Border
Obama Can’t Escape Immigration at North American Summit
One would be hard pressed to engage in a discussion about U.S.-Mexico relations and not have the topic of immigration raise its head in a matter of minutes. Immigration is a critically important aspect of the relationship between the two countries, intersecting virtually every topic imaginable, from agriculture to… Read More
Farm Bureau Warns Enforcement-Only Immigration Reform Would Harm America’s Food Supply
The on-the-ground harm of enforcement-only state immigration policies is clear. The “self-deportation” style laws in Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia all dealt severe blows to the states’ economies, particularly the agricultural industries. A federal enforcement-only approach to immigration reform would have a similarly harmful impact, leading… Read More
New Year, New Leadership and New Opportunities at DHS
The Department of Homeland Security enters 2014 with new leadership, following the confirmation this month of Jeh Johnson and Alejandro Mayorkas for Secretary and Deputy Secretary, respectively. Johnson and Mayorkas bring years of government service to their new jobs. Mayorkas’ tenure as Director of USCIS led to a far more open agency that treated the public as a partner, with innovations such as public comment on policy memos, expanded public engagement opportunities, the entrepreneur-in-residence program, and the delivery of a working program to process DACA applications within two months of the president’s announcement of the program. These successes, coupled with Johnson’s experience as the top Pentagon lawyer, promise a new direction for DHS. Read More
New ICE Deportation Statistics Are No Cause for Celebration
There is little to cheer in the new deportation statistics released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While the numbers document a 10 percent decline in the total number of deportations compared to last year, they also reveal the extent to which immigration enforcement resources are still devoted to apprehending, detaining, and deporting individuals who represent no conceivable threat to public safety or national security. In fact, the overwhelming majority of people deported by ICE either have no prior criminal record or were convicted of misdemeanors. While ICE does indeed capture and remove potentially dangerous individuals, most of its resources remain devoted to the enforcement of a broken and unworkable immigration system. The latest decline in removals notwithstanding, the U.S. deportation machine remains severely out of balance and lacking in either flexibility or meaningful opportunities for due process. Read More
Dollars and Lives Lost in the Wait for Immigration Reform
Two-and-a-half months after the Senate passed immigration reform legislation (S. 744), the House of Representatives continues to dawdle. Other than giving speeches and mulling over a few backward-looking, enforcement-only bills, the House has done nothing to revamp the broken U.S. immigration system or to realistically resolve the status of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants now living in the United States. The standard excuse for this inaction is that there are too many other high-priority items on the legislative agenda right now—so immigration reform will have to wait. But while Congress waits, dollars and lives are being lost. Read More
Beyond the Border Surge, What Else Is In the Senate Compromise?
On Monday, the Senate voted 67 to 27 to invoke cloture on Leahy 1183, an amendment to substitute the current version of the Senate’s immigration reform bill, S. 744, with a revised version of the bill that includes a host of amendments that have been referred to as the Corker/Hoeven compromise—or, more simply, the border surge. Thirty hours from that vote—sometime Wednesday morning—the Senate will actually vote on whether to adopt Leahy 1183. The cloture vote is a strong indicator of passage of the amendment and, many predict, of the bill overall. Read More
New Report Reveals Scale of Deaths Along U.S.-Mexico Border
Nothing illustrates the high stakes of the immigration reform debate now taking place in the Senate quite as powerfully as the growing body count along the U.S.-Mexico border. Despite the U.S. government’s decades-long effort to stop unauthorized immigration through an “enforcement first” strategy, unauthorized migrants continue to cross the border—and scores die before completing the journey. In fact, the Tucson sector alone witnessed 2,238 migrant deaths between Fiscal Year (FY) 1990 and FY 2012. That is one of the central findings of a new report from the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona, entitled A Continued Humanitarian Crisis at the Border. The report examines data from the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner to shed light on trends in border fatalities over time, as well as the demographic characteristics of those who died. Read More
Will Immigration Reform Correct the Immigration System’s Gender Bias?
Within the current immigration system, many women confront systematic barriers when trying to gain legal status. This is one of the main conclusions drawn from a study conducted by social scientists Cecilia Menjivar and Olivia Salcido. Based on a 10-year-long research project on immigrant women in Arizona, the authors identify specific instances in which gender inequality is ingrained in the formulation, interpretation, and implementation of immigration laws. Read More
How Immigrant Entrepreneurs Fare in the New Immigration Bill
With the Senate Judiciary Committee’s vote last week to pass S.744 on to the Senate floor, a new proposal for spurring immigrant entrepreneurship and innovation will be before Congress. Title IV, Subtitle H of the bill creates the INVEST visa (Investing in New Venture, Entrepreneurial Startups, and Technologies) for immigrant entrepreneurs. This new visa program would allow immigrant entrepreneurs to come to the United States, start businesses, and create jobs in America. There would be two types of INVEST visas. A nonimmigrant INVEST visa would be renewable provided certain initial investment, annual revenue, and job creation criteria are met within an initial three-year period. The immigrant version of the INVEST visa would have basically the same criteria just at higher thresholds. The committee also adopted an amendment that permanently authorizes the EB-5 Regional Center Program, which has created tens of thousands of American jobs and attracted over $1 billion in investments since 2006. Read More
What Do You Think About Immigration Reform?
As the Senate continues to shepherd a comprehensive immigration reform bill through the legislative process (day two of mark-up in the Senate Judiciary Committee begins tomorrow), it becomes clear how many issues are at stake in reform and how interconnected they are. It’s also overwhelming at times. That’s why the American Immigration Council is attempting to divide the issues into smaller discussions on our wiki, ThinkImmigration.org. Read More
All gifts are matched dollar for dollar
No one should face the immigration system alone
