"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Opinion | The racism behind anti-immigration rhetoric is palpable to every immigrant. Including me.
America is such a young country: It’s only a few hundred years old, and no one who has been here for only a few generations is without an immigrant connection. So, from the outside — from a place like Europe — the idea that Americans are not connected to immigration and our immigrant pasts seems like we are denying ourselves. We sound very self-hating about the very notion of immigration, but we’re actually just confusing racism with a desire to fix the immigration system.
I see that all the time: Things that are being said about immigration and the ideals of immigration are basically just being used as a thinly veiled form of racism. It’s so blatant. The president himself actually said he doesn’t mind people coming from countries like Norway — white people; it’s the people from “shithole countries” he doesn’t want. It seems almost pedantic and obsolete to actually have to talk about the fact that it’s racism.
The contributions of all immigrants has been so derided by our present administration, so I felt that I needed to celebrate immigration rather than have it openly derided. Also, I wanted to try to make people stand back and just see the anti-immigration propaganda that they were being fed, and understand instead how this country is what it is because of immigration. That was the genesis of my cabaret show (now an Audible book) “Legal Immigrant.”
The whole point of the show was to tell my experience from my perspective as immigrant, but also to show that I’m feeling these negative things about being an immigrant and I’m a white man of privilege; I can’t imagine what it must be like for people of color or Muslims. I don’t know the exact percentage, but I would say that, the day I became an American, at least 75 percent of the other people being sworn in with me were people of color.
So I wanted to try and make people stand back from this vehemence and have some fun while analyzing what was going on. I don’t want to be didactic, though: I understand that there are problems with the immigration system; I understand there’s a massive refugee problem in the world. But I will not condone racism or bigotry as part of that debate.
That doesn’t mean I’m not open to dialogue. I like when people engage, that’s why I do theater. I don’t want to just be behind a screen; I actually enjoy the fact that I can hear how people are reacting to me. And I’ve been heckled doing the show — from both sides. I want to hear what people have to say and I totally engage with some people. A couple of times it got quite rowdy, but that’s why I wanted to do these cabarets. They’re good ways to get people to engage and be provoked, and to maybe change their minds … or at least consider other options. And, at the end of the show, I make everyone in the audience sing “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow,” so I’m obviously someone who likes bringing people together, even though I also like provoking them.
There’s a thing in this country right now: Any dissent against the president or any disagreement with his views is seen as a red flag and people immediately respond in an aggressive way. People are just screaming at one another right now; it makes it very difficult to engage. And so, aside from trying to celebrate immigration, I’m trying to get people to also stand back and try to not let the tropes of this awful rhetoric blind us to what is actually going on.
This government is trying to brainwash its citizens into believing that the very thing that has made America what it is and has made America great — immigration — is a negative thing. That is complete doublespeak. The idea that if you’re pro-immigrant, you’re anti-America, and if you’re anti-immigration, you are pro-America is completely wrong. That’s not just my opinion; if you stand back from it and look at the history of this country, you can’t deny that is the truth.
I really do believe that people have lost the power of analysis in this country because of the duality of the political system: Politics in this country is a team sport. I also think that, with people like Betsy DeVos running the Education Department, it’s going to take a long time before we have a generation who can regain the powers of analysis. It’s all a multilayered effort to dumb us down, in order to be able to brainwash us and feed us propaganda. We need to stand up and take heed before it’s too late.
As told to THINK editor Megan Carpentier, edited and condensed for clarity.
*********************************
Yup!
It’s hard to have a “debate” or a “dialogue” when one side is wedded to myths and bogus narratives, rather than facts: when one side is driven by what it wants to believe, egged on by those who find it politically advantageous, rather than truth.
One of the worst of the many horrible things about the Trump Regime is that supposedly responsible public officials spread the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee White Nationalist myths and false narratives (see, e.g., “Gonzo Apocalypto,” Barr, “Big Mac With Lies,” Nielsen, “Cooch Cooch,” Mark “Fund My TGIF” Morgan, Matt Albence, EOIR, etc.).
Tyler Anbinder Professor of History George Washington University
Professor Tyler Anbinder writes in WashPost:
November 7, 2019 at 10:03 a.m. EST
President Trump insists that he harbors no prejudice against immigrants. “I love immigrants,” he told Telemundo in June. Indeed, Trump has married two immigrants — Ivana Zelníčková (from what is now the Czech Republic) and Melanija Knavs (born in what is now Slovenia). He does occasionally say something positive about an immigrant group, such as when he wondered why the United States couldn’t get more immigrants from Norway. But for the most part, Trump portrays immigrants as a threat or a menace, and he calls the largest segment of America’s newcomers — Latinos — “animals” and invaders.
As a historian who specializes in the study of anti-immigrant sentiment, I know that Trump is not the first president to denigrate newcomers to the country. But Trump has attacked and scapegoated immigrants in ways that previous presidents never have — and in the process, he has spread more fear, resentment and hatred of immigrants than any American in history.
Trump’s nativism is especially striking for its comprehensiveness. Over the centuries, nativists have leveled 10 main charges against immigrants: They bring crime; they import poverty; they spread disease; they don’t assimilate; they corrupt our politics; they steal our jobs; they cause our taxes to increase; they’re a security risk; their religion is incompatible with American values; they can never be “true Americans.”
Trump has made every one of these charges. No American president before him has publicly embraced the entire nativist worldview. A commander in chief who is also the nativist in chief has the potential to alter immigrants’ role in American society now and for generations to come.
There have, of course, been upsurges of nativism in previous eras, but presidents have rarely been the ones stoking the flames. President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which among other things nearly tripled the time immigrants had to wait before they could become citizens and vote, but his voluminous writings contain nary a word critical of immigrants.
Millard Fillmore, president at the height of the massive influx of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine, remained silent during his administration on the social tensions these newcomers caused. Even in 1856, when the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party (popularly called the Know Nothing Party) nominated Fillmore to return to the White House, he and his surrogates eschewed attacks on immigrants and rebranded the party as a moderating force between proslavery Democrats and anti-slavery Republicans.
Congress has typically been the source of the greatest nativist zeal in national politics — and presidents have generally tried to tamp down that zeal. Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester Arthur vetoed legislation barring the immigration of Chinese laborers in the 1870s and 1880s, though Arthur later agreed to sign a 10-year ban. In subsequent decades, Grover Cleveland, William H. Taft and Woodrow Wilson vetoed bills making the ability to read a prerequisite for adult men to immigrate. Congress eventually overrode Wilson’s veto to enact such a law in 1917.
By the 1920s, most Americans were convinced that further limits on immigration were necessary. “America must be kept American,” President Calvin Coolidge declared in December 1923, following the political winds, and by “American,” he meant white in race, Anglo-Saxon in ethnicity and Protestant in religion. Coolidge endorsed the severe limits Congress placed on the immigration of Slavs, Poles, Italians, Greeks and Eastern European Jews and accepted a ban on immigration from Asia and Africa, as well.
The only Americans who came even remotely close to rivaling Trump’s nativist influence were more narrowly focused than the president is. Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were widely admired anti-Semites whose views reached millions, but their animus was focused on powerful Jews at home and abroad, not Jewish immigrants in general. Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest, had millions of loyal radio listeners in the 1930s, but he, too, was more an anti-Semite than a broad nativist. None of them commanded the devotion of nearly as large a share of the population as Trump does.
John Tanton, who died this year, was a driving force behind the modern anti-immigration movement, organizing and raising money for a variety of groups that have advocated a reduction in immigration. But those groups didn’t have influence until Trump began spreading their ideas and appointing their leaders and allies to positions in his administration.
Trump’s anti-immigrant efforts have featured several classic nativist tropes. He falsely associates immigrants with crime, as when he said during his campaign that Mexicans are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In truth, immigrants commit significantly less crime than the native-born do. He scapegoats entire immigrant religious groups for the actions of one or two criminals, calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” after Syed Rizwan Farook (who was not even an immigrant) and his wife (who was foreign-born) killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. He perpetuates the notion that immigrants pose a public health threat, as when he wondered in 2018 why we let “all these people from shithole countries come here.” One of his objections, reportedly, was that Haitians “all have AIDS,” though the White House denies he said that. He’s making it harder for low-income immigrants to come here in ways that would almost certainly reduce immigration from Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, justifying his proposal on the grounds that he needs to “protect benefits for American citizens.” And he argues that even the U.S.-born children of recent immigrants — if they are part of ethnic, religious or racial minorities — are not real Americans, as he suggested when he tweeted that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
What makes Trump more influential than any previous American nativist is the size of his audience and the devotion of his supporters. Trump has more than 66 million Twitter followers and a powerful echo chamber in conservative media, allowing him to instantaneously convey his ideas to a quarter of the adult population. Other presidents had passionate followers (Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan come to mind), but none of them expressed much, if any, animus toward immigrants. Trump’s rhetoric has changed the way many Americans view immigrants: Nearly a quarter now call immigration a “problem,” more than double the percentage who characterized it that way in 2015, and the highest share since Gallup began asking that question a quarter-century ago.
Trump has made public expressions of nativism socially acceptable for the first time in generations. As he lambasted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali immigrant, at a July rally in Greenville, N.C., the crowd erupted with chants of “Send her back,” echoing Trump’s notorious tweet. “There was a filter,” a Latino resident of Greenville noted after the rally, that previously prevented Americans from expressing such hatred of immigrants, but “now the filter has been broken. My Hispanic friends are afraid to go to the store. They’re afraid to do anything. It’s scary.”
Trump’s spread of nativism has led to an upsurge in animosity directed at immigrants. Those who read or hear the president’s nativist views are more likely to write offensive things on social media about the groups he targets, one political science study found. One study using data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League found that counties that hosted Trump rallies in 2016 saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes in the following months, primarily assaults or acts of vandalism, compared to counties that didn’t host rallies. ABC News identified at least 29 cases in which violence or threats of violence were carried out, and the perpetrators targeted immigrants or those perceived to be immigrants more than any other group.
The president’s rhetoric inspires not merely petty violence but occasionally full-fledged acts of terrorism as well. Throughout the fall of 2018, Trump relentlessly sowed fears that an “invasion” of Central American refugees was imminent via an immigrant “caravan” heading through Mexico toward the United States. Before a gunman killed 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018, he apparently justified his actions on the grounds that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which these days assists refugees from all over the world, “likes to bring in invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.”
Five months later, the man accused of killing more than 50 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand hailed Trump as a symbol “of renewed white identity” in an online manifesto. In August, a man traveled to El Paso with the goal of killing as many Latinos as possible, authorities said, slaying 22 people at a Walmart. A manifesto linked to him echoed many of the president’s favorite talking points: It condemned “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” charged that immigrants are taking jobs from natives and lauded Republicans for reducing “mass immigration and citizenship.” These accused shooters all seemingly found Trump’s nativist rhetoric inspirational.
While this upsurge in nativist violence is terrifying, history suggests that, over the long term, those who embrace immigrants will win out over those who fear them. The percentage of Americans who want to cut immigration has risen since Trump took office, but that figure is still down by almost half since the mid-1990s. Ironically, Trump’s nativist pronouncements and actions may have galvanized Americans who oppose him to look even more favorably at immigrants than they did before. Seventy-six percent of Americans now say that immigration is good for the country — an all-time high in Gallup’s poll — while the percentage who call it harmful, 19 percent, is at an all-time low.
Anti-immigrant attitudes have always been part of American culture. They have spiked periodically — in the 1850s, in the 1920s — but those nativist upswings have proved ephemeral. The one we are witnessing today can be traced primarily to the uniquely powerful influence of Trump, the most successful purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment in American history. But the admiration that the vast majority of Americans hold for immigrants cannot be extinguished by any man or woman, no matter how influential.
After all, most Americans understand that immigrants make America great.
Twitter: @TylerAnbinder
*************************************
Beyond the vileness and lies of Trump’s White Nationalist, racist, xenophobia, Professor Anbinder’s article ends on an upbeat note:
Anti-immigrant attitudes have always been part of American culture. They have spiked periodically — in the 1850s, in the 1920s — but those nativist upswings have proved ephemeral. The one we are witnessing today can be traced primarily to the uniquely powerful influence of Trump, the most successful purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment in American history. But the admiration that the vast majority of Americans hold for immigrants cannot be extinguished by any man or woman, no matter how influential.
After all, most Americans understand that immigrants make America great.
Unfortunately, the “upward arc of history” will be too late to save the many individual lives and futures daily destroyed by Trump’s White Nationalist hate campaign.
That’s why the “New Due Process Army” is fighting to save lives and protect the Constitutional, legal, and human rights of everyone.
David Frum’s cover essay in the latest issue of the Atlantic calling for immigration restrictions is generating some well-deserved scorn. Even his central premise — that if liberals don’t enforce immigration laws, the nation will turn to fascists — is bedeviled by reality. President Trump, Fox News and the Republican Party tried with all their might to demagogue immigration before the midterm elections.The GOP got clobbered. Democrats did especially wellin electionsin New Mexico, Texas, Arizona and California, the states that border Mexico. In fact, all nine members of Congress who represent the districts along the Mexico border oppose funding for Trump’s border wall.
According to Gallup, 67 percent of Americans think immigration levels should either stay the same or increase, and 75 percent think immigration is a “good thing,” an all-time high. Over the past two years, the percentage who want to restrict immigration from current levels has averaged 30 percent, the lowest figure since Gallup began asking this question in 1965. An NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found that 61 percent of Americans think immigration helps the country more than it hurts, also an all-time high, and an incredible 49-point swingfrom 2005. There’s virtually no evidence that support for more immigration is a political liability, other than in Frum’s mind. At worst, an immigration supporter will lose the 30 percent of voters he or she would have lost anyway.
Frum’s essay also includes some bizarre, anti-historical observations. This one might be the strangest: “America was built on the revolutionary idea, never fully realized, that those who labor might also govern—that every worker should be a voter.” The United States was, of course, actually founded on the still-revolutionary — but not nearly as revolutionary — idea that every white, male landowner should be a voter. We weren’t even ready to admit that the people doing the most work at the time were full human beings. Not only was slavery thriving at the American founding, not only was it acknowledged and enshrined in the Constitution, but the effort to preserve the institution also formalized the bond between race, second-class citizenship and servitude. Even the Declaration of Independence, the founding document, was altered from Thomas Jefferson’s first draft to omit the word inherent as a descriptor of our rights, a nod to the fact that even the Enlightenment thinkers weren’t quite ready to recognize the existence of inalienable rights outside their immediate social status, much less to slaves.
In another fit of historical ineptitude, Frum pines for the years 1915 to 1975, a period of immigration restrictionism, which he bizarrely describes as the “years in which the United States became a more cohesive nation.” (Frum also conveniently leaves out how those policies were grounded in racism.) The economist Noah Smith obliterated this argument in a pretty devastating Twitter thread. This was a period of Jim Crow, lynching, red scares, the Depression, race riots, labor rights, mass incarceration, racial assassinations, internment camps and domestic terrorism. Under no circumstances would you describe it as an era of broad social cohesion.
If we wanted to look at the single metric most indicative of social cohesion, we’d probably look at murder rates. The U.S. homicide rate began to increase in the mid-1960s, then generally rose until it peaked with the crack epidemic in the early 1990s. Immigration began to increase in the early 1970s, but really began to soar in the 1990s. From about 1994 to about 2014, undocumented immigration soared while violent crime spiraled.
In fact, from about the late 1990s on, nearly every social indicator in the United States began to move in an encouraging direction — dropout rates, teen pregnancy rates, divorce rates, juvenile crime, rape, property crimes, you name it. Meanwhile, immigration boomed. I don’t think immigration caused all of those good things to happen. But Frum’s argument, that immigration unravels social cohesion, is simply contradicted by the data.
Frum goes on to list of a number of consequences of modern immigration, most of which Frum thinks bode ill for the sort of society to which Frum believes we should be aspiring. But most of the negative consequences Frum lists aren’t the result of immigrants themselves, but of people who share Frum’s view that we have too many immigrants. The line I quoted above, for example, is part of a broader argument Frum makes — because undocumented immigrants operated outside of the law, they aren’t afforded the same legal protection, social status and political representation as citizens and legal residents. But undocumented people live outside the law largely because (a) there is demand here for low-skilled workers, (b) it is virtually impossible for low-skilled workers to come here legally and (c) people who share Frum’s policy preferences have made it politically difficult to grant those who do come any sort of legal protection or political representation.
Frum also cherry-picks his data. He argues, for example, that employers in immigrant-heavy industries are shirking their safety obligations because immigrants lack the political power to demand or enforce regulations. He writes:
Forestry, fishing, and farming are three of the most dangerous industries in the United States. They are 46 percent reliant on immigrant laborers, half of them undocumented. (Documented and undocumented immigrants together make up only 17 percent of the U.S. workforce as a whole.) Building and grounds maintenance is surprisingly dangerous work: 326 people died in 2017. Some 35 percent of grounds workers are immigrants. About 25 percent of construction workers are immigrants, but immigrants supply almost half the workers in the most dangerous areas, notably roofing and drywalling. When so many workers in a job category toil outside the law, the law won’t offer much protection.
Note that Frum moves freely between percentages and raw numbers. Building and grounds maintenance may be “surprisingly dangerous work,” but without some other figures for context, 326 deaths is a meaningless statistic. How does that compare to other professions? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the most dangerous class of occupations falls under the heading “transportation and moving materials.” This group of jobs accounted for nearly a quarter of worker deaths in 2017 — over four times as many workers died in that field as in maintenance. Within that field, the most dangerous sub-field is called “heavy tractor and trailer truck drivers.” And according to a 2012 American Community survey, immigrants make up less than 16 percent of truck drivers. If we look at rates, Frum’s argument also falls flat. The highest fatality rate is comparatively immigrant-spare transportation, at 15.9 deaths per 100,000 workers. Immigration heavy maintenance comes in at 6.6 deaths per 100,000.
There is some evidence that immigrant representation in even these fields is growing, as native-born Americans move out of blue-collar jobs and into more lucrative occupations. But Frum’s policy prescriptions will only exacerbate the very problems that allegedly worry him. Remember, Frum also suggests curbing legal immigration. Contrary to the claims of restrictionists, people don’t come to the United States to get free welfare and health care. Undocumented immigrants contribute more to the economy than they take out, and are less reliant on social welfare than native-born Americans. People come to the United States — legally and illegally — when there is demand for their labor. When the jobs dry up, immigrants stop coming. If demand persists, and the number of legal avenues for immigration continue to dwindle, the immigrants won’t stop coming, they will just increasingly stop coming legally. That means more — not fewer — people in the shadows, unrepresented, unprotected and un-franchised.
But I think my favorite bit of Frum-ian logic comes when discussing the opioid epidemic:
Without the immigrant workers less prone to abuse drugs than the native-born, American elites might have noticed the opioid epidemic before it killed more Americans than died in the Vietnam, Korean, and Iraq Wars and the 9/11 attacks combined.
This is nonsense, on a number of levels. First, there’s little evidence that American elites “missed” the opioid epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been dutifully publishing overdose statistics each year, as it always has. I’ve talked to several medical examiners in recent years who believe the epidemic may even be overstated. Overdose isn’t always easy to diagnose, and because there’s a nationwide shortage of medical examiners, cause of death isn’t always the product of careful medical analysis so much as a rough guess by an elected coroner with little or no medical training. This isn’t to say that there’s nothing to worry about, but ask any pain patient who is struggling to find treatment — the opioid crisis has certainly not gone unnoticed.
More to the point, Frum’s argument here is a bit of rhetorical jujitsu. The nativist line has long been that immigrants — particularly those who are unskilled and undocumented — are diseased, crime-ridden and drug-addicted. Faced with evidence that immigrants are lesslikely to be addicted to opioids, Frum flips an asset into a liability. Now, the fact that immigrants don’t abuse drugs unfairly distracts elite attention from the native-borns who do.
It reminds me of one of my favorite-ever anti-immigration arguments, from longtime nativist Mark Krikorian. Back in 2004, Krikorian lamented over a Boston Globe story about how dedicated, hardworking immigrants were robbing native-born American teenagers a rite of passage — the privilege of slacking off at their first job. He wrote:
One economist said employers “like the fact that immigrants can work more hours and more shifts than teenagers.” A job counselor said “Typically when kids apply for a summer job they might want a week off to go to camp or do something else. I tell them, ‘You can’t do that. You are up against someone who is going to be there every day and you need to deal with that.’” As a result, the percentage of teenagers holding jobs is the lowest it’s been since statistics started being compiled in the 1940s.
Is it healthy for the future of our society to freeze our children out of low-wage, rite-of-passage jobs? When I was younger, I washed dishes in restaurants, packed tomatoes, did lawn work — this kind of thing is essential if we are to preserve a middle-class society that values work, rather than the Old World model that mass immigration is pushing us toward, where only inferiors ever get their hands dirty.
Of course, Krikorian also regularly argues that the same immigrants employers prefer because of their dedication and work ethic are simultaneously a drain on the welfare system.
The thing to remember here is the only consistent principle behind immigration restrictionism is opposition to immigrants. As a nativist, you’re free to argue that immigrants are both lazy and hardworking. They’re both assimilating too quickly and refusing to assimilate. They’re both violent drug pushers who are crowding our prisons, and they’re teetotaling law-abiders whose good citizenship is unfairly diverting attention from overdose deaths and mass incarceration among the native-born. Pick and chose these points as you need them. Any old argument will do.
*****************************************
Balko “outs” the kind of racist garbage that dangerous disingenuous dudes like Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Kris Kobach, Steve King, and their many apologists and enablers in the GOP have been spewing forth for years. Only now it’s been elevated to national policy, repeated by Trump, Administration dunderheads like Kristjen Nielsen, Sarah Sanders, L. Francis Cissna, E. Scott Lloyd, and even some supposedly brighter career officials at DHS who should know better. A very sad state of affairs, indeed!
The good news: The “high approval rate” for immigrants shows that the bogus White Nationalist narrative that appears to have helped Trump get elected might be failing this time around. On the other hand, Trump’s approval rate remains high among Republicans. That’s pretty disturbing!
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Growing up in eastern Honduras, Jose said his father would get drunk and beat him with a horse whip and the flat side of a machete. He said he watched his father, a coffee farmer whose crops succumbed to plague, hit his mother on the head with a pistol, sending her to the hospital for three days.
At 17, Jose said, he hired a coyote to ferry him to the United States, seeking to escape his home life and violent feuding among his relatives, as well as seek better opportunities for himself and his siblings. He was picked up by border agents, then released pending deportation proceedings.
After struggling to get a good lawyer, Jose applied at 19 for special protection under a program for young immigrants subjected to childhood mistreatment including abuse, neglect or abandonment.
But like a growing number of applicants, his petition hit a series of hurdles, then was denied. Now he is appealing.
“It’s like being stuck not going forward or backwards,” said Jose, now 22 and living in New York. He spoke on condition his last name not be used because he is working without a permit and does not want to jeopardize his appeal. “You can’t advance in life,” he said.
As President Donald Trump vociferously pushes for a physical barrier across the country’s southern border, young people claiming to be eligible for protection under the Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) program increasingly face a less publicized barrier: heightened demands for paperwork.
Data obtained by Reuters under the Freedom of Information Act shows that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has recently ramped up demands for additional documents through “Requests for Evidence” and “Notices of Intent to Deny,” which can tie up cases for months.
. . . .
*******************************
Read the rest of Mica’s articles, with graphs, at the above link.
Importantly, the restrictionst group CIS’s claim (in the part of the article NOT set forth above) that SIJ status was intended solely for trafficking victims is untrue. I actually worked on the enactment of the original SIJ provision in IMMACT 90 when I was in private practice. It was intended to be used by various states and localities, the largest number of which were in California, who had significant numbers of foreign-born “wards of the court” (some of them foster children) who otherwise would have been denied work and study opportunities upon becoming adults.
Indeed, there is scant evidence that SIJ was ever intended to be limited to trafficked juveniles as restrictionists claim, although such juveniles often fit within the remedial scope of SIJ status. First, that’s clearly not what the statute says. Second, Congress has other specific provisions for the protection of trafficking victims and victims of crime under the “T” and “U” nonimmigrant statuses which may also lead to permanent status.
Just another example of how the USCIS and the Trump Administration have improperly incorporated many parts of the false narrative promoted by immigration restrictionists into Government policies and procedures.
One of America’s most successful exports is in trouble.
For decades, the U.S. higher-education system has been the envy of the world. We “sell” much more education to other countries than we “buy” from them; nearly three times as many foreign students are currently studying here as we have abroad.
In trade terms, this means we run a massive surplus in education — about $34 billion in 2017, according to Commerce Department data. Our educational exports are about as big as our total exports of soybeans, coal and natural gas combined.
But all that may be at risk.
A recent report from the from the Institute of International Education and the State Department found that new international student enrollments fell by 6.6 percent in the 2017-2018 school year, the second consecutive year of declines. A separate, more limited IIE survey of schools suggests that the declines continued this fall, too.
To be sure, some of the forces behind these decreases are beyond our (or President Trump’s) control. Some foreign governments, such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia, have reduced the scholarships that previously sent significant numbers of students to the United States, according to Peggy Blumenthal, senior counselor to the president at IIE.
China, whose students represent about a third of U.S. international student enrollment, has been investing in improving its own domestic university system, too.
But according to the schools that are now watching the trend, the biggest forces deterring international students are U.S. policy and U.S. culture.
“They see the headlines and they think that they’re no longer wanted in the United States,” said Lawrence Schovanec, president of Texas Tech University, whose foreign student enrollment declined by 2 percent this year. Sixty percent of schools with declining international enrollment, in fact, said that the U.S. social and political environment was a contributing factor, according to the IIE survey.
The most frequently cited issue, however, was “visa application process or visa issues/delays.” In the fall 2018 survey, 83 percent of schools named this as an issue, compared with 34 percent in fall 2016.
Problems began — but didn’t end — with Trump’s Muslim ban. Schools have seen students trapped abroad and have since advised some students not to go home before graduation lest they get stuck trying to come back. Said Bennington College President Mariko Silver, “We’ve seen individual students who have contacted us with the desire to come and have pulled out of the process.”
Boo-hoo, Trump supporters might say. What’s the big deal if some foreigners stay home?
Forget the feel-good explanations about how international students enrich the campus environment (which I don’t dispute). The students who come here also spend cold, hard cash: on tuition, travel, books, food, housing.
A lot of jobs depend on those students. American colleges and universities alone employed 3 million people in 2017. For context, that dwarfs the entire agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting sector.
And contrary to perceptions that foreign students take spots that belong to Americans, at many schools they’re enabling more American students to get a degree.
In the years after the financial crisis, as states slashed budgets for higher education, schools helped make up the shortfall by enrolling more out-of-state and international students. These students generally pay full tuition, and their higher fees are used to cross-subsidize lower, in-state tuition rates (and scholarships) of American classmates.
No wonder that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently paid $424,000 to insure itself against a significant drop in tuition revenue from Chinese students.
More significantly, a continued drop-off in international students could cause serious pain beyond academia.
Foreign students come here in part because they’re interested in staying after graduation and working here. They disproportionately study fields that U.S. employers demand, and that U.S. students avoid. Foreign students now represent a majority of computer science and engineering graduate programs at U.S. universities, for instance.
That talent pipeline may be drying up.
Foreigners are experiencing more visa issues not only when they apply to study but also when they apply to stay and work. That might be one reason more than half of the decline in total enrollment last year was due to fewer students from India in computer science and engineering grad programs.
Our loss has become other countries’ gain. We’re still the top destination for foreign students, but Australia and Canada have each seen their international enrollments rise by double-digit percentages in the past year. They’re enticing students in word and in deed, with messages of welcome and expedited visas.
Trump likes to say that our allies are taking advantage of us on trade. In this case, would you really blame them?
**********************************************
Yup. “Bad things happen” when countries allow themselves to be ruled by bad leaders whose policies are driven by irrational fear, racism, and nationalist jingoism. They lose out to countries whose policies are governed by “enlightened self-interest” and a sense of belonging to a larger community.
Great job by Catherine of picking up on a “below the radar” way in which Trump is destroying America.
For its toxic mix of stupidity, xenophobia, racism, and incompetence in its policies toward nonimmigrant students, the Trump Administration earns this week’s coveted “Five Clowns Award!”
Recently I got involved in explaining how one could respond to this “restrictionist editorial” from Investor’s Business Daily, asserting that any Democrat who refused to buy into the Trump Administration’s draconian, and often illegal, immigration enforcement program was in favor of “open borders” and claiming to provide some (actually highly bogus) examples. “https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/illegal-immigration-democrats-open-borders/
Gotta hope that these dudes do a better job on investment news than they do on immigration policy! So here are some “talking points” that I prepared to help set the record straight!
Since Congressional Resolutions are nonbinding, they commonly are used as a political stunt by the party in control of a particular branch of Congress. The idea is to force members of the opposition party to “vote no” so that can be used against them in political campaigns. (Sadly, many voters have no idea what a “Resolution” is, so they are misled into thinking it’s opposition to an actual bill or law.)
So, given the bad reputation of ICE immigration enforcement, it’s hardly surprising that Democrats (and perhaps some thoughtful GOP legislators) don’t want to be “hoodwinked” into a political scheme of carte blanche endorsing an agency and its employees who have credibly been accused of many abuses.
Democrats don’t deny that civil immigration enforcement (apprehensions and removals) is necessary. But, it is certainly debatable whether ICE as currently structured, staffed, “branded,” and led is the right way to go about it. Even then, the “Abolish ICE” movement has not gained majority support among Democrat politicians. To view it as the “policy” of the Democratic Party or the majority of Democrats is simply wrong and misleading.
It’s possible to debate whether President Obama deserved his “Deporter-in- Chief” title.It’s also possible to debate the immigration enforcement strategies his Administration adopted. But, it’s beyond reasonable debate that Obama 1) gave immigration enforcement a very high priority; and 2) was in some enforcement areas, from a purely statistical basis, more effective than his predecessors and than Trump. Here’s a good analysis of the Obama immigration enforcement program: file:///Users/paulwickhamschmidt/Documents/The%20Obama%20Record%20on%20Deportations:%20Deporter%20in%20Chief%20or%20Not%3F%20%7C%20migrationpolicy.org.webarchive
Contrary to the false scenarios and manipulated statistics presented by the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice, and immigration restrictionists, the Government’s own statistics show that when released from detention and represented by counsel, asylum seekers show up for their hearings nearly all the time: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sd-me-family-asylum-20180817-story.html
In those cases where they don’t appear, it is often because of defective notices from overwhelmed Government immigration agencies or because nobody has clearly explained their rights and responsibilities to them in language they can understand. Indeed, many “in absentia” removal orders are subsequently vacated and reopened by the Immigration Courts.
Even in this highly anti-asylum administration, applicants who actually manage to get a hearing on the merits of their asylum claims win about one in three times, certainly a high enough chance of success to encourage most to show up.
Detention is both incredibly expensive and dehumanizing. DHS detention is tied up in numerous court cases. Since asylum applicants as a group are seldom either security or flight risks, looking for ways to process them outside detention makes more sense than building more expensive and substandard private jails.
“Sanctuary Cities” is largely a misnomer, because all jurisdictions provide some degree of cooperation to DHS consistent with law. Two things drive this phenomenon. First, courts have held that detainers issued by DHS for civil removal purposesare not legally enforceable because a judicial official does not issue them based on probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed. Second, ICE’s enforcement efforts aimed at non-criminal community members have sown fear and mistrust that has undermined local law enforcement. Victims are afraid to report serious crimes and individuals are unwilling to cooperate with local police or be witnesses in criminal prosecutions because of fear of deportation. Consequently, many localities have limited cooperation with DHS to that legally required: cooperating in the apprehension and removal of serious criminals, answering specific requests for information, or honoring criminal warrants issued by Article III Federal Judges.
Actually, it’s the Trump Administration not “Sanctuary Jurisdictions” that are scofflaws, engaging in illegal actions.
Whether or not all residents of San Francisco should be able to vote for school board is a local matter that is not indicative of any national position of the Democratic Party. All children in the United States, regardless of their status or the status of their parents, are entitled to public education under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plyler v. Doe; and many undocumented individuals pay taxes, and nearly all would if there were a better system to allow them to do so. Therefore, on it’s face letting all residents have a say in how the local schools are run is hardly an unreasonable approach, regardless of whether or not it’s the best approach.
Moreover, what’s happening in San Francisco is by no means indicative of what Democrats elsewhere in the country think. Neither the Democratic Party nor the majority of Democrats has specifically endorsed letting undocumented individuals vote for school board.
Approximately 11 million individuals reside in the US without documents. The vast majority are law-abiding, productively employed members of our community, many with relatives who are citizens or Green Card holders. While those who have committed serious crimes or mean our country harm should of course be identified and removed (which has been a priority of every Administration over the past 50 years), the vast majority of the rest are not going to be forcibly removed no matter how nasty and cruel immigration enforcement policies become.
Therefore, developing some type of “earned legalization” that would either give them a path to citizenship, or at least make it possible for them legally to live, work, pay taxes and raise their families in the US makes more sense than forcing them to live in an underground status.
Unlike massive, ultimately ineffective enforcement programs, legalization programs are “self-funded” through application fees so they don’t add to the deficit like expanded enforcement programs.
In the long run, we need wiser leaders who will implement a larger and more realistic legal immigration system that gives more credence both to the forces abroad that force individuals to come here and the U.S. market forces that make employers in the U. S want and need to employ immigrants.
We are a nation of immigrants. We are not going to stop human migration; however, we could harness its power to maximize use of our legal immigration system, minimize the number of future migrants who come by way of the “extra legal” system, and make immigration enforcement more reasonable, achievable, and publicly acceptable.
Professor Susan Forbes Martin writes in Center for Migration Studies:
“After years of talking about a broken immigration system, President Trump offered a framework for immigration reform in his State of the Union address. In the lead-up to the address, the White House issued a statement on January 17 honoring Barbara Jordan, the former Chair of the US Commission on Immigration Reform. The White House intimated that Barbara Jordan would have supported the proposals to be championed by the President. The statement is a gross misstatement of Representative Jordan’s views. The President’s position on immigration, and the language he has used, represent all that Jordan decried during her long career and, especially as Chair of the commission. The statement misconstrues the recommendations of the Jordan Commission as justification for deep cuts in immigration that would make it harder for family members, employees and refugees to enter the country. As the Executive Director of the commission, I can attest to the fundamental differences between the Trump policies and Jordan’s and the commission’s recommendations.
In its first report to Congress, the commission did indeed state, as the White House reported, that it is “a right and responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.” However, the commission also concluded that “legal immigration has strengthened and can continue to strengthen this country.” Further, the commission “decrie[d] hostility and discrimination against immigrants as antithetical to the traditions and interests of the country.” Its recommendations sought to improve the admission process by ensuring the timely entry of immediate family members of US citizens and legal permanent residents (LPRs) as well as workers and refugees.
The commission’s approach on immigration and refugee policy was considerably at odds with Trump policies—those described in the State of the Union and those already taken through administrative action—in four major areas. First, the Trump administration supports deep cuts in the overall number of family visas, claiming it wants to eliminate “chain migration.” The Commission, on the other hand, viewed family migration as beneficial to the country. It was concerned, however, about the sustainability of the program because of the multiple categories with extremely long backlogs and waiting time. It recommended adding 150,000 visas per year to permit the more rapid admission of the spouses and minor children of LPRs, who faced waiting periods of as much as a decade. To accommodate these additional visas, the Commission recommended re-directing visa numbers currently allocated to adult children and siblings of US citizens and the diversity program after a transition period. The Commission did not see ‘chain migration’ as inherently problematic. Unlike the Trump position, the commission encouraged continued admission as LPRs of the parents of US citizens. As the Executive Director of the Commission, I understood that it would have been the height of hypocrisy to denounce chain migration, as my own grandmother, like millions of other immigrants before and after, had arranged for the admission of her parents and their younger children after her arrival in the United States as a young woman.
Second, President Trump has made the most significant reduction in the admission of refugees since enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980. The ceiling on admissions was set at 45,000 for the current fiscal year and actual admissions are not nearly on a pace to meet that low number. By contrast, the commission recommended a floor on admissions of 50,000, stating that foreign policy and humanitarian imperatives necessitated that the United States take a strong leadership role in assisting and protecting refugees worldwide. The commission saw resettlement of refugees as one of the core durable solutions to refugee crises and believed the United States should lead by example. It believed that consultations with Congress, as specified in the Refugee Act of 1980, would be an effective mechanism for increasing admissions beyond the 50,000 floor when necessary. Indeed, the commission recommended that the President have even greater authority to raise the ceiling on admissions in the type of refugee emergencies experienced worldwide today. Jordan and the commission were cognizant of the dire consequences of the inflexibility of US refugee policies in the 1930s when the government rejected thousands of Jewish and other refugees from Nazi Germany who subsequently died in the Holocaust. The Trump policies would bring back those dark days with a hard ceiling on refugee admissions even when crises require flexibility and American leadership. The need for American leadership on these issues seems altogether lost on the administration.
The Commission also supported effective protection of other migrants fleeing life-threatening situations. Jordan was personally active in ensuring protection of asylum seekers from Haiti, a country described by President Trump in highly derogatory terms. In 1994, she approached President Clinton directly to ask him to reverse the policies adopted in the Bush administration that returned Haitian boat people to Haiti without consideration of their claims for asylum. She specifically recommended that they be granted temporary protection, either in Guantánamo or in the United States, until conditions changed significantly inside Haiti or they met the criteria for asylum. She would have been among those denouncing the Trump administration’s abrupt lifting of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians as well as Salvadorans. She understood that TPS was not a perfect solution for those who were unable to return home because of the conditions in their countries and believed in the importance of finding durable solutions for them here or abroad. However, she would never have supported returning TPS recipients to the kinds of conditions that will confront them in Haiti or El Salvador.
Third, the Trump administration has argued that immigration should be based on ‘merit’ as measured by a point system that rewards education and English language skills. The president implied that Norwegians have greater merit than potential immigrants from Africa. Under Jordan’s leadership, the commission explicitly rejected a point system, explaining its decision as follows:
We believe that a system that relies on formulas and bureaucratic procedures for determining which immigrants meet the ability criteria for admission is not as effective in serving the national interest as one that relies on the judgement of American families and employers within a framework that protects US workers from unfair competition.
The Trump administration ignored one of the most important recommendations that the commission made on legal admissions. The commission believed strongly that admission numbers and priorities should not be set in stone as has been the case: the last major reform of the legal immigration system took place in 1990. Rather, it recommended that Congress should revisit admission numbers and categories every three to five years to ensure they still meet the nation’s interests. Proposals by other blue ribbon panels would do the same thing, including through a standing commission which would assess needs and increase or reduce admissions in accordance with current economic conditions. The Trump policies would trap the country with admission ceilings that may be completely inappropriate in the years ahead.
Fourth, the President has chosen to put most of his immigration enforcement eggs into two baskets—a border wall and irresponsible deportation initiatives. The commission, by contrast, called for a comprehensive enforcement strategy that set priorities for deterring unauthorized migration and, when necessary, removing those who were without status or committed particularly serious crimes. The commission was aware that even twenty years ago a large proportion of migrants illegally in the country had overstayed their visas. A border wall would do little to address that problem. Recognizing that most migrants entering without authorization or overstaying their visas did so for jobs, the commission recommended an electronic employment verification system and enhanced labor standards enforcement designed to sanction employers who knowingly hired and exploited undocumented workers. Today, with illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border at historically low levels, expending scarce resources on a border wall makes even less sense. The Trump deportation policies are also problematic. Rather than prioritize the deportation of those who commit serious crimes, as have prior administrations, the administration has chosen to deflect resources towards detaining and attempting to deport those that pose no threat to the security of the country, including people who have registered for such programs as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and TPS.
Under Jordan’s leadership, the commission also supported greater cooperation with other countries in managing migration and deterring illegal movements. As part of the comprehensive strategy, the commission recommended negotiation of trade agreements, such as the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that could provide greater economic opportunities in countries of origin while protecting the rights of workers. The commission knew that opening up trade between the US and other countries was not a quick fix to illegal immigration but saw it as a necessary part of a long-term strategy to reduce the push factors causing people to move.
Whether Jordan would have supported DACA is unknowable as she did not address that issue directly. From her views on the importance of citizenship, I feel confident, however, that she would have been a strong supporter of a path to citizenship for the Dreamers. Always seeking bipartisan solutions, she would have applauded President Trump’s proposed pathway to citizenship for about 2.2 million Dreamers. She would have wanted that path to be as expeditious as possible—much shorter than the Trump administration’s proposed 10-year delay. Jordan proposed a new Americanization program that would facilitate naturalization by providing resources to help immigrants more rapidly learn the language and customs of their new home. She would have recognized that the Dreamers have already learned those lessons since they have spent the most formative period of their lives in the United States.
In conclusion, the Trump administration would weaken the United States by placing irresponsible constraints on family reunification, refugee admissions and employment-based admissions while doing little to address the real causes of illegal immigration. The president’s policies are the opposite of Barbara Jordan’s view that a robust level of legal immigration is in the national interest. Even more critically, Jordan would have been the first person to speak up against the discriminatory intent and language in President Trump’s proposals. In her own words, “I believe the fact that America is a nation of immigrants should be a source of pride and not a reason to ignite virulent nationalism.”
****************************************
Susan is a long-time friend, former client, and “academic superstar” who was my colleague at Georgetown. Indeed, Susan and our good friend Professor Andy Schoenholz were the “originators” of the “Refugee Law and Policy” course that I taught for several years as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown Law. Small world!
Of course we need a “robust” legal immigration system not the irrational racially inspired cuts and trashing of “family based” immigration being pushed by Trump, Miller, Sessions, Cotton, and the rest of the White Nationalist xenophobic gang.
We currently have an estimated 10-11 million so-called “undocumented” residents living in the United States. The vast, vast majority of them are productive, law-abiding individuals who provide services that are literally the “foundations” of our economy. Since we are essentially at “full-employment” the idea that these folks are “stealing jobs from Americans” is preposterous.
The problem is not that these folks are here without documents. Rather, it’s that our laws have been so poorly designed that we did not allow for enough legal immigration at the right levels (many more in the so-called “unskilled” and “service” jobs). Consequently, our economy and market forces basically created an “extralegal immigration system” to meet the legitimate needs of U.S. employers and would-be legal immigrants.
Logically, that calls for an expansion, not a contraction, of legal immigration. By allowing U.S. employers to use legal immigration to fill certain positions, we would virtually eliminate the so-called “jobs magnet” for illegal immigration. Moreover, we would insure that those coming have been properly screened, documented, and will pay taxes immediately. At that point there would be fewer individuals crossing the border illegally, and we could be better assured that those coming outside the system did not belong. The system would finally become rationally related to our national interests and the interests of the immigrants, instead of working against these natural market forces! And, we wouldn’t need “the Wall”,” a militarized border, the “New American Gulag,” tens of thousand of additional immigration agents, or thousands of additional U.S. Immigration Judges to make the system work. Imagine how much that might help the national deficit!
“McALLEN, Texas — Illegal crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border, after declining in early 2017, began an unexpected upturn last spring that only recently receded, according to new government figures.
The figures reflect the up-and-down nature of illegal immigration and are reminders that multiple factors — from politics to weather to conditions in home countries — influence who tries to come to the United States and when.
Apprehensions on the southern border in October 2016, a month before Donald Trump’s election, topped 66,000. After Trump’s victory, the number of migrants trying to enter the U.S. illegally reached a 17-year low.
Monthly apprehensions continued to drop into 2017, hitting 15,766 in April, when the downward trend reversed. Apprehensions rose each month to 40,513 in December. Migrant advocates said the “Trump effect” discouraging illegal immigration might be wearing off.
But last month, apprehensions decreased again. It’s not clear whether the post-holiday decrease is seasonal, or whether it will continue.
There were 35,822 migrants apprehended on the southern border in January, according to figures released Wednesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s not as many as in December, but it’s more than were apprehended each month last February to October.
The number of families and unaccompanied children caught crossing the border, which rose nearly every month since last spring, also dropped slightly last month to 25,980, but remained more than twice April’s total, 11,127.
In releasing the numbers Wednesday, Homeland Security spokesman Tyler Houlton noted the apprehension figures for children and families were still high.
“Front-line personnel are required to release tens of thousands of unaccompanied alien children and illegal family units into the United States each year due to current loopholes in our immigration laws. This month we saw an unacceptable number of UACs [unaccompanied children] and family units flood our border because of these catch and release loopholes,” he said. “To secure our borders and make America safer, Congress must act to close these legal loopholes that have created incentives for illegal immigrants.”
In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, so many migrant families with small children arrive daily — more than 15,500 family members so far this fiscal year — that volunteers at a local shelter set up a play area in the corner.
When the number of unaccompanied migrant children caught crossing began to increase in April, fewer than 1,000 were apprehended a month. By last month, that had grown to 3,227. The number of family members caught crossing grew even faster during that time, from 1,118 in April to 5,656 last month.
When Elvis Antonio Muniya Mendez arrived at the shelter last month from Honduras with his 15-year-old son, the playpen was packed with the children of 100 fellow Central American migrants caught crossing the border illegally and released that day. Muniya, 36, had fled a gang that killed his 26-year-old brother the month before. He was hoping to join another brother in Indiana. He and his son were released with a notice to appear in immigration court, which he planned to attend.
“I want to live here legally, without fear,” he said.
Trump administration officials have proposed detaining more families, but that’s not happening in the Rio Grande Valley, where many are released like Muniya with notices to appear in court. The shelter where Muniya stopped, Sacred Heart, saw the number of migrants arriving drop at the end of last year only to increase recently, said the director, Sister Norma Pimentel.
“I’ve never seen so many children be part of this migration,” Pimentel said.
Children who cross the border unaccompanied by an adult are sheltered by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement and placed with relatives or other sponsors in the U.S. The agency has about 9,900 shelter beds at various facilities. As of this week, the agency was sheltering 7,800 youths.
Children who cross the border with a parent may be released with notices to appear in court or held at special family detention centers.
Trump administration officials have proposed detaining more of the families. But space is limited. As of Monday, the detention centers held 1,896 people. Only one of them can hold fathers, and attorneys said it’s always full, so men who cross with children are often released with a notice to appear in court.
Advocates for greater restrictions on immigration say more needs to be done to hold parents who cross with their children accountable. They say such parents put their children at risk by making the dangerous journey. Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge now serving as a resident fellow in law and policy at the conservative Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, said the way migrants are treated on the border encourages family migration.
“The reason the children are there to begin with is this belief that a parent with a child will not be detained,” Arthur said. That assumption, he said, is wrong.
He said Congress and the Trump administration’s unwillingness to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program has also encouraged migrant families to make the trip now in hopes of benefiting from a “DACA amnesty,” even though the program is limited to those who grew up in the U.S.
But migrants and advocates said they were driven to cross the border more by conditions in Central America — gang violence and economic downturns — than by U.S. policies.
“Many of these countries, you just cannot live in them,” said Ruben Garcia of El Paso’s Annunciation House shelter. “People will tell you ‘It’s just dangerous to walk around in our neighborhood.’ ”
**************************************
Quite contrary to Tyler Houlton, the Trump Administration, and the restrictionists, this isn’t about “loopholes” in the law!Individuals arriving at our borders have a right to apply for asylum and they have a right to receive Due Process and fair treatment in connection with those “life or death” applications.
But for the purposely convoluted decisions of the BIA, individuals resisting gang violence would be “slam dunk” asylum, withholding of removal, or Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) cases. If we just screened them for crimes or gang connections and granted their applications, they could easily be absorbed by our country.
But, even if we don’t want to interpret “protection laws” to actually grant much protection, we could devise humanitarian relief short of asylum or full legal status that would allow individuals whose lives were in danger to find safety in the U.S. Or, we could work with the sending countries, the UNHCR, and other countries in the Americas to solve the problem of “safe havens.”
While the Trump Administration largely ignores the lessons of history and what happens abroad, one has only to look at the “European example” to see the inevitable failure of the restrictionist agenda. The European Union has done everything within it power to” slam the door” on refugees, make them feel unwelcome, unwanted, threatened, and targets for repatriation regardless of the harm that might befall them. But, still determined refugees continue to risk their lives to flee to Europe.
What the restrictive policies have accomplished is to force more refugees to use the services of professional smugglers, and to attempt more dangerous routes. Killing more refugees en route does somewhat reduce the flow — at the cost of the humanity of the nations involved.
I suspect that the increase in deaths has to do with more individuals having to use the services of professional smugglers, who are more unscrupulous than “Mom & Pop” and “Do It Yourself” operations, and smugglers having to use more dangerous routes to avoid increased border security.
I suppose that restrictionists can be cheered by the fact that more individuals will be killed coming to and into the United States, thus decreasing the overall flow of unwanted human beings. But 1) it won’t stop people from coming, and 2) I doubt that finding way to kill more refugees will look that good in historical perspective.
As one of my colleagues told me early on in my career as an Immigration Judge: “Desperate people do desperate things!” That’s not going to change, no matter how much the restrictionists want to believe that institutional cruelty, inhumanity, “sending messages,” denying legal rights, and “get tough tactics” can completely squelch the flow of human migration. However, it certainly can squelch the flame of our own humanity.
“As we approach the first anniversary of the Trump presidency, a clear pattern emerges.
A Muslim immigrant and her U.S.-born husband kill civilians. Candidate Donald Trump’s reaction was to propose a ban on all Muslim immigrants.
Some refugees commit crimes. His reaction is to bar all refugees for 120 days and drastically cut refugee admissions after that.
A diversity-visa immigrant commits a terrorist act. President Trump‘s reaction is to call for repealing the diversity immigrant program.
A man is admitted under the sibling preference. His accompanying child attempts a terrorist attack years later. President Trump’s reaction is that all “chain immigration” should be banned.
I wonder what his reaction will be if his “merit-based” program becomes law and a person admitted under that program commits a serious crime, perhaps years later. Would President Trump then call for the repeal of the entire “merit-based” program?
The absurdity of condemning an entire group because of the actions of a single member seems self-evident. If a left-handed immigrant commits a crime, no one would propose banning all left-handed immigrants. The real question is whether there is a causal link between the commission of the crime and either the substantive criteria or the processes of the particular program.
No such link exists. For one thing, everyone who seeks admission to the United States under any of these programs is rigorously vetted. I know this firsthand, from my experience as chief counsel of the federal agency that admits immigrants and refugees.
. . . .
Anti-immigrant groups are fond of pointing out that, if an individual who committed a crime had never been allowed to enter, the crime would not have occurred. And that is true. But that observation could be made about any admission program. No matter how strict the criteria or how rigorous the vetting, there is always some possibility, however remote, that a given individual will one day commit a crime. Short of banning all foreign nationals from ever setting foot on U.S. soil, there is no way to reduce the risk to zero.
As with any other policy decision, the risks have to be balanced against the benefits. And there are benefits in allowing U.S. citizens to reunite with their family members, benefits in attracting workers with needed skills, benefits in diversifying the immigrant stream, and benefits in fulfilling a moral responsibility to welcome our fair share of those who fear for their lives.
Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Stephen Legomsky is an emeritus law professor at Washington University, the former chief counsel of the federal immigration services agency, and the principal author of “Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy,” which has been the required text for immigration courses at 185 law schools.”
*******************************************
Go on over to The Hill at the link to read Steve’s complete article.
Thanks, Steve, for sending this my way and for these great and appropriate thoughts on MLK Day! It’s important for those of us who have spent a lifetime working in the field and have served the public in our Government to speak out against the various false narratives and perversions of programs that have served America well being pushed by the restrictionists who control this Administration’s immigration policies. Hate, fear, and loathing are not the answers that Dr. King was promoting!
“Over the course of President Donald Trump’s first year in office, his administration’s top immigration priority has shifted subtly. He’s talking less about deporting “bad hombres” and talking more — a lot more — about how “chain migration” is bad for the United States.
“We have to get rid of chainlike immigration, we have to get rid of the chain,” Trump told the New York Times’s Mike Schmidt in an impromptu interview at his West Palm Beach golf club in December. He followed it up, as he does, with a tweet:
“Chain migration” — which is loosely used as a synonym for all immigration to the United States that happens based on family ties (when a US citizen or, in some cases, a green card holder petitions for a relative to join them) — has become a conservative boogeyman, and an excuse to cut down on legal immigration. It’s long been a target of immigration restrictionists whose concerns about immigration are less about people “respecting the law” than about the government exercising stricter control over who enters the country.
Under the Trump administration, those restrictionists have more political power than they’ve had in a generation — and they’re using it to prosecute an aggressive case against the family-based system as it stands.
The Trump administration’s attacks on “chain migration” have helped shift the terms of the debate over immigration policy. “Chain migration” is being invoked, among other things, to frame two totally different demands Republicans have made in the debate over legalizing immigrants temporarily covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program: preventing current DACA recipients from sponsoring their parents after becoming citizens, and cutting or eliminating some categories of family-based immigration for all immigrants in exchange for legalizing DACA enrollees.
But it’s not just during the DACA debate. The Trump administration blamed the failed New York subway bombing in December on “chain migration” because the would-be bomber came as the child of a US citizen’s sibling in 2010. Its National Security Strategy, issued Monday, called chain migration a security threat.
In other words, the Trump administration’s attack on “chain migration” isn’t just a setup for a particular policy fight. It’s about who is allowed to be a part of America — and whether changes to the country’s makeup are healthy demographic development or a sign of uncontrolled invasion.
“Chain migration” is the technical name for a commonsense idea: People are more likely to move where their relatives are
The dynamic underlying “chain migration” is so simple that it sounds like common sense: People are more likely to move to where people they know live, and each new immigrant makes people they know more likely to move there in turn.
But as obvious as the reality is on the ground, it wasn’t always incorporated into theoretical models of migration (particularly economic models). Economists tended to think about the decision to migrate as a simple calculus of how much money someone was making at home versus how much he could be making abroad, rather than understanding that the decision was more complicated — and that family and social relationships played a role.
Princeton demographer Doug Massey, one of the leading scholars on immigration to the US at the end of the 20th century (and the beginning of the 21st), was one of the scholars who tried to correct this oversimplified view. As he put it in an essay for the Inter-American Parliamentary Group on Population and Development in the early 1990s:
The first migrants who leave for a new destination have no social ties to draw upon, and for them migration is costly, particularly if it involves entering another country without documents. After the first migrants have left, however, the costs of migration are substantially lower for their friends and relatives living in the community of origin. Because of the nature of kinship and friendship structures, each new migrant creates a set of people with social ties to the destination area.
These immigrants would also end up behaving differently once they arrived in their new countries. If they were just there for economic reasons, they’d have an incentive to move back once they’d made enough money, or circulate back and forth. But immigrants who move for social reasons are moving to a new community — a new place they’ll stay. That’s an upside if you think it’s important for immigrants to become American — and a downside if you think the US should be much pickier about who gets to move here for good than it is about who gets to work here.
One upshot of chain migration: Any policies that made it easier for immigrants to bring their relatives would allow migration chains to form, thus expanding immigration into the country. “Family reunification systems,” Massey wrote, “work at crosspurposes with the limitation of immigration.”
Massey and the other demographers of “chain migration” weren’t presenting it as a negative. But their words were easily adopted by people who did. The Massey essay quoted above ended up being reprinted in an issue of The Social Contract — the journal founded by immigration restrictionist mogul John Tanton, who also founded the three most visible restrictionist organizations in American politics (the think tank the Center for Immigration Studies and the advocacy groups NumbersUSA and FAIR).
The Social Contract was a forum for concerns about the threat of mass immigration (particularly mass nonwhite immigration) to the United States. (The Southern Poverty Law Center, which considers all Tanton-affiliated institutions to be “hate groups,” has a rundown of some of the journal’s more incendiary content.) Massey, on the other hand is a longtime supporter of reforms that would make it easier for immigrants to come to America.
An article by a supporter of expansive immigration policy could be reprinted, with few apparent edits, in a journal for his intellectual opponents only because the debate over chain migration is fundamentally not about whether it happens, but whether it’s okay. Defenders of chain migration tend to argue that it’s important for immigrants to put down roots in the US, and that having a family here is part of what that means.
Opponents, on the other hand, see family-based immigration as the government ceding some control for who gets to come here, so that it’s not selecting individuals in a vacuum — which leads rapidly to fears of the US government losing control of the immigration system entirely.
The actual policy behind “chain migration”
It’s not clear whether President Trump understands how family-based immigration actually works — and when it can lead to “chains” of relatives. Trump has claimed that the man who ran over several pedestrians in New York in November brought 23 (sometimes he says 24) relatives to the US in the seven years he’d lived here — a claim that chain migration opponent Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration studies said was impossible. And the White House’s “chain migration” diagram makes it looks like each generation of adults brings in children, which brings their children — which isn’t how chain migration works.
To better understand what policies, exactly, opponents of “chain migration” are worried about, check out this chart from the restrictionist advocacy group NumbersUSA — which is a more detailed representation of the same fear of overwhelming, uncontrollable waves of migration.
Let’s walk through the scenario in that chart. It depicts an immigrant who’s come to the US on an employment-based green card (in black) and is able to bring over his spouse and children immediately. He can also petition for his parents to come to the US on green cards, and — after he becomes a citizen (something the NumbersUSA chart doesn’t clarify) — he can petition for his siblings as well (all in gray).
The siblings all bring over their spouses and children immediately, and the spouses (in orange, maroon, navy, and teal) petition to bring over their own parents and (upon naturalization) their own siblings. The original immigrant’s parents (eventually) petition for their own siblings to come to the US, and the siblings then petition to bring over their married adult children — whose spouses can then petition for their own parents and (eventually) siblings, etc., etc.
Meanwhile, the original immigrant’s spouse can petition for her parents (in pink) and, once she becomes a citizen, her siblings (in blue, purple, red, and green). Those siblings bring over their spouses, who subsequently petition for their own parents and siblings, etc., etc.
There are a ton of assumptions in this model about the way immigrants behave — why is everyone in families of four or five? Does no one really want to stay in her home country? Is there no such thing as a bachelor in any of these families? — but the visa categories under US law make it a hypothetical possibility. But the thing is, US policymakers know that it’s a hypothetical possibility. And there are safeguards built into the system that restrict family-based immigration far more than the diagram would have you believe.
In practice, bringing over a family member takes years — which makes it very hard to build a chain
No one is automatically allowed to immigrate to the US. Anyone applying for residency in the country has to go through a standard vetting process — including a criminal and terrorism background check, and an evaluation of whether they’re likely to become a “public charge” in the US (i.e., be unable to support themselves for income and rely on social programs).
Trump’s National Security Strategy claims that “chain migration” is a problem for national security, but there’s nothing inherent to the way someone is allowed to immigrate to the US that makes it harder for the US to catch would-be terrorists — that is, if anything, a failure of the screening process.
The bigger obstacle, though, isn’t qualifying to immigrate — it’s that the number of hypothetically qualified family-based immigrants greatly exceeds the number of slots available for immigrants each year. The US doesn’t set caps on the number of spouses, minor children, or parents of US citizens who can come to the US each year — but, again, those categories in themselves don’t create chains.
The categories that do create chains are strictly capped: 23,400 married children of US citizens (plus their own spouses and minor children) are allowed to immigrate each year, and 67,500 adult siblings of US citizens (plus spouses and minor children). Furthermore, because the total number of immigrants coming from a particular country each year is capped, would-be immigrants from Mexico, China, India, and the Philippines end up facing even longer wait times.
When people talk about the “visa backlog,” this is what they mean: In January 2018, for example, the US government will start processing applications for F4 visas (the siblings of US citizens) who first petitioned to let them immigrate on June 22, 2004, or earlier. That is, unless the sibling lives in India (in which case the petition had to be filed by December 2003 to get processed in January 2018), Mexico (November 1997), or the Philippines (September 1994).
Sudarshana Sengupta, pictured here with family in Massachusetts, had been waiting for a green card for seven years when this picture was taken.Washington Post/Getty Images
Understanding that an F4 visa is a 13- to 23-year process throws that NumbersUSA diagram into a different light. How implausible it is depends on your assumptions about how close together generations are, and how young the immigrants are when they come to the United States. But if you start by understanding that the first members of the orange, maroon, navy, teal, blue, purple, red, and green chains don’t enter the US until 18 years after the original immigrant (signified by black) does — and that the first immigrants in the yellow section of the chart don’t enter the country until 23 years later — it should give you a sense of how long it will take in to fill in the rest of the chain.
In practice, this ultimately looks like a lot of people coming to the US in late middle age. That’s backed up by the data: A study from Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies — which is critical of “chain migration” — found that the average age of immigrants to the US has risen over the past few decades, and that family-based immigration was a substantial cause.
But even then, the NumbersUSA scenario assumes that all the immigrants can afford to sponsor a family member to immigrate to the US. A US citizen (or green card holder seeking to bring an unmarried child or parent) has to prove to the government that they can provide financial support if their relative needs it, rather than relying on the government for aid.
In practice, this means that every immigrant needs to have someone vouching for them whose household income is 125 percent of the poverty line — and the “household” includes the relative who’s trying to come to the US. In other words, a single adult could sponsor his parent to immigrate if he made at least $20,300 — 125 percent of the federal poverty line for a two-person household — but if he had a spouse and two children, he’d have to be making 125 percent of the poverty line for a five-person household. And that includes any other immigrants who the household is sponsoring at the same time.
So an immigrant with a wife and two children who wanted to sponsor his parents and four siblings to immigrate as soon as he became a citizen would have to be making $56,875 — around the median income in the US. And if his spouse were trying to do the same thing with her parents and four siblings, as in the NumbersUSA chart, they’d have to be making $83,000 — which would place them in the 66th percentile of US household income.
That’s not impossible. But it certainly calls into question the stereotype of family-based migration as a way for “low-skilled,” low-earning immigrants to bring their low-skilled, low-earning relatives into the US.
There are ways for citizens to get other people to agree to help support a potential immigrant relative. But at the same time, the US government has discretion to reject an application, even if the citizen meets the income threshold, if they suspect that in practice the immigrant won’t be supported in the US. (Another factor in determining “public charge”is age — which is interesting, given the data about family-based immigrants being older.)
Add all of these factors together, and it becomes clear that an immigrant won’t be able to bring that many relatives to the US over the course of his or her lifetime. Vaughan’s studyfound that as of 2015, immigrants who came to the US from 1981 to 2000 had sponsored an average of 1.77 relatives to come join them. The most recent immigrants in the study — those who came to the US in the late 1990s — had sponsored the most relatives: 3.46. But both of those numbers include the minor children they brought with them at the time: In other words, they were hardly starting 3.46 new “chains.”
If anything, in fact, the family-based system is so overloaded that it ends up creating unrealistic hopes in people that they’ll be able to immigrate to the US. If your sibling moves to the US on a work visa, for example, you might start to hope that he’ll eventually be able to bring you along — but if you try to plan your life around that, you’ll end up waiting for two decades.
There are hints all this panic over “chain migration” is really about fear of cultural change
All of this is relevant to a conversation about whether to further restrict, or eliminate, the F3 and F4 visas for married children and adult siblings of US citizens. And indeed, that’s the most common policy demand being made by Republicans who are seeking to end or reduce “chain migration.”
But the most stalwart opponents of “chain migration,” the ones who use it to refer to all family-based immigration, period, are talking not just about the mechanics of the chain but about a bigger normative question: whether allowing immigrants to come as family units, or allowing people to immigrate based on family relationships, gives the US too little control over who gets to come.
The ultimate impression of both the White House and NumbersUSA “chain migration” diagrams is to make it seem that admitting a single immigrant unleashes an uncontrollable tide of infinite future family-based immigration — that each immigrant is a one-person Trojan horse for hundreds more.
This is an image from the pro-Brexit campaign, but the theme’s the same: a lack of control.Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty
“As more and more immigrants are admitted to the United States, the population eligible to sponsor their relatives for green cards increases exponentially,” the restrictionist group FAIR says on its website. “This means that every time one immigrant is admitted, the door is opened to many more.”
This potent visual is why “chain migration” has been a longtime target of immigration restrictionists, even when the Republican Party as a whole was attempting to welcome legal immigrants. For people whose biggest fear regarding immigration is that immigrants will change the face of America — that they’ll trample the country’s “traditionally” white, Christian majority — there’s little more potent than the idea of immigrants bringing over huge families, replanting their communities whole in American soil.
This fear goes hand in hand with a fear that immigrants won’t assimilate. When immigration restrictionists cite the second quarter of the 20th century as a great time for the United States, they’re not (at least explicitly) praising the racist country quotas that governed immigration at the time. They’re (explicitly) praising the fact that, with overall immigration levels low, immigrants were forced to interact with and eventually integrate among US citizens. The more immigrants that come over — and especially the more that immigrants bring their families over — the less, in theory, that they and their descendants will have to interact with people from outside of their community. In turn, this gets into fears that parts of America could become alien to Americans — cultural, or literal, “no-go zones.”
The use of “chain migration” in the current debate over DACA, to refer to DACA recipients allowing their parents to become legal immigrants, complicates the matter even further. Because the parents of DACA recipients have, by definition, lived in the US as unauthorized immigrants, this isn’t really about bringing new people into the US — it’s about legalizing people who are already here (or bringing people back who have been deported, something US policy already makes pretty hard).
The insistence among some Republicans that “Dreamers” not be allowed to sponsor their parents, even after they become US citizens, is really about not wanting to “reward” unauthorized immigrants for living in the US without papers. They’re worried about losing “control” in a slightly different sense — worried that any “reward” for illegal behavior will incentivize a new wave of unauthorized migration to take advantage of potential rewards. This is pretty far afield from the way that “chain migration” is commonly understood — but that’s the word being used in the DACA debate anyway, not least because the president has helped turn it into a buzzword.
Because these memes, and the fears that they provoke, are all so tightly connected, “chain migration” is both an ideological concern about America selecting immigrants based on their merit, and a racist smokescreen for fears of demographic change. It can be hard to separate the two. And it’s certainly not in the interests of the opponents of “chain migration” to try.
There’s a reason that family-based immigration has lasted as long as it has
It’s a lot easier to get people to agree, in theory, that the US should be accepting immigrants on the basis of “merit” — i.e., without concern for whether they have relatives living here — than it is to get them to agree on exactly what should be done to reduce the importance of family-based immigration to the current system.
For one thing, many policymakers, including many Republicans, see allowing some family members to immigrate as an important factor in encouraging integration. Allowing immigrants to bring along their spouses and minor children, for example, makes it less likely that they’ll decide to return to their home countries — and it means their children will grow up American, in more ways than one.
There are also policymakers who see family unity as a value worth protecting for its own sake (an argument you’ll often hear among religious advocates). And there’s, of course, an ethnic component. Asian Americans, in particular, feel that they are still trying to make up ground after decades of racist exclusion from the immigration system — and family-based immigration has been the best way for them to make that ground up. Mexican Americans, too, feel that the current system has unfairly forced Mexican immigrant families to be separated while other families get to reunite with ease.
All of these objections have combined, so far, to make Democrats firmly opposed to any proposal that would restrict future family-based immigration. But as “chain migration” begins to eclipse other issues (like immigration enforcement in the interior of the US) as a top Republican priority, it’s not clear whether Democrats’ commitment to hypothetical legal immigrants of the future is going to win out over their commitment to legalizing unauthorized immigrants who are currently here.”
****************************************
The fear that the US won’t be a “White Christian country” is what’s really driving the campaign against family migration (a/k/a/ “chain migration”). But, in reality, the days of the US as a “White Christian Empire” are in our national rearview mirror, no matter what the White Nationalist restrictionists do. It’s really just a question of how much pain, suffering, and divisiveness the White Nationalists can inflict as their already tenuous control inevitably continues to slip.
As almost all “non-restrictionist” economists tell us, restrictive national immigration policies are not in our national interest. In fact, more, not less legal immigration is going to be a necessity to keep our economy from stagnating like that of Japan and some European countries. Indeed, Paul Ryan’s goofy “everyone should have more kids” was an acknowledgement of how our future success depends on a robust legal immigration system.
Also, the concept that the legal admission of Dreamers is a “negative” that has to be “offset” by cuts in legal immigration elsewhere is pure fiction. Dreamers are already here and contributing to our society and our national welfare. Giving them legal status is not only the right thing to do, but also the smart thing. And doing the “smart thing” requires no bogus “offsets.”
“LONG BEACH, Pacific County — Named after a character in a cowboy book, Police Chief Flint Wright describes himself as pretty conservative.
A portrait of Ronald Reagan hangs in his office, along with photos of John Wayne, and his father and grandfather on horses — capturing the rural lifestyle of Pacific County, which curves around Willapa Bay in the state’s southwest corner.
He doesn’t talk about it much, but he voted for Donald Trump, helping Pacific County go with the Republican presidential candidate for the first time in decades. Among other things, he liked Trump’s promise to secure the borders. Economic migrants are not a problem in his mind — he’s seen how hard they work — but he wondered, “who’s coming with them?” Terrorists, he feared.
Then came the July arrest of Mario Rodriguez by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“I was kind of in shock, to be blunt with you,” Wright said.
Rodriguez, whose visa had expired, had lived in the area for more than a dozen years. He had worked in bilingual education and periodically tipped police to trouble spots.
Mario Rodriguez, detained by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement after his visa expired, has lived in the area for more than a dozen years and worked in bilingual education. He is now out on bond as his case goes through immigration court. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
“He was real pro-law enforcement,” the police chief said. “Shoot, anybody would like to have him as a neighbor.”
Trump, on the campaign, had talked about kicking out Mexican “drug dealers, criminals, rapists.” And that’s the kind of immigration crackdown a lot of people here were expecting.
“Yeah, we don’t want that element,” Wright said. But Rodriguez? The police chief couldn’t believe sending him back to Mexico would do anybody any good.
That kind of shock is reverberating throughout the county as Trump’s toughened immigration policy hits home. ICE has arrested at least 28 people in the county this year, according to numbers provided to the Sheriff’s Office.
While that’s just a small share of the roughly 3,100 ICE arrests overseen by its regional office in Seattle — which covers Washington, Oregon and Alaska — it represents a pronounced upward trajectory. Last year, ICE reported eight Pacific County arrests to the sheriff and for a long stretch of years before that, zero.
In a county of small, close-knit communities — Long Beach, population 1,400, is one of the largest — it’s noticed when someone goes missing. The number is magnified by those who have moved, gone into hiding or followed family after a deportation. People have lost neighbors, schools have lost students and businesses have lost employees.
. . . .
Shellfish farmers face many uncertainties, Sheldon explained.
The weather is a big one, periodically disrupting work on the water.
ICE is the new big storm, blowing in periodically to take essential workers.
Boats, working in the seafood industry, travel on Willapa Bay. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
“One minute they’re here. Another minute they’re not,” Sheldon said. “It’s not like there’s any warning.”
She and other employers say they get required paperwork for every worker — though documents might be fake — and don’t know who is illegally here.
“It’s been a huge impact,” said Kathleen Nisbet-Moncy, vice president of the Willapa-Grays Harbor Oyster Growers Association, of ICE’s arrests. Many of the area’s two dozen companies are small businesses. Losing key employees is a big deal. One, she said, lost a worker of 25 years.
And the industry already faced a labor shortage.
Workers need to have an understanding of tides; they carry tide tables like Bibles, arranging their days accordingly. Some operate boats. Others shuck oysters or process fish, not easy when done quickly.
Paid by volume, they sometimes work seven day weeks, or days that take in both early-morning and late-night tides cycles.
“Don’t you want people to work?” Sheldon asked. “Why don’t we say you can’t sell cigarettes to illegal immigrants?”
She was joking. But things didn’t make sense to her.
It was hurting her business. So many people have been arrested or moved that she can no longer fill empty positions. She has had scale back orders and turn away customers.
“Tell him I say hi”
In Long Beach Culbertson Park, as after-school football practice got started, 10-year-old Danner Walters broke into tears.
He was on the sidelines talking about his friend Joel. A week before, Joel left for Mexico with his mom and siblings to rejoin his dad, who had been deported months before.
“We’ve been best friends since kindergarten,” Danner said.
. . . .”
*****************************************
Read the complete, much lengthier, article, at the link.
Too bad folks don’t think through all of the implications before they pull the lever for immoral and irrational candidates like Trump and the GOP restrictionists. Truth is what the restrictionists don’t want you to hear or think about: the vast majority of the allegedly 11 million undocumented individuals here are law-abiding, productive members of the American community, doing jobs that help, rather than hurt, American workers, doing them exceptionally well, and raising or being part of part of “mixed families” with citizens, immigrants, and undocumented individuals all mixed together.
Removing them is a senseless and cruel waste of time and money. The only reasons for doing it have to do with racial and cultural bias — that’s why guys like Trump, Sessions, Bannon, and Miller have to come up with bogus economic and law enforcement rationales in an attempt to “rationalize” basically irrational policies.
Actually, the number of undocumented individuals in the United States is a boon to our country, our economy, and our culture. It shows that we remain a vibrant nation, and that we should have been admitting hundreds of thousands of additional legal immigrants annually. That’s why GOP proposals to restrict legal immigration are so wrong-headed.
Because we failed to do what we should have, the system basically “self corrected” largely by the operation of free market forces, but with some adverse effects like the use of smugglers, the exploitation of the undocumented, and the colossal amount of money wasted by “dumb” immigration enforcement and detention over many Administrations and Congresses.
But, it’s not too late to get it right by legalizing the productive, law-abiding individuals already here and expanding our legal immigration system to realistic levels that are more consistent with our needs as a nation. That will reduce or eliminate the “job magnet” and cut the business for smugglers without vast expenditures of law enforcement funds.
“When people arrive at the border seeking asylum from persecution, the United States gives them the benefit of the doubt. As long as they can show there’s a “significant possibility” that they deserve protection, they’re allowed to stay and make their case to an immigration judge. President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress want to change that.
On Sunday, the Trump administration demanded that Congress overhaul the US asylum system as part of any legislation to protect the nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation. The White House’s asylum proposal, laid out in nine bullet-pointed items as part of the broader immigration plan, appears to be modeled on the Asylum Reform and Border Protection Act, a bill that Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee approved in July. The bill, which has not been passed by the full House, would make it easier for the Department of Homeland Securityto quickly reject asylum claims and force most asylum seekers to remain in detention while their cases are decided. The overall effect would be to transform a system for protecting persecuted people, created in the wake of World War II, into a much more adversarial process.
At a hearing in July, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) warned that the GOP proposal would “all but destroy the US asylum system.” Now Trump is trying to fold those changes into a deal to protect the Dreamers—undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children—who were previously covered by Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Eleanor Acer, an expert on refugees at the advocacy group Human Rights First, saidin a statement Monday that Trump’s demands will “block those fleeing persecution and violence from even applying for asylum, and punish those who seek protection by preventing their release from immigration detention facilities and jails.”
But Republicans like Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) argue that asylum reform is needed to address “pervasive” fraud, such as false claims of persecution. Asylum claims from the “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have been a major focus for Republicans. Between 2013 and 2015, there were more asylum claims from the Northern Triangle, which has been terrorized by MS-13 and other gangs, than in the previous 15 years combined. A 2015 report from the Government Accountability Office found that the United States has “limited capabilities to detect asylum fraud.” But the scope of the problem is not known. Leah Chavla, a program officer at the Women’s Refugee Commission, says going after fraud is misguided in light of the many checks and balances that are already in place.
The real “fraudsters” here are the GOP restrictionists, led by folks like Goodlatte, Miller, and Sessions, trying to fob off their knowingly false and contrived narrative on America. Shame!
Second, the current system intentionally denies lawyers to the respondents in detention in obscure locations along the Southern Border, specifically selected to make it difficult for individuals to exercise their rights.Raising the standards would virtually guarantee rejection of all such asylum seekerswithout any hearing at all.The standard for having asylum granted is supposed to be a generous “well-founded fear” (in other words, a 10% chance or a “reasonable chance”). In fact, however, DHS and EOIR often fail to honor the existing legal standards. Forcing unrepresented individuals in detention with no chance to gather evidence to establish that it is “more likely than not” that they would be granted asylum is a ridiculous travesty of justice.
Third, access to lawyers, not detention, is the most cost-effective way to secure appearance at Immigration Court hearings.Individuals who are able to obtain lawyers, in other words those who actually understand what is happening, have a relatively low rate of “failure to appear.” In fact, a long-term study by the American Immigration Council shows that 95% of minors represented by counsel appear for their hearings as opposed to approximately 67% for those who are unrepresented. See,e.g., https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/taking-attendance-new-data-finds-majority-children-appear-immigration-court
Rather than curtailment of rights or expensive and inhumane detention, the best way of insure that all asylum applicants appear for their scheduled hearings and receive full due process would be to insure that the hearings take place in areas with adequate supplies of pro bono and “low bono” counsel and that hearings are scheduled in a predictable manner that does not intentionally outstrip the capabilities of the pro bono bar.
Fourth, a rational response to fraud concerns would be building better fraud detection programs within DHS, rather than denying vulnerable individuals their statutory and constitutional rights. What would a better system look like: more traditional law enforcement tools, like undercover operations, use of informants to infiltrate smuggling operations, and much better intelligence on the operations of human trafficking rings. And, there’s plenty of resources to do it. DHS just lacks the ability and/or the motivation. Many of the resources now wasted on “gonzo” interior enforcement and mindless detention — sacking up janitors and maids for deportation and detaining rape victims applying for asylum — could be “redeployed” to meaningful, although more challenging, law enforcement activities aimed at rationally addressing the fraud problem rather than using it as a bogus excuse to harm the vulnerable.
Fifth, Goodlatte’s whole premise of fraud among Southern Border asylum applications is highly illogical. Most of the Southern Border asylum claims involve some variant of so-called “particular social groups” or “PSGs,” But, the entire immigration adjudication system at all levels has traditionally been biased against just such claims. and, it is particularly biased againstsuch claims from Central America. PSG claims from Central America receive “strict scrutiny’ at every level of the asylum system! No fraudster in his or her right mind would go to the trouble of “dummying up” a PSG claim which will likely be rejected. No, if you’re going to the trouble of committing fraud, you’d fabricate a “political or religious activist or supporter claim” of the type that are much more routinely granted across the board.
Don’t let Trump, Miller, Sessions, Goodlatte, and their band of shameless GOP xenophobes get away with destroying our precious asylum system! Resist now! Resist forever! Stand up for Due Process, or eventually YOU won’t any at all! Some Dude once said “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” While arrogant folks like the restrictionists obviously don’t believe that, it’s still good advice.
“Washington (CNN)Democrats are raising alarms that more than a quarter of eligible recipients under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program have not yet filed to renew their status ahead of Thursday’s deadline.
According to data provided Wednesday by a senior Democratic congressional staffer and confirmed to CNN by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, 42,669 individuals nationwide — or 27.7% of the 154,234 people eligible — had not submitted their applications. That was slightly down from roughly 48,000 that the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday hadn’t yet submitted.
When President Donald Trump announced the end of the program, known as DACA, a month ago, he put in place a six-month delay on expiring protections by allowing any recipient whose DACA expires by March 5 until Thursday to apply for a two-year renewal. Otherwise, the program that protects young undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children from deportation will begin to end on March 5, as the two-year permits of nearly 700,000 active protectees begin to run out.
Democrats have repeatedly implored DHS to extend the deadline, saying one month to gather paperwork — and the roughly $500 application fee — is not long enough for those affected.
Trump sketches out DACA deal with Republicans at White House dinner
They’ve been especially critical of DHS for not making special consideration for DACA recipients in states hit by hurricanes Irma and Harvey, though DHS did announce Tuesday it would make case-by-case decisions for recipients in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands affected by Maria.
The frustration bubbled up at a Senate hearing Tuesday, where Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin cited considerations the Internal Revenue Service was making for Texas, Louisiana and Florida residents.
“May I implore you, implore you, to do the same thing at DHS that our own Internal Revenue Service is doing,” Durbin said to the DHS officials testifying. “If it’s good enough for our tax collectors to have a heart, isn’t it good enough for DHS to have a heart?”
Senators’ frustration with Trump on DACA bubbles up at hearing
According to the Wednesday data, more than 2,600 of eligible recipients in Texas had yet to submit renewals, 28% of the total eligible in that state. In Florida, more than 2,000, or 35% of those eligible, had yet to renew. In the US islands hit by Irma, 16 of the 37 eligible hadn’t yet renewed.
Democrats have also been frustrated with DHS over its notification process, saying without individual notifications to those eligible for renewal, the administration should extend the deadline.
“We are very concerned that because DACA recipients were not individually notified of their eligibility for renewal, tens of thousands of DACA recipients could lose their work authorization and DACA status protections,” Congressional Hispanic Caucus leaders wrote in a letter to acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke on Tuesday repeating a request to meet about extending the deadline.
Trump said he was putting in place the six-month window to give Congress a sense of urgency to put the Obama administration executive action into law.
But despite Tuesday’s hearing, multiple working groups and meetings the President has had with lawmakers at the White House, little substantive progress has been made.
The fault lines have remained consistent. Democrats support the bipartisan Dream Act that would protect eligible young immigrants who arrived as children and put them on a path to citizenship. They say they could accept border security as a compromise with it, but insist they will not vote for anything that could put the families and friends of those protected at greater risk of deportation.
DACA deal: A list of just some of the things that could go wrong
But Republicans are also insistent that any DACA deal must include border security and likely immigration enforcement measures, and the more conservative members of the party are suggesting policies — like mandatory worker verification, cuts to the legal immigration system and expanded deportation authority — that would be almost impossible to get Democrats to agree to.
Any solution would likely have to include Democrats, as they’ll be needed for passage in the Senate and to make up for Republicans in the House who would never vote for any DACA deal. But House Speaker Paul Ryan has also pledged not to move any bill that doesn’t get the votes of a majority of Republicans, limiting the options.
Durbin was joined on Tuesday at the hearing by Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina, in urging lawmakers and the White House to not try to concoct too big a compromise. Tillis has sponsored legislation similar to Durbin’s Dream Act that he bills as a conservative DACA solution.
Responding to a wish list articulated by a DHS senior staff member testifying about the White House’s aims, Tillis grew frustrated and urged members to focus on a narrow deal as a starting point.
“It reads like a laundry list for comprehensive immigration reform, and if Congress has proven an extraordinary ability to do anything, it’s to fail at comprehensive immigration reform,” Tillis said.”
******************************************
Bad news on all fronts for Dreamers, and for America. Over at the White House, notorious White Nationalist xenophobe racist and Sessions confidante Stephen Miller is plotting to destroy any chance of compromise legislation to aid Dreamers by attaching reductions in legal Immigraton and other parts of the White Nationalist agenda to the bill.
Politico reports:
“The White House is finalizing a plan to demand hard-line immigration reforms in exchange for supporting a fix on the DACA program, according to three people familiar with the talks — an approach that risks alienating Democrats and even many Republicans, potentially tanking any deal.
The White House proposal is being crafted by Stephen Miller, the administration’s top immigration adviser, and includes cutting legal immigration by half over the next decade, an idea that’s already been panned by lawmakers in both parties.
The principles would likely be a political non-starter for Democrats and infuriate Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who have negotiated with President Donald Trump on immigration and left a White House meeting last month indicating a solution was near. They could also divide Republicans, many of whom oppose cutting legal immigration.
Miller was upset after Trump’s dinner last month with Schumer and Pelosi and has been working since to bring the president back to the tougher stance he took during his campaign.
Miller has begun talking with Hill aides and White House officials about the principles in recent days. The administration is expected to send its immigration wish-list to Congress in the coming days, perhaps as soon as this weekend, said the people familiar with the plan, who include two administration officials. They requested anonymity to discuss the ongoing negotiations.
A White House official cautioned that the plans have not been finalized and could still change. Miller didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Unless they change dramatically from their current form, the immigration principles could short-circuit congressional negotiations aimed at finding a fix to DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — the Obama-era initiative that grants work permits to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors.
“Handing Stephen Miller the pen on any DACA deal after the revolt from their base is the quickest way to blow it up,” said a senior Democratic Senate aide.
Lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol panned an earlier White House immigration proposal spearheaded by Miller, the RAISE Act, when the White House rolled it out in August. Republicans including Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ron Johnson .)of Wisconsin all but declared the proposal dead on arrival.
Trump announced last month that he would end the DACA program, but he said he’d give Congress six months to come up with a legislative solution.
Despite Trump’s efforts to make nice with Schumer and Pelosi, Republican lawmakers signaled this week that the president is prepared to demand tough immigration measures as part of the negotiations.
In addition to provisions in the RAISE Act, the White House’s immigration principles also include parts of the Davis-Oliver Act, including measures that would give state and local law enforcement power to enforce immigration laws, allow states to write their own immigration laws and expand criminal penalties for entering the U.S. illegally.
The principles would also incorporate a provision from the Davis-Oliver Act that puts the onus on Congress to designate Temporary Protected Status, which allows immigrants to temporarily stay in the United States because they are unable to return to their home country as a result of a natural disaster or other dangerous circumstances.
The Davis-Oliver Act gives Congress 90 days to approve a measure extending TPS protections to a foreign state. If Congress does not act, the designation will be terminated. Lawmakers have raised concerns that Congress will be unable to agree on the designations, effectively killing the program.
In addition, the principles call for billions of dollars in border security, as well as money for detention beds and more immigration judges, according to the people familiar with them. Republicans are likely to support those moves.”
************************************
Miller’s proposals are right out of the White Nationalist restrictionist playbook. It will be a non-starter for Democrats. Additionally, no decent human being of any party should ever be associated, in any way, with any idea emanating from the arrogant racist Miller.
If Miller is involved, Dreamer relief is DOA. That means that Dreamers are likely to be left to fight out their future one case at a time in the Federal Courts and in the Immigraton Courts. Given the existing 630,000+ case backlog in the U.S. Imigration Courts, and the relatively cumbersome process for restoring “Dreamer” cases to the Immigraton Court Docket, not many will actually be removed from the United States before 2000.
I also think that Dreamers will have a reasonable chance of succeeding in the Article III Courts in barring DHS from relying on any evidence furnished as part of the DACA application and interview process as evidence of removability. That’s likely to throw a further monkey wrench into any enforcement initiative aimed at Dreamers.
So, the best strategy might prove to be working hard to remove the Trump regime and enough White Nationalist GOPers through the ballot box to create a climate for reasonable immigraton reform in 2021.
Sad, but probably true. A country that mistreats its youth in this manner can expect “very bad things” to happen in the future.
“An emerging list of conservative demands is threatening to derail the fledgling bipartisan effort to preserve the Obama administration program protecting from deportation 690,000 illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children.
President Trump discussed the outlines of a potential deal to protect those covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program with Democratic congressional leaders at a White House dinner this month. The tentative deal would couple permanent protections for those immigrants with improved border security.
But key conservative Republicans in the House and Senate are coalescing around a broader suite of policies as a condition of backing a deal, and that has Democrats and moderate Republicans warning that the current, fragile consensus could quickly break apart.
In the Senate, James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) introduced a conservative alternative this week to the Dream Act, a bipartisan bill that has some moderate Republican support and that Democrats want to pass as part of any deal with Trump.
[Trump, top Democrats agree to work on deal to save ‘dreamers’ from deportation]
The Lankford-Tillis bill, known as the Succeed Act, sets out a more onerous path to legal status for the immigrants in question, and it includes provisions barring them from taking advantage of existing laws that allow legal immigrants to petition authorities to allow foreign relatives to come to the United States.
Critics say those laws foster “chain migration,” inflating the amount of legal immigration. Eliminating the possibility of petitioning on behalf of relatives abroad is among another set of policies that House conservatives are pursuing on a separate track.
Key White House officials, including senior adviser Stephen Miller, have worked with members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus and other Republican lawmakers to hone a list of policy demands that go beyond the border security provisions on which Democrats have signaled they are willing to negotiate.
It is unclear to what extent Trump himself will support these provisions as part of the effort to negotiate a solution for “dreamers,” as the childhood arrivals are known. But the proposals are gaining adherents among some of the president’s strongest backers in Congress.
[Trump administration announces end of immigration protection program for ‘dreamers’]
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the Freedom Caucus chairman, said in an interview this week that a working list of policies that conservatives may demand includes ending the “chain migration” laws; mandating that employers use E-Verify, an online federal system to determine people’s eligibility to work in the United States; stepping up enforcement against those overstaying legitimate visas; and limiting protections for those who seek asylum at U.S. borders.”
***************************************
Read the rest of the article at the link.
These toxic dudes never miss a chance to push their White Nationalist anti-American agenda. Frankly, we don’t need to plow more resources into already perfectly adequate border security, and there is certainly no need for more immigration agents who have so little to do now that they can squander time busting law-abiding American residents, guarding their agency bosses, staking out hospitals and courthouses, and screwing up already out of control Immigration Court dockets. Where’s the accountability for efficient and rational use of resources? But, those could be trade-offs that the Dems could make to save the Dreamers. (Honestly, given some of the other garbage the GOP has put out there, funding “The Wall” seems like the least harmful of the trade-offs in human terms. Money gets wasted, America looks foolish, but nobody gets hurt and it won’t tank our economy like the restrictionist agenda on legal immigration would).
But, the hard core xenophobic White Nationalist agenda being pushed by Miller, the “Freedom” Caucus, and other restrictionists out to limit legal immigration, deny due process, and make a mockery out of our legal and moral obligations to refugees — No Way! The Dems would have to “Just Say No.”
The “Ace in the Hole” for the Dems: There is neither the ability nor the moral willingness on the part of the majority of decent Americans to deport 800,000 American young people. They might end up “hanging in limbo” till some future date when responsible government once again gains the upper hand over the “wrecking crew.”
“Defenders of President Trump’s decision to rescind an Obama-era immigration policy that shielded young immigrants from deportation have offered misleading critiques of the program.
They say the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, known as DACA, led to a humanitarian crisis on the border, put native-born Americans out of work and conferred legal status to recipients. Here’s an assessment.
DACA does not specifically grant legal permanent residency or citizenship, but there are pathways for recipients.
Conservative news personalities have suggested that DACA leads to citizenship or that recipients are eligible. These claims require more context.
DACA grants recipients work permission and protects them from deportation, but it alone does not confer citizenship or legal permanent resident status. They are not granted legal status, according to the Department of Homeland Security, though their removals are deferred.
But, according to immigration data, just under 40,000 DACA recipients have obtained “green cards,” or legal permanent residency, and over 1,000 have become American citizens. This is possible because DACA recipients can change their immigration status through a legal basis other than DACA (like marrying an American citizen).
While immigration law bars people who overstayed their visa from returning to the United States for three or 10 years, depending on how long they have resided here unlawfully, DACA halts recipients’ accrual of “unlawful presence.” So someone who obtained DACA status before the re-entry penalty was triggered would remain protected from it.
DACA recipients who entered the country illegally cannot apply for residency the same way as people who entered legally and overstayed their visas. They can, however, apply for “advance parole,” which gives recipients permission to travel outside the United States under special circumstances and is not specific to DACA. When they return to the United States, they enter legally, opening up other avenues for legal status.
It’s misleading to suggest that DACA triggered a wave of migration from Central America.
In a statement, Mr. Trump blamed DACA for spurring “the massive surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America,” a claim echoed by his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and other Republican lawmakers. But the link between DACA and the humanitarian crisis in 2014 is largely anecdotal and overstated.
Nearly 70,000 children, overwhelmingly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, tried to cross the United States border alone in the 2014 fiscal year. They would not have qualified for DACA, a program for undocumented immigrants brought in before age 16 who had been living in the United States since 2007.
There were certainly reports of children who listed American immigration policy as having prompted their solo journeys. The Obama administration’s clarification that the minors were not eligible for DACA also suggests a need to swat away the notion. And researchers have noted the possibility that DACA might have given migrants hope that the United States could provide future reprieve from deportation.
Still, it’s a stretch to say DACA was the single or even the main motivating factor behind the surge in migrant children reaching the border. For one, Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran applications for asylum to other Central American countries increased by 1,185 percent from 2008 to 2014, showing that the children were seeking relief not only in the United States.
More significant drivers of the migration were violence, poverty, gang presence, economic opportunity and the desire to be reunified with family, and “it remains unclear if, and how, specific immigration policies have motivated children to migrate to the United States,” according to a 2014 Congressional Research Service report.
Department of Homeland Security data also shows that the surge in unaccompanied minors preceded President Barack Obama’s June 2012 DACA executive order. The number of apprehensions began to rise in January 2012 and plateaued from June 2012 to January 2013, before increasing and then peaking in May and June of 2014.
The evidence that DACA recipients have displaced native-born workers is lacking.
According to Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, more than four million unemployed Americans in the same age group as DACA recipients “could possibly have those jobs” held by DACA recipients. And Mr. Sessions was more emphatic: The executive order “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.”
While it’s certainly possible that there are individual cases of an employer hiring a DACA recipient instead of an American citizen, the claim of a widespread trend is unproved.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that trends in foreign-born and native-born unemployment rates have not changed with DACA. For example, the unemployment rate for natives who had attended college was lower than their foreign-born peers both before and after 2012, while the unemployment rate for natives without a high school diploma has consistently been higher than the foreign-born population.
Similarly, DACA appears to have had no discernible effect on the number of total job openings or those specifically in white collar industries — where DACA recipients are more commonly employed — which have been steadily rising since mid-2009. Economists dispute the overarching argument that less immigration leads to more jobs for Americans.
The defense that Mr. Trump’s order does not open up DACA recipients to deportation is false.
Rescinding DACA will not lead to the “mass deportation of people,” the conservative radio host and author Laura Ingraham said in an interview on Fox News. Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, argued on CNN that the “only folks that are subject to deportation right now are those that have engaged in criminal activity.”
Mr. Jordan’s claim is false. The Department of Homeland Security has been clear that officials will potentially arrest and deport any undocumented immigrant without protected status, regardless of a criminal record. Though undocumented immigrants with criminal records still make up the majority of immigration arrests, noncriminal arrests more than doubled in Mr. Trump’s first 100 days as president, compared to the same time period in 2016.
Immigration lawyers say it’s too early to tell whether DACA recipients, who had to provide personal information to officials to apply for the status, will especially be at risk after Mr. Trump’s order. Previously, their information was “protected from disclosure” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection for the purpose of enforcement. The order, however, notes that information “will not be proactively provided to ICE and CBP,” and the president has said that former recipients would not be a priority for deportation.
“It’s very unclear to me whether U.S.C.I.S. will share that information if ICE affirmatively asks,” said Kate Voigt of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, referring to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. It is clear, though, that Mr. Trump’s order rescinding DACA opens recipients up to deportation.”
**********************************
Truth is that DACA is good for the U.S. But, truth seldom, if ever, enters into the restrictionist White Nationalist narrative.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9911171/Screen_Shot_2017_12_21_at_11.13.27_AM.png?w=660&ssl=1)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9945429/GettyImages_665129180.jpg?w=660&ssl=1)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6667687/GettyImages-540653952.jpg?w=660&ssl=1)
