444,431 foreign nationals in FY 2015. Another 253,509 foreign nationals were denied entry, and 129,122 foreign nationals returned home without a formal order of removal (Office of Immigration Statistics 2016). In FY 2016, EOIR judges received 328,122 cases and completed 273,390, including those of 8,726 foreign nationals who were granted asylum (EOIR 2017). Considerable credit is due to the people carrying out immigration-related responsibilities across the federal government.
Immigration is not a program to be administered; rather, it is a phenomenon to be managed. While there are limits to how much one government can control migration, the building blocks in Figure 3 offer a reasonable set of priorities. Effective immigration governance, coupled with laws and policies that incorporate the national interests, is key to maintaining a robust sovereign nation.
Get the entire article, which I highly recommend, at this link:
Words of wisdom, to be sure. If only our policy makers had the same degree of understanding.
Today, we operate on an illusion that a few folks sitting in Washington, D.C. can “pull all the strings” to seal borders, override market forces, ignore international conditions and agreements, change behavior in foreign countries, and dominate forces of human migration that have been at work since before all of us were born and will continue long after we’re all gone. It’s a toxic mix of arrogance and ignorance that will leave immigration and refugee policy in tatters for years to come.
I can only hope that there are those out there in the upcoming generations who will bring to the immigration phenomenon practical scholarship, reason, humanity, fairness, and better ideas on management of our laws for the benefit of our country and humanity as a whole.
