Labor – Page 4 – immigrationcourtside.com

FLRA HEARING OFFICER APPEARS TO “HOME IN” ON DISINGENUOUS ABSURDITY OF EOIR’S ARGUMENT FOR “DECERTIFYING” IMMIGRATION JUDGES’ UNION! — In Reality, Immigration “Judges” Have Been Reduced To The Status Of “Deportation Clerks” With All Meaningful Precedents & Policies Set By Unqualified & Biased Politicos On The 5th Floor Of The DOJ!

https://www.govexec.com/management/2020/01/trump-administration-makes-its-case-break-immigration-judges-union/162288/

Eric Katz reports for Government Executive:

Justice Department “simply does not want to deal with a vocal union that asserts its rights,” labor group argues at hearing.

ERIC KATZ | JANUARY 7, 2020

IMMIGRATION

UNIONS

The Trump administration argued in an executive branch court on Tuesday that the duties of immigration judges housed within the Justice Department have grown more important in the last two decades, elevating the judges to management and therefore rendering them ineligible to form a union.

The Justice lawyers and their first witness—James McHenry, the director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which employs the nation’s 400 immigration judges—faced pointed questions from an attorney with the Federal Labor Relations Authority who oversaw the hearing and questioned whether the judges actually set department policy. The administration first announced in August it would attempt to decertify the National Association of Immigration Judges, bringing the case to FLRA to argue the employees are not eligible to collectively bargain.

Union representatives argued at Tuesday’s hearing that their members’ duties have not fundamentally changed since 2000, when the Justice Department last attempted to decertify the union. FLRA rejected the Justice Department’s argument that year that immigration judges make policy through the issuance of decisions, noting the judges do not set precedent and their rulings are often appealed and reviewed. FLRA also said the immigration court system was established specifically so judges do not maintain any management duties to enable them to focus on hearings.

The arguments followed a similar path on Tuesday, though Justice attorneys and McHenry said several changes to Executive Office of Immigration Review policy and relevant precedents created an opening for a new FLRA ruling. William Krisner, the regional attorney for FLRA’s Washington office who presided over the hearing, said Tuesday morning the authority would first have to determine if anything had changed since 2000 before ruling on the merits of the case. William Brill, a Justice attorney, pointed to a 1999 streamlining effort by the department that enabled the immigration appeals board within the review office to simply affirm a judge’s ruling without issuing a separate opinion as one such change. The change was not presented during the previous FLRA case, Brill said, and was amplified in 2002 when EOIR again shifted course to allow just one board member to affirm a judge’s ruling.

Facing Brill’s questioning, McHenry said the “factual day-to-day” of immigration judges’ work has not changed since 2000 but the “legal significance of those duties” had been overhauled.

Legal changes have “fundamentally recast the nature and importance of immigration judge duties,” McHenry said.

Richard Bialczak, an attorney for the union, rejected the argument, saying Justice’s claims were nothing more than a retread.

The Trump administration is “raising the same arguments and hoping for a different outcome,” Bialczak said. “There’s no factual basis for it. The Department of Justice simply does not want to deal with a vocal union that asserts its rights.”

Brill also argued immigration judges’ workload increasingly involves issuing decisions that cannot be appealed to the Executive Office of Immigration Review’s board. While immigrants can appeal those cases to the federal circuit, Brill and McHenry said the judge’s initial ruling represents the department’s official position. Immigration judges collectively issued about 280,000 decisions in fiscal 2019, about 38% of which could not be appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals.

Justice also pointed to Lucia v. SEC—a 2018 Supreme Court case that dictated that administrative law judges must be appointed by the president or a designated official, rather than hired normally—as relevant to immigration judges. The Executive Office of Immigration Review employees are administrative judges, not administrative law judges, but McHenry said their “duties and functions are very similar.”

“It’s difficult to conceive someone who needs to be appointed by the head of an agency but does not make management decisions,” Brill said.

Margaret Tough, another attorney for the union, countered that Lucia had no bearing on immigration judges, who are appointed by the attorney general and have been dating back prior to 2000. She and Bialczak said the judges are now under stricter oversight by management, facing new performance evaluations, quotas for their annual caseload and a restriction on speaking publicly. On cross examination, McHenry noted the judges can face discipline if their rulings are not up to acceptable standards and the board can remand cases back to them. Under their performance standards, judges cannot exceed a pre-set remand rate.

Upon follow-up questioning from Kirsner, the FLRA attorney, McHenry conceded the judges “are not supervisors.”

“Immigration judges are at the bottom of the org chart so they don’t supervise anything,” McHenry said, noting they cannot hire or fire anyone.

Tough highlighted that the Executive Office of Immigration Review has hired additional supervisory judges and under McHenry created the Office of Policy, which the agency director said was launched to “ensure better coordination of policy making within the agency.” He added, however, that adjudicatory policy making remained the sole power of immigration judges and their supervisors cannot influence the judges’ rulings.

Kirsner repeatedly sought more information on immigration judges’ power to set precedent. Generally speaking, their rulings do not influence more than the case at hand. Kirsner also clarified that unless there is a remand, their work on a case is finished after they issue a decision. Justice attorneys noted various statements in which the union suggested immigration judges should be removed from the executive branch and placed into an independent court, but Kirsner rejected them as irrelevant.

FLRA is expected to continue to hear from witnesses through Thursday before issuing a decision on the union’s fate later this year.

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Many thanks to my long-time friend, fellow retired judicial colleague, member of the Round Table, and former NAIJ President Judge Joan Churchill for passing this along.

“Immigration judges are at the bottom of the org chart so they don’t supervise anything,” McHenry said, noting they cannot hire or fire anyone.

FLRA also said the immigration court system was established specifically so judges do not maintain any management duties to enable them to focus on hearings.

The above quotes “say it all” about the absurd position being argued by the DOJ. But, since neither administrative nor Article III courts hold the regime accountable for dishonesty before tribunals and engaging in frivolous litigation, like private parties would be, there is no incentive for the regime and its toadies at DOJ to stop flooding the courts with lies, misrepresentations, and meritless litigation.

Indeed, the Article IIIs unwillingness to deal “head-on” with the clearly unconstitutional nature of the Immigration Courts and their grotesque and unethical mismanagement by the DOJ have lead to an absurd growing backlog of 1.3 million cases (each involving real human lives) and the impending collapse of one of the largest sectors of the American justice system. What will it take for the “life-tenured ones in their ivory towers” to get out of the clouds and engage in the fray before it’s too late for our nation?

As I say over and over: Imagine if we had an honest Administration and Article III courts with integrity that forced the Government and private parties to work together to solve pressing legal and policy problems, particularly in the field of immigration, rather than squandering time and resources on Government-generated meritless litigation and schemes intended to collapse our entire justice system?

Worse yet, Article III Courts like the Supremes and the Fifth Circuit regularly reward the regime for its scofflaw performances, thus showing contempt for their own judicial roles, our Constitution, the rule of law, and, worst of all, for the human lives destroyed by invidiously motivated and illegal policies of the Trump regime. It also encourages this scofflaw behavior to continue and escalate.

That’s why the feeble and feckless complaints by Chief Justice Roberts about loss of respect for the courts and the ugly tenor of public discourse encouraged and engendered by the Trump regime are so discouraging and annoying. Actions speak louder than words, Chiefie! And, Trump has figured out that you’re all bluster and no backbone when it comes to standing up and speaking out in real cases about his all-out assault on American democracy!

Finally, let’s not forget that while DOJ/EOIR “management” is squandering everyone’s time on wasteful and frivolous efforts like “decertification,” here are just a few of the real management problems facing the Immigration Court system:

No e-filing system;
Growing 1.3 million case backlog, notwithstanding almost doubling the number of Immigration Judges, with no coherent plan for addressing it effectively for the foreseeable future;
Inaccurate and deficient record keeping as documented by TRAC;
Defective hearing notices;
Rock bottom judicial and staff morale, resulting in premature departure of some of the “best and brightest;”
“Single source” judicial selection process that effectively excludes non-Governmental candidates from the Immigration Judiciary;
Huge discrepancies among judges in asylum decision-making;
Continuing quality control problems with both Immigration Judges and BIA Judges misapplying basic legal standards and established precedents, as noted by Circuit Court decisions;
Problems in providing qualified in-person interpreters for hearings;
Inadequate training of Immigration Judges.

Seems like we’d all be better off if the NAIJ, rather than what passes for “EOIR management” were in charge of our Immigration Courts. And, while the FLA’s Krisner quite properly ruled it irrelevant to the proceedings before him, it’s more obvious than ever that the myriad of problems plaguing the Immigration Courts can’t and won’t be solved until there is an independent, Article I U.S. Immigration court established outside the Executive Branch!

PWS

01-10-20

GRETA THUNBERG: AN INSPIRATIONAL LEADER FOR OUR TIMES & THE FUTURE: “She is committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to try to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns.”

Carolyn Kormann writes in The New Yorker:

News Desk

The Pure Spirit of Greta Thunberg is the Perfect Antidote to Donald Trump

She is committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to try to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns.

On December 3rd, Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist from Sweden, completed her second transatlantic voyage, by almost entirely emissions-free sailboats, in the span of four months. Her small figure, dressed in black, stood, waving, on the bow of a catamaran, as it approached the port of Lisbon. Hundreds of people, standing onshore, cheered, welcoming her back to Europe. “I’m not travelling like this because I want everyone to do so,” she told reporters after walking off the boat onto dry land. “I’m doing this to send a message that it is impossible to live sustainably today, and that needs to change.” The scene felt both ancient and precisely of this moment, like Thunberg herself, who writes regularly in a paper journal but has mastered social-media virality, who can seem ageless and androgynous (the fierce stare) while also strikingly young and girlish (the braids), who acts with an otherworldly grace while delivering an outraged message grounded in the latest, best climate science. Her lightning-strike emergence as the planet’s hero, her capacity to inspire students around the world—all in the span of little more than a year—can seem like a prophesied story, an epic poem, a fable. Margaret Atwood (and others, including myself) have compared her to Joan of Arc—if the teen-age medieval warrior, who was burned at the stake in part for impersonating a man, had been inspired by scientific reports instead of divine voices and visions of angels. Centuries from now, we hope, people will live in a thriving, equitable civilization and tell Thunberg’s tale, too.

But it is, as Thunberg says repeatedly, precisely what we do during this century that will determine the fate of those future centuries, and what we do during the next decade that will determine the climate for the nearly two billion children alive today. They are the ones Thunberg represents, whom she is fighting for, and whom she has mobilized, since August, 2018, when she first sat outside the Swedish Parliament with a simple handwritten sign that read, in black letters, “SKOLSTREJK FOR KLIMATET.” Hundreds of thousands of students (and, gradually, their parents), in cities around the world, have followed her lead, striking from school and marching in the streets to protest for climate action. “You say you love your children above all else,” she said in her first big address, at last December’s United Nations climate talks. “And yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

From Lisbon, Thunberg took a train to Madrid, where leaders from around the world were gathering for another round—the twenty-fifth since 1995—of U.N. climate negotiations (known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP25). The point of this year’s talks was for countries to lay the groundwork for ambitious new targets in the reduction of their greenhouse-gas emissions. By the end of 2020, according to the terms of the Paris Agreement, countries are to commit to new nationally determined contributions (N.D.C.s, in U.N.-speak) that reflect the scale of global decarbonization necessary to limit global heating to two degrees Celsius. (The current pool of N.D.C.s, which many countries are not even meeting, would lead to more than three degrees warming by century’s end.) A related issue at the talks has involved carbon markets—detailed in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement—in which one country can pay another country for its emissions reductions (the equivalent of buying a carbon credit) and then count those reductions towards its own N.D.C. Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and India have, reportedly, all been blocking text that would provide strong regulations of these kinds of markets and accounting mechanisms. Though the final text of this year’s agreement is due today, the deliberations will likely continue at least until Saturday.

Thunberg, meanwhile, has increasingly referred, in mathematical detail, to carbon budgets, or the amount of carbon dioxide that we have left to emit into the atmosphere if we want to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In her speech to world leaders in Madrid, on Tuesday, she referred her audiences to page 108, chapter 2, of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and she said that, if we are to have a sixty-seven per cent chance of achieving that goal, we had, as of the first of January, 2018, four-hundred-and-twenty gigatons of carbon dioxide left in our carbon budget. That number is now much lower, considering that we emit approximately forty-two gigatons of carbon dioxide every year. This means that we have roughly eight years left to burn fossil fuels at current levels before our budget is empty. For all the efforts underway to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, they are nowhere near enough. Global emissions again hit a record high in 2019. As Thunberg also said, in the same speech, “The biggest danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and C.E.O.s are making it look like real action is happening, when in fact almost nothing is being done, apart from clever accounting and creative P.R.”

On Wednesday, Time named Thunberg the magazine’s Person of the Year. Donald Trump, who is famously obsessed with being on the cover of Time, could not stand it. He has campaigned on fossil-fuel expansion, has betrayed on numerous occasions that he does not understand what climate change is, and, on November 4th, he officially began proceedings to remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. (Every other country in the world remains a signatory to the pact.) On Thursday, in response to Thunberg’s news, he tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” Thunberg, as always, took the President’s mockery in stride, changing her Twitter bio, minutes later, to “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.”

This is not the first time that Thunberg has one-upped Trump’s mocking tweets. In September, she gave a historic speech with the kind of rhetorical vigor that exemplifies her gifts as an orator. “This is all wrong,” she said. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!” Later, Trump retweeted a video clip of her remarks, adding, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” The same day, Thunberg put the exact words in her Twitter bio: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

Thunberg is Trump’s perfect foil. She is pure spirit, committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns so that we avert climate change’s deadliest impacts and destabilizing tipping points. Thunberg is devoted to learning, writing, and understanding the world around her. She constantly lifts up other young climate leaders—especially those from indigenous and frontline communities—and begs reporters to focus on them, not her. (On Monday, she and Germany’s most prominent youth activist, Luisa Neubauer, hosted a press conference with young leaders from the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Russia, and Uganda.) She is a gifted public speaker, not because she stirs up chaos and hate through incoherent rants, but because she speaks elegantly and intelligently, in logical, pithy, unmuddied sentences. Her rhetorical gifts are, perhaps, all the more remarkable considering that, when she was younger, she fell into a major depression concerning climate change and stopped speaking altogether for months. As she said at the start of her speech on Tuesday, “A year and a half ago, I didn’t speak to anyone unless I really had to. But then I found a reason to speak.”

Carolyn Kormann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Read more.

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Wow! No wonder Trump and his cronies are so scared of her!

PWS

12-14-19

WHITE NATIONALIST AGENDA: Trump Regime Announces Plans For All-Out Assault On Legal Immigration — “It’s an attempt to lock into place changes to immigration policy that cannot be easily undone, regardless of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.”

https://apple.news/AKO1peXCgQpS_Ol7Hfyg_6g

Stuart Anderson writes in Forbes:

Trump Plans Far-Reaching Set Of New Immigration Regulations

The Trump administration plans a far-reaching set of new immigration regulations that, if enacted, would profoundly affect employers, international students, H-1B and L-1 visa holders, EB-5 investors, asylum seekers and others. The proposed forthcoming rules are detailed in the administration’s just-released Unified Agenda for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

H-1B Visas: “As a result of more restrictive Trump administration policies, denial rates for H-1B petitions have increased significantly, rising from 6% in FY 2015 to 24% through the third quarter of FY 2019 for new H-1B petitions for initial employment,” according to a recent National Foundation for American Policy analysis. A new H-1B regulation would make life even more difficult for employers and high-skilled foreign nationals.

The summary of a forthcoming H-1B rule states it would: “[R]evise the definition of specialty occupation to increase focus on obtaining the best and the brightest foreign nationals via the H-1B program, and revise the definition of employment and employer-employee relationship to better protect U.S. workers and wages. In addition, DHS will propose additional requirements designed to ensure employers pay appropriate wages to H-1B visa holders.” (The target date for publishing a proposed rule is December 2019.)

The rule could be used to defend the administration against lawsuits from companies that contend many actions by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on H-1B petitions have violated the Administrative Procedure Act by not going through the rulemaking process.

“Undoubtedly they will push the boundaries and aim for long-term, structural changes to the H-1B visa category,” said Lynden Melmed, a partner at Berry Appleman & Leiden and former Chief Counsel for USCIS, in an interview. “But absent new authority from Congress, going too far risks a court injunction and they could end up with nothing.”

One way USCIS may try to push the boundaries would be to place into regulation the theory behind a March 31, 2017, internal document now used in adjudications that excluded computer programmers from qualifying as a specialty occupation. The document discusses computer programmers and tells adjudicators that since the Department of Labor Occupational Outlook Handbook states that “. . . some employers hire workers with an associate’s degree . . . it suggests that entry level computer programmer positions do not necessarily require a bachelor’s degree and would not generally qualify as a position in a specialty occupation.” (Emphasis added.)

The March 31, 2017, document notes this has applicability to many occupations and states: “The Policy Memorandum is specific to the computer programmer occupation. However, this same analysis should be conducted for occupations where the Occupational Outlook Handbook does not specify that the minimum requirement for a particular position is normally a bachelor’s or higher degree in a specific specialty.” (Emphasis added.)

“Companies may be surprised to learn how many different positions do not require a bachelor’s degree under Department of Labor standards,” said Melmed. “Employers may have to rethink how they approach their talent strategy.”

A new regulation that would “revise the definition of employment and employer-employee” will make it even more difficult for IT services companies and others that place employees at customer locations. Such companies already have experienced much higher H-1B denial rates due to USCIS policies that, attorneys say, have targeted the companies for tougher scrutiny.

H-4 EAD: The administration continues to place on the regulatory agenda a measure to rescind an existing rule that allows many spouses of H-1B visa holders to work. The target date for a proposed rule is March 2020. (See here for more background.)

L-1 Visas: The irony of USCIS trying to tighten the L-1 visa category is companies complain the Trump administration already has made it nearly impossible to gain approval of L-1 visas at U.S. consulates in India to transfer employees into the United States. Companies also cite U.S. consular posts in China as a problem. “Our refusal rate for L visas at consular posts in India is 80% to 90%,” an executive of a major U.S. company told me in an interview. Denial rates have also increased considerably at USCIS for individual L-1B petitions (used for employees with “specialized knowledge”).

According to the summary of a new item placed on the regulatory agenda: “In order to improve the integrity of the L-1 program, the Department of Homeland Security will propose to revise the definition of specialized knowledge, to clarify the definition of employment and employer-employee relationship, and ensure employers pay appropriate wages to L-1 visa holders.” (September 2020 is the target date for publishing a proposed rule.)

Companies note they already endure visa denials by consular officers who, with little background knowledge, decide that a company should only have a limited number of people who possess “specialized knowledge” – even though there is nothing in the law or regulation about a numerical limit within a company on employees with specialized knowledge of a company’s “product, service, research, equipment, techniques, management, or . . . expertise in the organization’s processes and procedures.”

Regulating on L-1 wages may place USCIS in legal difficulties. “As a practical matter, most employers already pay their L-1 workers at high rates of pay,” said Kevin Miner, a partner at the Fragomen law firm, in an interview. “We will want to see what specific regulatory proposals are made regarding wage rates for L-1 workers, since Congress specifically did not impose prevailing wage requirements in the L-1 statute. Adding requirements that Congress has not put into the statute would be an overreach by the agency and would call into question the legal viability of the new regulations.”

International Students, OPT and Unlawful Presence: New enrollment of international students at U.S. universities declined by more than 10% between the 2015-16 and 2018-2019 academic years – and new Trump administration regulations are likely to further discourage international students from coming to America.

The ability to gain practical work experience following a course of studies attracts many international students to the United States. Many competitors for talent and students, such as Canada and Australia, already make it easier than the United States for international students to work after graduation.

The administration continues to target Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows international students to work for 12 months after graduation and 24 additional months in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. A summary of a rule proposal on the agenda states: “ICE [Immigration and Custom Enforcement] will amend existing regulations and revise the practical training options available to nonimmigrant students on F and M visas.” (August 2020 is the target date for a proposed rule.)

Ironically, Trump administration officials from the State Department recently praised Optional Practical Training. “OPT is one of our greatest strengths,” said Caroline Casagrande, a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of State, during a November 18, 2019, press event on international students. “And we know that students value the practical experience that they gain here in the United States and it is one of our most helpful recruitment tools as a reason that a student chooses to study in the United States.”

A 2019 National Foundation for American Policy study by economist Madeline Zavodny concluded, “There is no evidence that foreign students participating in the OPT program reduce job opportunities for U.S. workers.”

In 2018, USCIS issued policy memos that could cause many international students who unknowingly violate their immigration status to be barred from the United States for 10 years. On May 3, 2019, a U.S. District Court issued an injunction blocking the two policy memos following a lawsuit (Guilford College) filed by universities.

USCIS placed on the regulatory agenda plans for a proposed rule (with a September 2020 prospective date) called “Enhancing the Integrity of the Unlawful Presence Inadmissibility Provisions.”

“The recent announcement in the regulatory agenda regarding unlawful presence is likely a response to the Guilford College litigation,” Paul Hughes, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery and the lead attorney in the case, told me. “In Guilford College, the court issued a nationwide injunction blocking USCIS from applying this memo, both because it did not undertake the notice-and-comment rulemaking required by the Administrative Procedure Act, and because it was at odds with the statutory text. It appears that the administration is now trying to use rulemaking in an apparent effort to cure the procedural errors they made the first time.”

The Department of Homeland Security regulatory agenda contains at least two other measures of interest to the education community and international students. An item on the agenda (with a June 2020 target date for a proposed rule) states: “ICE proposes to vet all designated school officials (DSOs) and responsible officers (ROs), who ensure that ICE has access to accurate data on covered individuals via the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).”

An item that remains on the regulatory agenda – with a February 2020 target date for publishing a proposed rule – would establish a “maximum period of authorized stay for students.” Currently, international students are admitted for the “duration of status” until they complete their studies. Universities warn changing to a maximum period of stay is likely to carry negative consequences for students.

EB-5: USCIS has proposed and finalized (November 21, 2019) a rule governing EB-5 (employment-based fifth preference) “immigrant investor classification and associated regional centers” that made significant changes to the category, including substantially raising the minimum investment amount for a foreign investor. The administration appears interested in further restricting the category with two items placed on the agenda. One would make regulatory changes to the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Regional Center Program, including how they file, and their designation, termination and continued participation. The other rule would “increase monitoring and oversight of the EB-5 program as well as encourage investment in rural areas.”

Family Sponsorship: After failing to convince Congress to reduce or eliminate most family-sponsored immigration, the Trump administration put forward two measures that could significantly reduce legal immigration to the United States: 1) an October 4, 2019, presidential proclamation (blocked at least temporarily by a court) would bar new immigrants from entering the United States without health insurance and 2) a rule on Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds – finalized on August 14, 2019, but blocked by an injunction.

A proposed rule on “Enhancing the Integrity of the Affidavit of Support” shows the administration wants to restrict and discourage Americans from sponsoring family members. “DHS intends to update regulations at 8 CFR 213a by aligning the requirements with the statutory provisions and amending sponsorship requirements to better ensure a sponsor has the assets and resources to support the intended immigrant at the statutorily required level,” according to a summary. “DHS further intends to update the provisions to allow the public benefit granting agencies to more easily obtain information from USCIS in order to seek reimbursement from a sponsor when the sponsored immigrant has received public benefits.”

Asylum: Many items on the regulatory agenda aim to restrict asylum, which has already seen wholesale changes in procedures in the past three years. All of the proposed rules are designed to make it more difficult for individuals to avail themselves of the U.S. asylum system.

In one measure, “The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security propose to amend their respective regulations governing the bars to asylum eligibility. The Departments also propose to remove their respective regulations governing the automatic reconsideration of discretionary denials of asylum applications.” In another proposed rule, DOJ and DHS would “amend regulations governing the standards and procedures for making credible fear determinations or reasonable fear determinations for aliens who are subject to expedited removal, but who want to seek asylum or express a fear of persecution or torture.” Others would affect asylum interviews, work authorization and procedures.

Other Rules on the Agenda: The administration proposes to continue with its announced fee increases for immigration benefits, make changes that could affect adjustment of status and limit a future administration’s use of parole and employment authorization. “Removal of International Entrepreneur Parole Program” is listed on the agenda with a “final action” date of December 2019.

The Trump administration’s regulatory agenda on immigration is ambitious and far-reaching. It’s an attempt to lock into place changes to immigration policy that cannot be easily undone, regardless of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. There is one glaring omission from the Trump administration’s regulatory agenda – any measure to make it easier for foreign-born individuals to work, study or live in the United States.

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With “Moscow Mitch” and the GOP making sure that Congress can’t do its job and the Supremes and much of the Federal Judiciary apparently in his pocket, Trump’s plans for a White Nationalist Fascist State are on a roll. As Stuart points out, once the damage is done to our nation, it’s likely to take a long time to repair, regardless of when Trump finally leaves office.

Who would have thought that institutions and values developed painstakingly over centuries would be so easily thrust aside by a lawless authoritarian and his gang.

PWS

11-22-19

HISPANICS HELPED RESCUE AMERICA’S CITIES: Their Reward: Donald Trump & His White Nationalist Mafia!

A.K. Sandoval-Strausz
Director of Latinx Studies
Penn State

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/08/how-latinos-saved-american-cities/?arc404=true

How Latinos saved American cities

After whites fled and before the ‘creative class’ moved in, immigrants kept urban neighborhoods alive.

A.K. Sandoval-Strausz

November 8, 2019

Chicago’s South Lawndale was just like countless other neighborhoods that bottomed out during the urban crisis of the mid-20th century. Settled after the fire of 1871 and built up in the early 1900s, it had prospered as an industrial district offering steady factory work and affordable housing to immigrants from Germany, Poland and Bohemia. But by the 1960s, its white residents were leaving en masse, moving to the suburbs for newer housing and to avoid sharing the neighborhood with black families who were moving in. The writer Stuart Dybek remembered South Lawndale in those years as a place where people “walked past block-length gutted factories [and] . . . half-boarded storefronts of groceries that had shut down when they were kids, dusty cans still stacked on the shelves.”

But some locals saw a solution to the neighborhood’s decline. Among them was Richard Dolejs, a real estate agent and community leader. Instead of moving out, he recalls, “we said: ‘Well, what about the Mexican community? We should apply to that group and try to bring ’em in.’ ” In the early ’60s, he persuaded lenders to write mortgages for the newcomers and hired Spanish-speaking staff to help them with the paperwork. This was not just altruism: Dolejs’s neighbors wanted to sell or rent their houses to somebody, and since a nearby barrio was being destroyed in the name of “urban renewal,” Hispanic Chicagoans needed somewhere new to live.

They found it.

Depopulation, job loss, fiscal distress and soaring crime in America’s cities were among the nation’s most intractable problems from the 1950s to the early 1990s. When that crisis abated, many experts credited the recovery largely to the “creative class,” urban professionals and other people with money. But it owed more to Latino immigrant families who had begun to revitalize inner-city neighborhoods decades earlier, laying essential foundations for the well-heeled to return. As Latin American migrants are today demonized and scapegoated, their indispensable role in solving one of the greatest crises of the 20th century shouldn’t be overlooked.

[Trump has spread more hatred of immigrants than any American in history]

Like South Lawndale, many other city neighborhoods deteriorated steadily during the urban crisis. Dallas’s Oak Cliff area had thrived starting in the 1940s thanks to military spending on a nearby aircraft and missile factory. The prospect of racial integration, however, led a few whites to launch racist attacks and many more to flee to homogeneous neighborhoods in north Dallas or the suburbs. Oak Cliff’s Mexican American population grew beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, when Dallas officials ran new highways through another area, disrupting the city’s main barrio and displacing its residents; they were joined by Mexican immigrants beginning in the 1970s.

Latino migrants saved neighborhoods like these from the abandonment and decay that afflicted so much of urban America. While virtually every other demographic group in most cities shrunk, Latin American newcomers replenished neighborhoods. In 1960, my research in census data found that South Lawndale and Oak Cliff were each about 1 to 2 percent Hispanic; four decades later, 91 percent of South Lawndale’s 81,000 residents and 76 percent of Oak Cliff’s 116,000 denizens were Latinos. They were a community lifeline at a time when many landlords, unable to sell or rent their properties but still responsible for mortgages and taxes, hired “torches” to burn them down so they could collect insurance money. Between 1950 and 1980, the North Lawndale neighborhood lost a shocking 10,000 housing units, nearly a third of its previous total. But in adjacent South Lawndale, the number of dwellings held steady as Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants became homeowners.

This was a nationwide phenomenon. New York City lost 820,000 residents between 1950 and 1980, and it would have shrunk more if not for gains of over 1 million new Latinos after 1980. Boston lost 238,000 residents in those decades but gained 100,000 new Latinos since 1980. Cities like Milwaukee and Philadelphia also depended on arriving Latinos — about 85,000 in Milwaukee and 160,000 in Philadelphia — to help stabilize their populations. The clearest example was Chicago, which shed more than 600,000 residents between 1950 and 1980. Nearly 370,000 new Hispanic residents after 1980 saved the Windy City, which is now 29 percent Latino, from losing population as quickly as urban-crisis bellwethers like Detroit and Cleveland.

[Family-based immigration has ‘merit,’ too]

Three decades of population decline in most urban areas nationwide gave way to a new era, beginning around 1980, when more than two-thirds of the 25 biggest cities gained residents. Much of this increase owed to Latinos. In most big cities, Hispanic populations expanded in the 1970s and reached peak growth rates by the 1990s; meanwhile, the non-Hispanic white populations shrank continuously, with the predominantly white “creative class” stabilizing this demographic only in the past 20 years. As a result, of those 25 biggest cities, 12 have populations that are more than one-quarter Hispanic, including eight that are more than one-third Hispanic and two, San Antonio and El Paso, that are majority Latino. By the same token, research on more than 3,000 U.S. counties and 150 big cities has demonstrated that Latinos were the largest immigrant group contributing to economic growth, as an influx of immigrants generated jobs and propelled revitalization through the housing sector.

This is not just a question of numbers. It is difficult to imagine how many neighborhoods — from the North Corona section of Queens to Detroit’s Mexicantown to Minneapolis’s Lake Street to everything west of Interstate 25 in Denver — could have sustained themselves without the arrival of 25 million new Latino urbanites over the past half-century. Equally important, however, are the ways these migrants imported everyday customs from Latin America and adapted them for their new homes.

The most significant of these habits was a preference for walking over driving. In countries such as Mexico, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, few people owned cars, especially in the rural areas from which most immigrants came. This made the newcomers the ideal inheritors of the American urban core, a landscape created before the automobile. While Anglo Americans were leaving in droves for car-dependent suburbia, Latinos repopulated neighborhoods built around pedestrians and public transportation.

This in turn revitalized the inner-city commercial landscape. Urban small businesses had been declining for decades, pressured since the mid-1950s by suburban malls and since the 1970s by predatory big-box retailers. But new Latino residents energized neighborhood commerce. They shopped locally, at stores they could walk to, where shopkeepers spoke Spanish. Businesses like these enjoyed a protected market with a growing clientele: The Kauffman Index, which measures entrepreneurial activity, showed that in almost every year from 1996 through 2018, Latinos were more likely than any other demographic group to open their own businesses.

They also brought life back to city streets. While two generations of American thinkers fretted over the loss of public life, from Richard Sennett’s “The Fall of Public Man” in 1977 to Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” in 2000, Latino neighborhoods experienced a revival of streetside socializing. Once-empty sidewalks, play areas and parks echoed with the sounds of música norteña, salsa and cumbia and the cheers of spectators at neighborhood soccer leagues — and eventually, Anglo Americans learned to shout “¡Goooooooool!” when a team scored.

In Oak Cliff, Latino immigrants helped reverse two decades of falling property values, and by the 1980s, local homes were appreciating faster than in Dallas as a whole. As the city’s share of Latinos jumped from the 1990s into the 2010s, Dallas’s crime rate began a decline that saw homicides drop by 69 percent between 1991 and 2018. Similarly, in South Lawndale, home values more than doubled between 1990 and 2000, and by 2018 the number of homicides citywide had dropped by 40 percent from its peak in 1991. Neighborhood business activity soared; soon journalists, business groups, social scientists and public officials were lauding South Lawndale — now known as Little Village — as an example of a new and revitalized Chicago. Like other barrios, it still had problems with poverty, underfunded schools and delinquent youth, but things had improved dramatically.

Leaders of cities nationwide soon recognized the positive effects of immigration. They organized to welcome newcomers, especially after the 2010 Census showed how many urban areas depended on immigrants to sustain their populations and workforces. Detroit, for example, launched a development initiative called Global Detroit, observing that “immigration has proven, by far, to be the best American strategy to combat population loss.” A few years later, Detroit’s leaders joined with municipal officials from across the industrial heartland to establish the Welcoming Economies Global Network — its motto is “Leading Rust Belt Immigrant Innovation” — with more than two dozen affiliates.

Latin American immigrants have filled essential roles in metropolitan economies, making up a large proportion of home builders, child-care workers, building maintenance staff, and restaurant cooks, servers and busboys. Sociologists and economists have shown that the urban professionals cities covet today need child care and other household help, and that they are attracted to cities by cafes, clubs and restaurants. Without the hands that have built and renovated homes, looked after children, kept office buildings running, and prepared meals, white-collar families wouldn’t live in urban America.

[Yes, you can gentrify a neighborhood without pushing out poor people]

These urban professionals increasingly require not just Latino labor but Latino space, as they seek out neighborhoods with “character” and “authenticity.” In numerous barrios — from San Francisco’s Mission District to Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights to New York’s Washington Heights — urban professionals have paid barrios their highest compliment by gentrifying them. A few years ago, Chicago immigrant José Luis Arroyo recalled a young white man who walked up and asked to purchase his house, saying he had lived there before his family moved away. “These Americans left because they thought we were going to destroy their neighborhood,” Arroyo told researchers for the Chicago Mexican Migrant Oral History Project. “These young peoples’ parents got scared and moved away, and they took their children with them. And then these children grew up and became professionals and came to visit the barrio. And now they want to move back!”

The revitalizing influence of Latinos and other immigrants now extends far beyond cities. Many of the pathologies of the urban crisis are today afflicting rural America, where a lack of economic opportunity and a catastrophic opioid epidemic have emptied out small towns and left vast numbers of workers disabled. Once again, Latin American newcomers have led the way in addressing the rural crisis by providing much-needed labor on Pennsylvania farms, in Iowa meatpacking plants and at Wyoming nature resorts and repopulating the surrounding small towns. Of the nearly 2,300 rural counties in the United States, 94 percent saw increases in Hispanic residents between 1990 and 2000, and from 2000 to 2010, Latinos made up 58 percent of all population growth in nonmetropolitan counties.

A nation of immigrants is what we have been, and it is what we shall remain. The newest Americans trust us to be the nation we said we were for all those years: a city upon a hill, the North Star, the last best hope of Earth, Mother of Exiles. Perhaps they can help us recognize ourselves; for they are just the latest in a proud lineage of migrants seeking their promised land.

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

Trump’s racist White Nationalism basically targets all who “differ” from his absurd “nativist vision” of America and his disdain for truth and values.

PWS

11-11-19

“JUDICIAL” FARCE: In 1983, The Reagan Administration Created EOIR To Enhance Judicial Independence – Hon. Ashley Tabaddor Tells Us How The Trump Administration & Billy Barr Are Rewriting That History To Weaponize EOIR As The Servant Of DHS Enforcement!

Hon. A. Ashlley Tabaddor — Hon. A. Ashley Tabaddor
President, National
Association of Immigration Judges (“NAIJ”)

Dear Colleagues,

As you may be aware, on August 26, 2019, the Agency announced drastic organizational changes to EOIR, via interim regulations effective immediately. Among a number of troubling changes, the Agency collapsed the role of the Director with that of the Chairperson of the Board. Attached please find NAIJ’s comment, filed on October 25, 2019, in response to this interim rule. You may also visit the following link to see other comments by additional organizations in response to the EOIR’s interim rule.

https://www.regulations.gov

I personally would like to take this opportunity to thank Judge Khan and Judge Marks for leading the laborious effort in finalizing this Comment for publication.

Additionally as we have just concluded our rating period, IJs should be receiving their formal performance evaluations. Please contact us with any questions or concerns if you believe (or have been notified) that you will receive a rating of less than Satisfactory on all of your PWP elements.

Many IJs have inquired about ways that they may register their protest against the imposition of the quotas and deadlines. If you are inclined, you may use the proposed language below in your cover email returning the electronically signed PWP to your ACIJ.

● Protest Language – “I do not agree that the numerical metrics/quotas constitute an accurate measure of my performance. Nor do I agree that the numbers produced by EOIR are accurate within the designated metric categories.”

As always, we welcome any questions, comments and concerns. Hope you have a great weekend,
Ashley Tabaddor
President, NAIJ

Here’s the complete NAIJ comment:

NAIJ Comment re Organization of EOIR 84 Fed.Reg. 44537 , RIN 1125-AA85- Final

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

Outrageous!

One of the “under the radar” aspects of this “deconstruction of justice in America” is the arrogant confidence of Sessions, Barr, and their minions at DOJ and EOIR that Congress and the Article III Courts will turn a “blind eye” to their blatantly “in your face” unconstitutional behavior. So far, they have been right.

Article III Courts have recognized the Immigration Judges’ “duty to remain neutral and impartial when they conduct immigration hearings.” See, e.g., Wang v. Att’y Gen., 423 F.3d 260, 267–68 (3d Cir. 2005). Yet, they have basically ignored their own rules and pronouncements by continuing to approve decisions from a “fake” court system. One where the “judges” are selected, supervised, and can be removed by the “Chief Prosecutor” and are told that they owe their first duty of obedience to that prosecutor rather than to the Constitution or the rule of law that they are sworn to uphold. Even when they do rule in favor of the individual, the prosecutor can and does simply reach in, change the result, and then designate his prosecutorial decision as a “precedent.”

What kind of “Due Process” and “fundamental fairness” is that? What Article III Judge would submit him or herself to such a parody of “justice?”

EOIR as “redesigned, politicized, and weaponized” against migrants and their courageous representatives by the Trump DOJ mocks the stated criteria and standards of the Article IIIs. Why are the Article IIIs afraid to follow up their legal rhetoric with the actions that logically should flow from it?

Under Trump, the Attorney General and his toadies have disingenuously disparaged the motives and character of the individuals coming before the “courts” and their attorneys. Many are actually forced to appear “unrepresented” and have no idea what is happening and the intentionally arcane, hyper technical, and confusing “rules” being applied to extinguish their rights and claims.

DOJ officials have also demeaned, disparaged, and denigrated the work ethic and character of their own “judges” with limitations on their authority, “Mickey Mouse” quotas and timeframes, and giving away judicial authority to non-judicial officials at EOIR, as Judge Tabaddor cogently points out.

Article III Courts compound that error when they improperly “defer” to Executive Branch adjudicators who are neither “fair and impartial” nor in many cases “expert.” The whole system is intentionally put under pressure to “produce and deport,” with scholarship, independent judicial decision making, and Due Process being shoved to the “back of the bus.”

By accepting contemptuous unlawful actions from Barr and the DOJ, the Article III Judiciary basically diminishes itself and demeans its Constitutional role. Perhaps that doesn’t make any difference to most of them; life tenure guarantees that they get paid every day just for waking up regardless of what they do afterwards. But, as Congress is finding out, once you establish yourselves as feckless in the face of a tyrannical and overbearing Executive, respect and proper Constitutional roles might prove difficult or impossible to regain.

Since the NAIJ leadership seem to be the only ones courageous enough to speak out against the travesty occurring in the Immigration Courts, no wonder the DOJ is trying to illegally disband the NAIJ. I wonder why these very overt actions to suppress the First Amendment and subvert the Fifth Amendment are going “over the heads” of the Article III Judiciary. What’s the purpose of an “independent judiciary” that is afraid or unwilling to stand up for judicial independence when it matters most!

As the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

I think he would be totally disgusted with the overall performance of the Article III Appellate Judiciary in failing to stand up for and protect the legal rights and very lives of the most vulnerable among us: migrants, including asylum seekers.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a proud retired member of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

PWS
11-03-19

MICHELLE HACKMAN @ WSJ: Immigration Judges’ Union Fights Back Against DOJ’s Heavy-Handed Attempt To Quash It! – Like The “Whistleblower,” The NAIJ Has Been Outspoken In Exposing Bias, Denial Of Due Process, & Improper Politization Of U.S. Immigration Courts By Corrupt DOJ!

https://apple.news/APq7A4ihtTZ280UVWJnfkNg

From the WSJ:

By Michelle Hackman

September 27, 2019, 10:00 a.m. EDT

WASHINGTON—The union representing the nation’s more than 400 immigration judges filed a labor complaint against the Justice Department, escalating an already tense situation between the Trump administration and the judges carrying out its immigration policy.

The judges—who unlike most other jurists work for the Justice Department—based their complaint on two recent incidents.

The most recent occurred in late August, when the Executive Office of immigration Review, which oversees the judges, included a link to a blog post on a white nationalist website in its daily news briefing emailed to all employees. The blog post in question described immigration judges using several racial and ethnic slurs, angering judges around the country and prompting a formal letter to the office’s director.

The other incident came in April, when the union sought clarification from the Justice Department on whether the judges’ positions made them regular employees or managers in the course of contract negotiations. The Justice Department didn’t respond to the query but later filed a petition with the Federal Labor Relations Authority to decertify the union, on the basis it considered the judges managers.

The union’s complaint was filed with the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and could slow the Justice Department’s attempts to disband the union.

The judges’ union, known formally at the National Association of Immigration Judges, allows its leadership to fill a unique role as government employees empowered to criticize their employer and, by extension, the administration’s immigration policies.

The union has been outspoken about the government’s efforts to exert increasing political control over the nation’s immigration court system, narrowing the judges’ discretion around who can qualify for asylum.

Attorney General William Barr, for example, overruled the Board of Immigration Appeals in deciding people with family ties to gang targets or others with domestic violence claims couldn’t qualify for asylum. More recently, the administration has been temporarily allowed to enforce a rule disqualifying anyone for asylum if they traveled through a third country en route to the U.S. The rule faces further court challenges.

In its effort to move more quickly through a backlog of pending cases that has grown to more than one million, the Justice Department has also placed new quota requirements on the judges. It has pressed individual judges to move through cases faster, giving judges a one-year deadline to decide each case and setting a 700-case annual quota. Only about a third of judges are on track to meet that goal, according to A. Ashley Tabaddor, the union’s president.

The administration has also begun shifting cases to judges known to work quickly, sometimes handing cases to courts located far from where an immigrant is living. More recently, it has also begun diverting some judges from their normal duties to hear cases of the government’s “remain in Mexico” program, under which migrants who have claimed asylum must wait in Mexican cities while their cases make their way through the courts.

The government has set up makeshift tent courts at ports of entry to process these cases more quickly, and judges have been hearing cases using a videoconferencing tool. These courts, unlike most others in the country, aren’t open to the public or to journalists.

The union rebuked the tent courts’ closed conditions as “another glaring reason why the immigration courts have been deprived of key characteristics of what it means to be a court in the United States.”

The union has also argued that immigration courts should be given judicial independence, rather than answering to the Justice Department’s political leadership.

Write to Michelle Hackman at Michelle.Hackman@wsj.com

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

Thanks, Michelle, for bringing into the national spotlight this important story about the DOJ’s improper influence over the U.S. Immigration Courts and their outrageous attempts to suppress and punish truth and dissent.

We need an independent Article I U.S. Immigration court enacted by Congress. Until that happens, vulnerable individuals will continue to have their most important rights denied by this unconstitutional parody of a fair and impartial court system. In the meantime, the Article III Courts continue to ignore the glaring constitutional defects that must be addressed before approving any more defective “removal orders” and denials of asylum and other relief emanating from these fatally defective “captive courts” that have been “redesigned” to function as part of the DHS enforcement apparatus.

PWS

09-27-19

BILL McKIBBEN @ TIME: Imagine A World Not Led By Trump & His Fellow GOP Climate Change Deniers! — Humanity Would Have At Least A “Fighting Chance” For Survival!

https://time.com/5669022/climate-change-2050/

BY BILL MCKIBBEN SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

IDEAS

McKibben is the author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? and a co-founder of 350.org

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’ve reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice.

There was a point after 2020 when we began to collectively realize a few basic things.

One, we weren’t getting out of this unscathed. Climate change, even in its early stages, had begun to hurt: watching a California city literally called Paradise turn into hell inside of two hours made it clear that all Americans were at risk. When you breathe wildfire smoke half the summer in your Silicon Valley fortress, or struggle to find insurance for your Florida beach house, doubt creeps in even for those who imagined they were immune.

Two, there were actually some solutions. By 2020, renewable energy was the cheapest way to generate electricity around the planet—in fact, the cheapest way there ever had been. The engineers had done their job, taking sun and wind from quirky backyard DIY projects to cutting-edge technology. Batteries had plummeted down the same cost curve as renewable energy, so the fact that the sun went down at night no longer mattered quite so much—you could store its rays to use later.

And the third realization? People began to understand that the biggest reason we weren’t making full, fast use of these new technologies was the political power of the fossil-fuel industry. Investigative journalists had exposed its three-decade campaign of denial and disinformation, and attorneys general and plaintiffs’ lawyers were beginning to pick them apart. And just in time.

These trends first intersected powerfully on Election Day in 2020. The Halloween hurricane that crashed into the Gulf didn’t just take hundreds of lives and thousands of homes; it revealed a political seam that had begun to show up in polling data a year or two before. Of all the issues that made suburban Americans—women especially—uneasy about President Trump, his stance on climate change was near the top. What had seemed a modest lead for the Democratic challenger widened during the last week of the campaign as damage reports from Louisiana and Mississippi rolled in; on election night it turned into a rout, and the analysts insisted that an underappreciated “green vote” had played a vital part—after all, actual green parties in Canada, the U.K. and much of continental Europe were also outperforming expectations. Young voters were turning out in record numbers: the Greta Generation, as punsters were calling them, made climate change their No. 1 issue.

And when the new President took the oath of office, she didn’t disappoint. In her Inaugural Address, she pledged to immediately put America back in the Paris Agreement—but then she added, “We know by now that Paris is nowhere near enough. Even if all the countries followed all the promises made in that accord, the temperature would still rise more than 3°C (5°F or 6°F). If we let the planet warm that much, we won’t be able to have civilizations like the ones we’re used to. So we’re going to make the change we need to make, and we’re going to make them fast.”

Fast, of course, is a word that doesn’t really apply to Capitol Hill or most of the world’s other Congresses, Parliaments and Central Committees. It took constant demonstrations from ever larger groups like Extinction Rebellion, and led by young activists especially from the communities suffering the most, to ensure that politicians feared an angry electorate more than an angry carbon lobby. But America, which historically had poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation, did cease blocking progress. With the filibuster removed, the Senate passed—by the narrowest of margins—one bill after another to end subsidies for coal and gas and oil companies, began to tax the carbon they produced, and acted on the basic principles of the Green New Deal: funding the rapid deployment of solar panels and wind turbines, guaranteeing federal jobs for anyone who wanted that work, and putting an end to drilling and mining on federal lands.

Since those public lands trailed only China, the U.S., India and Russia as a source of carbon, that was a big deal. Its biggest impact was on Wall Street, where investors began to treat fossil-fuel stocks with increasing disdain. When BlackRock, the biggest money manager in the world, cleaned its basic passive index fund of coal, oil and gas stocks, the companies were essentially rendered off-limits to normal investors. As protesters began cutting up their Chase bank cards, the biggest lender to the fossil-fuel industry suddenly decided green investments made more sense. Even the staid insurance industry began refusing to underwrite new oil and gas pipelines—and shorn of its easy access to capital, the industry was also shorn of much of its political influence. Every quarter meant fewer voters who mined coal and more who installed solar panels, and that made political change even easier.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of McKibben’s essay at the link.

The 2020 election might be America’s and the world’s last, best chance for salvation from Trump and his anti-science, climate denying GOP cabal that is bent on destroying our air, water, resources, and health.

PWS

09-13-19

HON JEFFREY S. CHASE ON DOJ’S SCURRILOUS & FRIVOLOUS ATTACK ON THE NAIJ!

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2019/8/22/dojs-latest-effort-to-undermine-impartial-immigration-bench

. . . .

The NAIJ has been particularly effective at arguing how such actions support the need for an independent Article I immigration court, outside of the control of the executive branch. The idea has been endorsed by numerous law groups, including the American Bar Association and the Federal Bar Association, and is now a common talking point among members of Congress. The move to decertify the NAIJ is clearly an effort to end such efforts.

A statement issued by Reps. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., chairs of the House Judiciary Committee and its Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, recognized the decertification petition as “blatant retaliation for this opposition and an obvious attempt to shield immigration court operations from public view.”

The congressional leaders continued that “the Administration’s attempt to silence immigration judges by engaging in frivolous union busting tactics underscores why we need an immigration court system that is separate and independent from the Executive Branch. In the coming months, the Judiciary Committee will hold hearings to explore the current state of the U.S. immigration court system and develop a foundation for legislation to create an independent immigration court.”

. . . .

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

Go on over to Jeff’s blog a the link to read the complete article, which originally appeared on Law360.

Under Trump, the Department of “Justice” clearly has become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Under a future honest Administration, the DOJ is in need of a complete housecleaning and reorganization. We need some legislative safeguards to insure that the DOJ promotes, rather than undermines, the “rule of law.”

Of course, the problem starts — but doesn’t end — with corrupt leadership from folks like Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions and Bill “Trump’s Toady” Barr. But, it also takes some “go along to get along” amoral so-called “career bureaucrats” at DOJ to carry out these invidious policies.

Obviously, the need for an independent Article I U.S. Immigration court becomes more clear and pressing every day that the current farce operating within the DOJ is allowed to continue!

PWS

09-10-11

LABOR DAY @ WASHPOST: The Toxic Hypocrisy Of Trump & The Restrictionists On The Labor Issue!

LABOR DAY @ WASHPOST: The Toxic Hypocrisy Of Tru.mp & The Restrictionists On The Labor Issue!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/these-days-our-debate-over-labor-is-awash-in-hypocrisy/2019/09/01/d57e735c-c9a4-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html

By Editorial Board

September 1 at 5:47 PM

A CYNIC, says a character in one of Oscar Wilde’s novels, is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If that’s true, then the debate over the state of labor in the United States these days is awash in cynicism — or maybe it could just be called plain old hypocrisy. And in truth, it’s not so much a debate as a shouting match, largely over the inflamed issue of immigration.

Most of the noise comes from restrictionists, encouraged and shamelessly egged on, for the first time in memory, by a president of the United States. Such people recite figures they have assembled regarding the costs of immigration: its effects on wages, government spending and, of course, our “culture,” which some might take as a cover word for race or ethnicity or religion. But a lot of these compilations are questionable, both in their origins and their conclusions.

And beyond that, there is a great contradiction in such reasoning: It fails to take account of the work immigrants do in this country — the fruits of their labor, which are shared by the entire society. The skylines of metropolitan areas such as ours have been transformed over the past quarter-century by new construction, with immigrants providing a considerable share of the labor. Many of our hospitals, clinics, day-care centers, hotels, homes for the elderly and other institutions could not exist without immigrant employees, who made up about 17 percent of this country’s workforce in 2018, according to a government report.

A quarter of immigrants, in turn, are thought to be unauthorized. Although they are regularly slandered — by the president, among others — as a source of crime and as living off the dole, they are, for the most part, as law-abiding as the general population and are eligible for few government benefits. Not many people with personal knowledge of the matter would question their work ethic. Their labors in farm and field help feed the country; replacing them there would be a daunting task. They serve in some of the most demanding and often unpleasant jobs in our society: slaughtering animals, working long hours outdoors in punishing heat and cold, caring for the elderly, sick and mentally ill, cleaning four or five homes a day.

Strangely enough, this sort of thing is rarely discussed in any serious way on the cable outlets and social media. There is much in the way of insult and calumny toward impoverished immigrants (they “make our country poorer and dirtier,” said one popular TV opinionizer) but little constructive thought on how this country, with a static and aging native population and a tightening labor market, can continue to prosper without a reasonable amount of immigration.

Although unauthorized immigrants are routinely demonized by some in Congress and the media, there is a sizable part of the country, perhaps a majority, that does not consider their presence here to be criminal, that in fact sympathizes with them. There aren’t many other kinds of lawbreakers of whom that can be said. The recent immigration raid on agricultural processing plants in Mississippi, in which nearly 700 workers were rounded up, brought forth a wave of help and support for the workers and their families from people around the country, including churches and neighbors in Mississippi.

Practical and intelligent proposals are being made for dealing with the problems of immigration and work. But nothing can be done unless more of this country pays attention to the realities in working America in the coming election year and not to the dark maundering of demagogic doomsayers.

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

Yup.

Largely what I’ve been saying all along on “Courtside.” The solution to the largely manufactured “immigration crisis” is staring us in the face.

Legalize those already in the labor force, so that they can be fully protected from exploitation by minimum wage, wage and hour, and OSHA laws, and reach their full economic potential in our society (which would also maximize tax revenues and Social Security contributions).

Then, provide many more legal immigration opportunities for workers and families, both permanent and temporary, to keep America great and prevent us from suffering the type of economic stagnation that has hit Japan and other “low immigration” countries.

The main things standing in the way of such rational and practical solutions are Trump and the hard core GOP restrictionists who prop him up.

Sadly, it also appears that some, not all, within the massive DHS bureaucracy have become invested in cruel and futile immigration enforcement which requires endless taxpayer money and bodies to maintain its cycle of inevitable, yet sometimes politically advantageous, “enforcement-only” failures.

PWS

09-02-19

LABOR DAY TRIBUTE: Carlos Lozada’s “Review of ‘A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century’ by Jason DeParle”

Carols Lozada — Carlos Lozada
Journalist

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/30/many-immigrants-family-separation-happens-long-before-border/

There is a family separation that occurs long before an immigrant reaches America’s borders. It is no less wrenching than the ruptures that the Trump administration inflicted on thousands of children and parents last year as part of its “zero tolerance” policy against illegal entry, and may at times be even more painful, since it happens voluntarily. That is, if acts born of despair can ever be described as entirely voluntary.

In “A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves,” journalist Jason DeParle’s riveting multigenerational tale of one Filipino family dispersing across the globe, from Manila to Abu Dhabi to Galveston, Tex., and so many places in between, separation is a constant worry and endless toll. Parents leave their kids and country for years at a time so they can send back wages many multiples of what they previously earned. Children yearn for their parents, rebelling or wilting without them, while the youngest latch on to aunts and grandparents. Births, birthdays, weddings, illnesses, funerals — daily life slips by for the absent, imagined and unexperienced. Meanwhile, the government encourages the exodus; 1 in 7 laborers in the Philippines becomes an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW), a status so common it rates not just an acronym but also an industry of private middlemen and government agencies managing a sector that accounts for one-10th of the country’s economy.

But the price is loneliness and longing. “The two main themes of Overseas Filipino Worker life are homesickness and money,” DeParle writes. “Workers suffer the first to get the second.” With immigration a central battleground in the Trump-era culture wars, and with the southern U.S. border and Hispanic influx dominating the political debate, this book provides crucial insight into the global scope, shifting profiles and, above all, individual sacrifices of the migrant experience.

DeParle, a New York Times reporter, tells the story of Emet, Tita and their daughter Rosalie, as well as their other children and grandchildren — a Manila family he first encountered and lived with for several months in the late 1980s. As a young reporter, DeParle wanted to better understand poverty, but in the Philippines, that meant learning about migration instead. The title of his book is also the Portagana family’s unofficial creed, a pained mix of self-affirmation and abnegation.

Emet cleaned pools in a government complex in the Philippines, earning $50 a month, barely enough to scrape by with his family in their Manila shantytown. When he has the chance to clean pools in Saudi Arabia for $500 per month, he takes it, while his wife of 14 years and their five children stay behind. “Ever since his orphaned childhood, all he had wanted was a family, but to support one, he had to leave it.” Tita cries when Emet departs, left to fend for herself and the family, rising at 4:30 a.m. to boil the breakfast rice, washing the school clothes every day, making every tough decision — does she pay for a doctor’s visit or for more food? — on her own.

When Emet first sends money, she cries again. “Tita stopped running out of fish and rice,” DeParle recounts. “She bought extra school uniforms so she didn’t have to wash every day. . . . After years of toothaches, she had seven teeth pulled and treated herself to dentures. . . . But the ultimate luxury was the family’s first bed.” She told Deparle how “I was ecstatic we could lay on something soft.”

New comforts are part of “migrant lore,” DeParle writes. Some analysts worry that remittances lead to consumerist splurges, but families receiving migrant income also invest in housing, health care and education. Migration serves as a tool of economic development, DeParle suggests, because of migrants’ enduring loyalty to the family back home. Of the 11 siblings in Tita’s own family, nine worked abroad, as did all five of Tita and Emet’s children. When DeParle returned to the Philippines two decades after having lived in Tita’s home, he saw that the family’s old straw huts had morphed into a compound of a dozen houses for various relatives — and the quality of the amenities bore a direct relationship to how long each owner had worked abroad. But an aging Emet still pondered the price, nostalgic for the days in the slum. “I was happier then,” he acknowledges, “because I was with my children.”

[Who gets to dream? America’s immigration battles go beyond walls and borders.]

Rosalie, their middle child, emerges as the book’s itinerant protagonist, not simply because she becomes the clan’s essential breadwinner as a nurse in America but because, for DeParle, she embodies the new face of migration. “Since 2008, the United States has attracted more Asians than Latin Americans, and nearly half of the newcomers, like Rosalie, have college degrees. Every corner of America has an immigrant like her.” Long male-dominated, migration has been increasingly feminized, in part because of the demand for caregiving workers in rich countries, a need that women have disproportionately filled. “By the mid-1990s when Rosalie went abroad, nearly half the world’s migrants were women — more than half in the United States — and they increasingly went as breadwinners, not spouses.”

Rosalie was a quiet child and an average student who considered religious life in Manila — not necessarily someone you’d pick to make it through nursing school, move to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for several years, and take and retake English-language tests until, after 20 years of working, she could obtain a visa to the United States, take on a night shift in a Galveston hospital and embrace suburban life. She is separated from her own children, just as she suffered years without Emet. Her eldest daughter grows attached to Rosalie’s sister Rowena as a sort of surrogate mother, calling her “Mama Wena” and struggling with her aunt’s absence after reuniting with Rosalie in Texas.

Having long operated as a far-flung family, Rosalie, her husband, Chris, and their three kids must not only learn to live in America — they have to learn to live together. DeParle’s examination of how the two daughters adapt to U.S. elementary schools, seeking to become more all-American than the Americans, even as their parents find solace in Texas’s Filipino immigrant networks, is a minor classic of the assimilation experience. He also reflects on the impact of communications technology on migrant communities: “Can assimilation survive Skype?” DeParle wonders, seeing how it eases transitions by helping relatives stay in touch across time zones but also lengthens and deepens immigrants’ ties with the old country.

After all, even when you’ve left, you’re never entirely gone. Any health crisis among her extended family in the Philippines results in new bills for Rosalie to cover from afar. Chronically exhausted at the hospital — where Filipino nurses feel they get shorthanded shifts and sicker patients — she must also deal with the insecurities of her suddenly stay-at-home husband, whose masculine self-perception suffers in the face of his provider-wife. (“Would you be ashamed of Daddy if I worked as a janitor?” Chris asks the kids as he seeks a job in Galveston.) DeParle highlights this “inversion” of traditional gender roles in the modern migrant experience. For women, “migration elevated their incomes, raised their status, and increased their power within their marriages,” he writes. “But it also took many away from their children, often to care for the children of others, and elevated the risks of abuse.”

DeParle has a gift for distilling complexity into pithy formulations. “Migration is history’s ripple effect,” he writes, noting how U.S. colonialism led to the establishment of the Philippines’ first nursing schools, an industry that would propel Rosalie to America a century later. He also aptly captures the United States’ conflicted feelings about immigrants, a mix of resentment and need. “Unwelcomed is not the same as unwanted,” he explains simply. And the ominous U.S. Embassy in Manila, the repository of so much hope and so many fears for Filipino visa seekers, is “the gateway to opportunity, but marines guard the gate.” The book is packed with insights masked as throwaway lines — lines that convey so much.

So I wish DeParle had conveyed more about his own role in the story of this remarkable family. “Our relationship defies easy categorization; it’s part author-subject, part old friends,” he writes, likening himself to a big brother for Rosalie and uncle to her kids. “This was a journalistic endeavor but not an entirely arm’s-length one,” DeParle admits. “Occasionally my presence shaped events I was trying to record.” Some of these events were crucial. He gets Rosalie an English tutor for her exams. He spends hours on the phone helping Rosalie practice for her interview with the Galveston hospital. Most essential, he intervenes when bureaucratic scheduling nearly derails a final visa approval. “I was there as a journalist, not an advocate,” he writes. “But Rosalie had been waiting for twenty years.” So he helps by speaking with a U.S. Foreign Service officer. It is an entirely humane impulse, and DeParle stresses that the determination that got Rosalie to America “is hers alone.” But the author’s unexpected appearances complicate and at times confuse his narrative.

“A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves” has political implications without being an overtly political work. Yes, DeParle’s sympathies are clear. “Rosalie’s experience was a triple win: good for her, good for America, and good for her family in the Philippines,” he writes. “Migration was her vehicle of salvation. It delivered her from the living conditions of the nineteenth century. It respected her talent, rewarded her sweat, and enlarged her capacity for giving.” He also stresses how Filipino immigrants thrive in America, with more education, higher employment, and lower poverty and divorce rates than the native-born.

Yet he mainly calls for calm and compromise around the immigration debates. “Be wary of seeing the issue in absolutist terms,” DeParle warns. He worries that if immigration becomes entrenched as another American culture war, like those over guns or abortion rights, its supporters will have more to lose. The warning comes under a Trump administration that has defined itself through its offensive against migrants, not just rewriting policies but seeking to write immigration out of the American tradition. On this point, DeParle offers a devastating rebuttal in another simple line.

“It’s good,” he concludes, “for your country to be the place where people go to make dreams come true.”

Follow Carlos Lozada on Twitter and read his latest essays and book reviews, . . . .

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This story reminds me of the dramatic presentation about her own family’s immigrant experience delivered by my friend and co-teacher Professor Jennifer Esperanza of Beloit College during our recent Bjorklunden Seminar on American Immigration. I’ve posted it before, but here it is again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEODrtuj_Pk&t=323s

One of the points Jenn makes is how she channeled the challenges of her childhood into learning that led to a lifetime of success and high achievement.

PWS

09-02-19

HATE ON THE DOCKET: As Administration’s Attacks On Judicial Independence Mount, DOJ/EOIR Pelt Immigration Judges With White Nationalist Hate Group’s Racist, Anti-Semitic Propaganda! — Slurs Target Union Officials Leading The Resistance To DOJ’s Union-Busting Effort!

https://apple.news/AAsWdQ8tyR365PO0Me_6IZg

Hamed Aleaziz reports for BuzzFeed News:

The Justice Department Sent Immigration Judges A White Nationalist Blog Post With Anti-Semitic Attacks

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Attorney General William Barr

An email sent from the Justice Department to all immigration court employees this week included a link to an article posted on a white nationalist website that “ directly attacks sitting immigration judges with racial and ethnically tinged slurs,” according to a letter sent by an immigration judges union and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

According to the National Association of Immigration Judges, the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) sent court employees a link to a blog post from VDare, a white nationalist website, in its morning news briefing earlier this week that included anti-Semitic attacks on judges.

The briefings are sent to court employees every weekday and include links to various immigration news items. BuzzFeed News confirmed the link to a blog post was sent to immigration court employees Monday. The post detailed a recent move by the Justice Department to decertify the immigration judges union.

A letter Thursday from union chief Ashley Tabaddor to James McHenry, the director of the Justice Department’s EOIR, said the link to the VDare post angered many judges.

“The post features links and content that directly attacks sitting immigration judges with racial and ethnically tinged slurs and the label ‘Kritarch.’ The reference to Kritarch in a negative tone is deeply offensive and Anti-Semitic,” wrote Tabaddor. The VDare post includes pictures of judges with the term “kritarch” preceding their names.

Tabaddor said the term kritarchy is a reference to ancient Israel during a time of rule by a system of judges.

“VDare’s use of the term in a pejorative manner casts Jewish history in a negative light as an Anti-Semitic trope of Jews seeking power and control,” she wrote.

Tabaddor called on McHenry to take immediate action over the distribution of white nationalist content.

“Publication and dissemination of a white supremacist, anti-semitic website throughout the EOIR is antithetical to the goals and ideals of the Department of Justice,” she wrote. The court, Tabaddor wrote, should immediately withdraw the email and issue an apology to all immigration judges, including those mentioned in the post.

“Separately, EOIR should take all appropriate safety and security measures for all judges given the tone and tenor of this posting,” she wrote.

After publication of this article, a DOJ spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the email briefing was compiled by a contractor and should not have included a link to the VDare post.

“The daily EOIR morning news briefings are compiled by a contractor and the blog post should not have been included,” the spokesperson said.

EOIR Assistant Press Secretary Kathryn Mattingly told BuzzFeed News that “the daily EOIR morning news briefings are compiled by a contractor and the blog post should not have been included. The Department of Justice condemns Anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.”

A former senior DOJ official said that the email in question was “generated by a third-party vendor that utilizes keyword searches to produce news clippings for staff. It is not reviewed or approved by staff before it is transmitted.”

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So, it’s “mere coincidence” that the two Judges leading the NAIJ’s resistance are specifically targeted with slurs within a few days of the DOJ’s filing of a petition to “decertify” the NAIJ? Not credible!

Coincidence that a White Nationalist racist Administration biased against asylum seekers distributes White Nationalist hate propaganda directed at Immigration Judges who stand up for Due Process? Unlikely!

No, starting with Trump & Sessions, this Administration has had a long-term love affair with White Supremacist hate groups. It’s no coincidence that acts of violence by White Nationalist domestic terrorists have increased under Trump. While the DOJ and DHS are busy reviving up baseless fear and loathing of foreigners, the real threats to our national security by White Nationalist domestic terrorists, and frankly by the Trump Administration itself, are left unaddressed and not so subtly encouraged.

There are lots of scummy characters involved in the latest assault on Due Process, fundamental fairness, and simple human decency by Trump’s DOJ.

But there is another major enabler at fault here: the unconstitutional and unethical placement of “judges” within a law enforcement agency has been painfully obvious for years. Yet, life tenured Federal Judges have looked the other way as clearly substandard adjudications have emanated from the Immigration Courts under the last three Administrations. Kind of a “who cares” attitude where rights of foreign nationals are involved.

Now, however, as in the Bush II Administration, U.S. citizen judges are being targeted for harassment and career derailment because of their views.

Trump and his henchmen have already made it clear that they will target anyone who fails to roll over for their White Nationalist agenda, judge or not. Myopic Federal Judges who fail to hold the Administration accountable for abuses and to put an end to the “EOIR travesty” might well find themselves on the receiving end of the Administration’s racist hate campaign at some point. Who will stand up for the rights of those unwilling to stand up for others?

PWS

08-22-19

PWS

FRAUD, WASTE, & ABUSE @ “JUSTICE” – Barr & Co. Seek To Punish National Association of Immigration Judges (”NAIJ”) For Daring To Stand Up For Due Process & Judicial Independence!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/us/immigration-judges-union-justice-department.html?searchResultPosition=1

Christina Goldbaum reports for the NY Times:

By Christina Goldbaum

10, 2019

The Justice Department has moved to decertify the union of immigration judges, a maneuver that could muffle an organization whose members have sometimes been openly critical of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda.

The department filed a petition on Friday asking the Federal Labor Relations Authority to determine whether the union, the National Association of Immigration Judges, should have its certification revoked because its members are considered “management officials” ineligible to collectively organize, according to a Justice Department spokesman.

The move suggested escalating tensions between overwhelmed immigration judges desperate for greater resources and a Justice Department pushing them to quickly address a backlog of immigration cases.

“This is a misguided effort to minimize our impact,” said Judge Amiena Khan, vice president of the judges’ union, which has publicly criticized the use of a quota system in immigration court and other attempts to speed up proceedings.

“We serve as a check and balance on management prerogatives and that’s why they are doing this to us,” said Judge Khan.

Unlike other federal judges who are part of the judicial branch, immigration judges are appointed by the attorney general and are employees of the Justice Department. Though sitting judges are prohibited from speaking publicly about issues that could be considered political, representatives of the immigration judges’ union can speak publicly about Justice Department policies on behalf of its members.

This is not the first time an administration has challenged the organization. The Clinton administration also tried to decertify the immigration judges’ union, a move that the Federal Labor Relations Authority rejected, according to former immigration judges.

Both Judge Khan and the union president, Judge Ashley Tabaddor, have spoken out repeatedly against what they say is an attempt to turn immigration judges from neutral arbiters of the law to law enforcement agents enacting the White House’s policies. They have called for immigration judges to be independent of the Justice Department.

Last year, the union criticized the department’s quota system, which required immigration judges to complete 700 cases per year, as well as a move to bar judges from an administrative tool they had previously used to reduce their caseloads. The union says the focus on efficiency impedes judges’ ability to work through complicated cases and could affect the due process rights of immigrants in court.

The pressure to hear more cases more quickly amounts to “psychological warfare,” Judge Tabaddor said last year.

Addressing some of the union’s concerns, the Justice Department has tried to tackle the backlog, which now totals more than 830,000 cases, by hiring more immigration judges. Judges appointed by President Trump now make up 43 percent of the nation’s immigration judges, a larger share than under any of his five predecessors, according to a recent analysis by The Associated Press. A large number of his appointees are former military or Immigration and Customs Enforcement lawyers, the analysis found.

But that hiring has not been accompanied by other necessary support, Judge Khan said.

“I can’t work alone, I am reliant on support staff,” said Judge Khan. “Right now there are two judges to one support staff person,” which has delayed the progress of cases despite the additional judges, she said.

The judges’ union plans to officially respond to the Justice Department’s petition once it receives official notification from the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

If the attempt to decertify the union is successful, it could leave judges without recourse for their already overwhelming workload, judges said.

“The union won’t be able to help judges with overall working conditions at a time when most all judges would tell you working conditions are worse now than they have ever been,” said Paul Schmidt, a former immigration judge.

Judge Khan called the Justice Department’s petition part of “a systematic attack on unions” representing federal employees under the Trump administration. Last year, Mr. Trump signed a series of executive orders that rolled back the workplace role of unions for at least two million federal workers and made it easier to fire them. The administration said the move would make the government more efficient.

The Justice Department’s recent petition will most likely prompt an investigation by the Federal Labor Relations Authority, according to a department spokesman.

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Seems like the investigation ought to be into ethical violations and attempts to misuse Federal labor laws by Bill Barr. A substantially identical challenge to the NAIJ was soundly rejected by the same agency, the FLRA, back in the late 1990’s under the Clinton administration.

Since then, over the strong objection of the NAIJ, the status of Immigration Judges has been even farther reduced to that of glorified “deportation clerks.” The idea that individuals whose little remining discretion has been removed have somehow morphed into “management officials” is both totally absurd and a confirmation that so-called “management officials” in the Federal Government under the Trump Administration have nothing to manage.

Seems like this clear abuse of our legal system by Barr and his cronies should be a subject for investigation by the House Judiciary Committee and would warrant commencement of impeachment proceedings against arrogant, anti-American scofflaw Bill Barr. Not that Barr hasn’t already been found in contempt of Congress and the American people – he has. He’s a disgusting character – a disgrace to public service and the legal profession.

I suppose he will escape accountability in his lifetime. But, the “Jefferson Davis of the Justice Department” will certainly receive the judgement of history against him for his betrayal of his country and his racist, White Nationalist misconduct clothed in a thin veneer of undeserved credibility based on his success in the corporate legal world. If anything, that a sleazy and corrupt character like Barr could prosper in the world of “white shoe corporate law” is an indictment of that system and its total lack of values and ethical standards.

Meanwhile, it appears that the actions of the NAIJ have been successful in striking a nerve among the DOJ kakistocracy. As with the corrupt, inept, and racist-infested DHS, the current inability of the DOJ as an institution to stand up to Barr’s dishonesty, corruption, and lawless behavior certainly merits a reexamination of the role and structure of the DOJ down the line with an eye toward determining how an institution supposedly staffed with “officers of the court” could be so cowardly and inept when it comes to standing up against internal abuses and contempt for our Constitution.

In addition, the latest abuse of authority by Barr emphasizes the need for immediate removal of the Immigration Courts from Barr’s control and a reversal of the “Chevron doctrine” of “judicial task avoidance” that has granted the DOJ’s immigration kakistocracy clearly unwarranted and unjustified “deference.”

Finally, I pass along my favorite quip from one of my former colleagues about the exalted “management role” of today’s Immigration Judges: “I often say I am not even permitted to manage the pencils in my courtroom.”

While there is a certain type of “dark humor” in the actions of Barr and the other “malicious incompetents” in the Trump Administration, there is nothing funny about the innocent lives being lost or threatened by their actions or the damage that these “evil clowns” are inflicting on our Constitution and our instructions.

PWS

08-10-19

TRUMP SEEKING TO END LEGAL IMMIGRATION? — Proposed Appointment Of Supremely Unqualified Far Right Bigot “Cooch Cooch” To Replace Fired Hardliner Cissna @ USCIS Threatens To Topple Whole System With “Malicious Incompetence” — But, Has He Finally Pushed Senate’s “Top Turtle” Too Far?

https://apple.news/AndEGsINTRO-3yhD1KPQLAw

Raul Reyes writers in Slate:

On Friday, the New York Times reported that former Virginia attorney general Kenneth Cuccinelli will be tapped for a role in the Trump administration. He will be put in charge of the country’s legal immigration system, as head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). While it had been earlier rumored that Cuccinelli would be placed in a new job as “immigration czar,” both the Times and the Washington Post noted that he now seems set for the top spot at USCIS.

No matter what job Cuccinelli ends up in, he is neither deserving nor qualified to play any role in shaping immigration policy. He is an immigration hardliner with views that are at odds with American values. He has a history of xenophobic, homophobic, and sexist comments. Ironically, one nice thing that can be said about Cuccinelli is that he fosters bipartisanship — he has generated opposition from both sides of the aisle.

Given that Cuccinelli could soon be presiding over USCIS, his comments on immigration are worthy of review. In 2018, he told Breitbart News Daily that states should use “war powers” to turn back migrants: “You just point them back across the river and let them swim for it,” he said. In 2015, appearing on a conservative radio station, he claimed that President Obama was encouraging an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants. In 2012, he compared immigration policy to pest control. He’s called the infamous Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) “one of my very favorite congressman.” So Cuccinelli is hardly someone who can be trusted to run USCIS in keeping with the agency’s core values, which include “respect” and “integrity.”

Most importantly, Cuccinelli has no significant experience in immigration policy, notwithstanding his failed attempt to end birthright citizenship as a state senator. He is not from a border state, nor has he been a credible voice in the immigration debate. His background is in law enforcement, not immigration law.

Cuccinelli’s prime qualification for his new job seems to be that he has been a tireless defender of the president on cable news. That could almost be seen as laughable if the stakes were not so high. Consider that as head of USCIS, Cuccinelli would wield tremendous power over immigrants like refugees, domestic abuse victims, and asylum-seekers. Or that our legal immigration system is byzantine and complicated, attracting the largest number of immigrants in the world. In FY 2017, the U.S. granted Legal Permanent Resident status to about 1.1 million people, including 120,000 refugees and 25,000 asylum-seekers.

Cuccinelli’s anti-LGBTQ record is especially troubling. As attorney general, he was against policies banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public colleges and universities. As a state senator, he unsuccessfully fought to criminalize sodomy, calling “homosexual acts… intrinsically wrong.” In 2008, he declared that homosexuality “brings nothing but self-destruction, not only physically but of their soul.” The extreme views matter because LGBTQ people are among our most vulnerable immigrants. The Human Rights Campaign, for example, has documented “the precarious position of transgender immigrants and asylum seekers.” Sadly, it seems unlikely that Cuccinelli would respect their human rights, let alone treat LGBTQ immigrants with kindness and compassion.

There are myriad ways in which Cuccinelli has demonstrated that he is far out of the mainstream, so much so that handing him a huge job would be dangerous. The man who worried about getting his newborn son a social security number because he was concerned about the government tracking his family is probably not the ideal person to put in charge of E-Verify, the federal database that checks employment eligibility.

True, the president can choose whomever he likes for high-level positions. But Cuccinelli isn’t even a smart political pick. In addition to being unpopular with Democrats, he doesn’t have the full support of Republican lawmakers either. According to the website Vox, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) does not want to confirm Cuccinelli (the ill will stems from the fact that Cuccinelli headed up a political action committee that supported primary challenges to incumbent Republicans in 2014). Besides, on immigration most Americans are moving away from Trump. This January, the Pew Center found that 62 percent of Americans believe that immigrants strengthen our country. A restrictionist like Cuccinelli is not what the public wants or needs.

As head of USCIS, Cuccinelli would bring little to the job except a track record as a Trump loyalist. With his outdated and narrow views, he would be a disaster overseeing our legal immigration system.

Raul A. Reyes is an immigration attorney and member of the USA Today Board of Contributors. A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia Law School, he is also a contributor to NBCNews.com and CNN Opinion. You can follow him on Twitter at @RaulAReyes, Instagram: raulareyes1.

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Let’s remember that fired hardliner L. Francis Cissna was the man who “took the ‘Services’ out of US Citizenship and Immigration Services.” His dismal anti-immigrant polices and undermining of public service have brought unprecedented backlogs to USCIS adjudications that are now under Congressional investigation. He also reportedly “tanked” employee morale at USCIS. Nevertheless, he wasn’t quite nasty enough for Trump and his neo-Nazi White Nationalist advisor Stephen MIller.

As a Virginia resident who suffered through “Cooch Cooch’s” disastrous tenure as Attorney General and his thankfully unsuccessful bid to become our Governor, I can testify that he is indeed without any redeeming social values. In other words, a perfect fit for the “Trump Immigration Kakistocracy.” But, “Cooch Cooch” has some powerful enemies in the GOP Senate. He pissed off Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and powerful Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) can’t be too pleased with Trump’s treatment of his former staffer Cissna.

In the meantime, it’s “chaos as usual” in the DHS/USCIS kakistocracy.

PWS

05-31-19

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

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

Neil Irwin & Emily Badger report for the NY Times:

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

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

By Neil Irwin and Emily Badger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

04-10-19

TRUMP & HIS ENABLERS IGNORE THE REALITY THAT EVENTUALLY WILL DWARF HIS BOGUS BORDER CRISIS: “The UN estimates that by 2050, there will be 200 million people forcibly displaced from their homes due to climate change alone. . . . If we want people to be able to stay in their homes, we have to tackle the issue of our changing global climate, and we have to do it fast.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/06/us-mexico-immigration-climate-change-migration?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Lauren Markham reports for The Guardian:

The northern triangle of Central America, the largest source of asylum seekers crossing the US border, is deeply affected by environmental degradation

@LaurenMarkham

‘Comparing human beings to natural disasters is both lazy and dehumanizing.’ Photograph: Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images

Media outlets and politicians routinely refer to the “flood” of Central American migrants, the “wave” of asylum seekers, the “deluge” of children, despite the fact that unauthorized migration across the US borders is at record lows in recent years. Comparing human beings to natural disasters is both lazy and dehumanizing, but perhaps this tendency to lean on environmental language when describing migration is an unconscious acknowledgement of a deeper truth: much migration from Central America and, for that matter, around the world, is fueled by climate change.

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Yes, today’s Central American migrants – most of them asylum seekers fearing for their lives – are fleeing gangs, deep economic instability (if not abject poverty), and either neglect or outright persecution at the hands of their government. But these things are all complicated and further compounded by the fact that the northern triangle of Central America – a region comprising Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, and the largest sources of asylum seekers crossing our border in recent years – is deeply affected by environmental degradation and the impacts of a changing global climate.

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‘Violence and environmental degradation are inextricably linked, and both lead to mass migration.’ Photograph: Pablo Cozzaglio/AFP/Getty Images

The average temperature in Central America has increased by 0.5C since 1950; it is projected to rise another 1-2 degrees before 2050. This has a dramatic impact on weather patterns, on rainfall, on soil quality, on crops’ susceptibility to disease, and thus on farmers and local economies. Meanwhile, incidences of storms, floods and droughts on are the rise in the region. In coming years, according to the US Agency for International Development, countries in the northern triangle will see decreased rainfall and prolonged drought, writ large. In Honduras, rainfall will be sparse in areas where it is needed, yet in other areas, floods will increase by 60%. In Guatemala, the arid regions will creep further and further into current agricultural areas, leaving farmers out to dry. And El Salvador is projected to lose 10-28% of its coastline before the end of the century. How will all those people survive, and where will they go?

El Salvador is projected to lose 10-28% of its coastline before the end of the century. How will all those people survive, and where will they go?

This September, I travelled to El Salvador to report on the impacts of the US government’s family separation policy. I’d been to El Salvador many times before, but never to the Jiquilisco Bay, a stunning, shimmering and once abundant peninsula populated by mangroves and fishing communities and uncountable species of marine life. It is also one that, like many places in El Salvador, and like many places in the world, is also imperiled by climate change. Rising sea levels are destroying the mangrove forests, the marine life that relies on them, and thus the fishermen who rely on that marine life to feed themselves and eke out a meager economy.

I met a man there named Arnovis Guidos Portillo, a 26-year-old single dad. Many people in his family were fishermen, but they were able to catch fewer and fewer fish. The country’s drought and devastating rainfall meant that the area’s farming economy, too, was suffering. The land was stressed, the ocean was stressed, and so were the people. Arnovis got into a scuffle one day at a soccer game, which placed him on a hitlist with a local gang. He had been working as a day laborer here and there, but the drought meant there was less work, and it was hard to find work that didn’t require crossing into rival gang territory. If he did, he would be killed. So he took his daughter north to the United States, where border patrol agents separated them for two months, locking them up in different states and with zero contact.

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‘People really don’t want to leave their homes for the vast uncertainty of another land.’ Photograph: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images

Violence and environmental degradation are inextricably linked, and both lead to mass migration. An unstable planet and ecosystem lends itself to an unstable society, to divisions, to economic insecurity, to human brutality. When someone’s home becomes less and less livable, they move elsewhere. Wouldn’t each and every one of us do the same?

This week, the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer published a series of pieces about the impacts of climate change in the Guatemalan highlands, where farmers are struggling to grow crops that they have been farming there for centuries. “In most of the western highlands,” Blitzer wrote, “the question is no longer whether someone will emigrate but when.” A few years ago, I reported from Guatemala’s dry corridor, several hours away from where Blitzer was reporting, where persistent drought had decimated the region’s agriculture, and particularly the coffee crop, on which roughly 90% of local farmers relied. It was a wildly different landscape from the one Blitzer described, but it faced the same problem: if you live in an agricultural zone, come from a long line of farmers and can’t reliably harvest your crops any more, what else is there to do but leave?

if you live in an agricultural zone, come from a long line of farmers and can’t reliably harvest your crops any more, what else is there to do but leave?

It’s abundantly clear that climate change is a driver of migration to the US – we have the data, we have the facts, we have the human stories. Still, the Trump administration has done nothing to intervene in this root cause. In fact, the US government has systematically denied the existence of climate change, rolled back domestic regulations that would mitigate US carbon emissions and thumbed its nose at international attempts – such as the Paris accords – to curb global warming.

Now, in his latest futile, small-minded and cruel attempt to cut migration off at the neck (something we know is not possible – an unhealthy societal dynamic must be addressed at the root, just like with a struggling tree or crop), Donald Trump announced last week that he would cut all foreign aid to the northern triangle. It’s a punitive move, and one that – just like building a wall, separating families, locking people up indefinitely, and refusing asylum seekers entry across the border – is a petty intimidation tactic that will do nothing to actually curb forced migration.

In fact, cutting aid to Central America will do quite the opposite, for as much waste and imperfections as there are in international aid, aid in Central America has been vital for creating community safety programs, job skills development and government accountability standards. It has also helped with drought mitigation and supporting climate-resilient agricultural practices. In other words, foreign aid to Central America – a place unduly hit by climate change – is supporting the kind of climate change resiliency that will keep people from having to leave in the first place.

Because people really don’t want to leave their homes for the vast uncertainty of another land, particularly when that land proves itself again and again to be hostile to migrants’ very existence. People don’t want to be raped along the route north, or die in the desert, or have their child ripped away from them by the border patrol, or be locked up indefinitely without legal counsel, without adequate medical care, with no idea what will happen to them and when. Who would risk this if things were OK back home? People like Arnovis leave because they feel like they have to.

Eventually Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials convinced Arnovis to sign deportation papers with the promise that, if he did, he would be reunited with his daughter and returned to El Salvador. But he was shooed on to a plane back home without her. It took a tremendous amount of advocacy, but, after months locked up in the US, she, too was returned home. They are now back together, which is a good thing, but the fundamental problem hasn’t changed: he can’t find work. His society is ill. So is the planet, and the land and sea all around him.

Today, there are 64 million forced migrants around the world, more than ever before. They are fleeing war, persecution, disaster and, yes, climate change. The UN estimates that by 2050, there will be 200 million people forcibly displaced from their homes due to climate change alone.

Migration is a natural human phenomenon and, many argue, should be a fundamental right, but forced migration – being run out of home against one’s will and with threat to one’s life – is not natural at all. Today, whether we choose to see it or not, climate change is one of the largest drivers of migration, and will continue to be for years to come – unless we do something about it. If we want people to be able to stay in their homes, we have to tackle the issue of our changing global climate, and we have to do it fast.

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Quote of the Day: “Comparing human beings to natural disasters is both lazy and dehumanizing.”

One week ago, I was a guest participant in an Environmental Justice Seminar here at Lawrence University taught by Professor Jason Brozek of the Government Department. I was inspired by the students’ collective degree of knowledge, thoughtfulness, informed dialogue, and commitment to addressing this pressing problem. “Environmental Due Process” is certainly an important facet of the mission of the “New Due Process Army.”

PWS

04-08-19

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After whites fled and before the ‘creative class’ moved in, immigrants kept urban neighborhoods alive.

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