Sinister Security

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Trump’s Immigration Ideas Get Even Weirder

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The Latest Nonsense About Immigration—a Quick Guide

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https://mronline.org/2018/02/07/the-latest-nonsense-about-immigration-a-quick-guide/

By David L. Wilson, MR Online

February 7, 2018

We’ve seen and heard a lot about immigration in the past few weeks, and a good deal of it has been out-and-out nonsense. Many journalists and politicians simply don’t understand U.S. immigration policy, some consciously lie about it, and a few, like Donald Trump, manage not to understand and at the same time consciously lie.

Here’s a list of some of the immigration absurdities now circulating in the media and in the political class.

1. We have a big problem called “chain immigration.” People who say this are actually talking about the family-based visa system established by the 1965 immigration reform. The term “chain migration” refers to an age-old process of people settling in a new country and then sending for friends and relatives. Many or most European Americans got here through this kind of migration. So why do conservatives call family-based immigration “chain migration”? Simple: they claim to support family values, so they don’t want us to notice that they’re opposing a program that favors family reunification.

2. Family-based immigration means “a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.” Most people don’t live long enough to create anything like the migration “chain” we find in President Trump’s rants and rightwing TV ads. It’s true that a naturalized U.S. citizen can sponsor green cards for a spouse, for parents, and for minor children, but the process involves many bureaucratic hurdles and delays. To sponsor other close relatives, such as siblings and adult children, the citizen confronts a labyrinth of quotas and restrictions, with delays stretching into decades for people of certain nationalities. Green card holders face even stricter limitations and greater hurdles.

In January Trump claimed that terrorism suspect Sayfullo Saipov brought in “22 people through the chain.” PolitiFact calculates that the 29-year-old Saipov, a green card holder since 2010, could only have done this by somehow “fathering more than 20 kids before he left Uzbekistan.”

3. We also have a good visa program called “merit-based immigration.” Currently the U.S. government makes immigration visas available for some people with special skills or employment opportunities; these visas are capped at 140,000 a year, including the applicants’ spouses and minor children. Conservatives generally like this program, but after years of charging that immigrants are “taking our jobs,” they’re naturally uncomfortable with the program’s usual name, “employment-based immigration.” So in the past decade they’ve been trying to rebrand it as “merit-based immigration.”

4. This program brings us people who “will contribute to our society and who will love and respect our country.” Republicans are trying to reorientthe employment-based visa program towards admitting immigrants with advanced degrees in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. This probably does contribute to our society, but the Republicans’ real interest is the new workers’ ability to benefit U.S. corporations. Recruiting these immigrants gives U.S. companies a technological edge; creates a “brain drain” for the immigrants’ home countries, often U.S. economic rivals like China and South Korea; and compensates for the shortage of qualified U.S.-born workers caused by the failures of our own underfunded education system.

5. Current immigration laws have “deadly loopholes” which allow “criminals to break into our country.” This is a reference to the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which George W. Bush signed into law in 2008. The act was intended to protect unaccompanied minors arriving at the U.S. border; instead of turning the children back, Border Patrol agents are required to hand them over to Health and Human Services while their asylum claims are considered. Most of these minors are Central Americans fleeing violence in their own countries—violence largely created by the U.S. demand for drugs and U.S. support for rightwing regimes.

There really is a loophole, though—for the Border Patrol. The law excludes “contiguous countries,” giving the agents freedom to ship Mexican kids back across the border to face whatever the drug cartels may have in store for them.

6. The only important immigration issue now is the legal status of immigrants known as “Dreamers.” The main media and political focus has been on the nearly 700,000 younger immigrants currently losing work authorizations and the protection from deportation they had under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), but more than 300,000 other immigrants, including Salvadorans and Haitians, are losing protections they had under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. And of course there are another 10 million out-of-status immigrants who never had any protections to lose; at least two-thirds of them have lived here for a decade or more.

7. But of course we can’t give all these people legal status. For much of the twentieth century—through 1986—Congress periodically provided an avenue to legalization for unauthorized immigrants with long-term residence. A 1938 report for the Roosevelt administration explained the reasoning: “It is not in the best interests of the United States that there should be a considerable number of aliens here who have resided in this country for many years and who are otherwise eligible for naturalization and anxious to become citizens, but who are prevented from doing so” because of a lack of status.

Why can’t we apply that logic now? Or was amnesty all right in 1938 because back then the undocumented immigrants were mostly white?

8. Still, we need to be realistic and compromiseon immigration. The White House talking points from January 25 laid out a hardline restrictionist agenda as the government’s bargaining position. Why shouldn’t immigrants and their supporters negotiate from an equally firm position? For example, polls show as much as 86 percent of the U.S. population supporting legal status for the Dreamers. Why in the world should we have to compromise on that? (The rest of Trump’s immigration agenda is also generally unpopular.)

9. At least we could compromise on Trump’s wall. There’s a widespread sense that it will do no harm to humor Trump by giving him $25 billion for increased border security. But even the existing border security is far from harmless. It disrupts border communities and causes environmental damage, and its main result has been driving migrants into inhospitable and dangerous terrain. More than 7,209 people have died trying to cross the Mexico-U.S. border in the last twenty years; for comparison, official estimates for deaths at the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989 are in the low hundreds.

What we actually need is a rollback of the border security regime, along with an investigation of corruption in the awarding of border security contracts. For example, how did we end up paying Boeing $1 billionfor a barely functional 53-mile “virtual fence”?

10. We can count on Democrats to do the right thing for the Dreamers. The first version of the DREAM Actwas introduced in 2001, before some of the current Dreamers were born. In 2009 and 2010 the Democrats controlled Congress and the White House. For two years the party leadership refused to put the bill up for a vote; when they finally allowed a roll call, in December 2010, the votes of five Democratic senators killed the legislation. Some Democratic politicians sincerely support immigrant rights; others are just trying to get reelected. We can only count on them when we’ve instilled a fear in their hearts that they may be looking for a new job after November.

11. Still, it’s up to the people in Washington; all we can do is make phone calls. Any progress that’s ever been made in this country has been driven by popular movements. Advances in immigrant rights will only come about when millions of people are backing immigrant activists in their struggles. We need to accompany them to immigration hearings; turn out for protests to defend their rights; reportand—if we can do it without endangering others—recordabuses by immigration agents; and consider risking arrest to prevent these abuses. We also need to do something seemingly less radical but no less difficult: educate ourselves on the realities of immigration policy and get this knowledge out to others, in personal conversations, through social media, at community meetings, at forums, screenings, and teach-ins—in any milieu where we can be heard.

“Knowledge is power,” according to an old adage. Rightwingers understand this; sometimes they even use the phrase as a motto. That’s why they’re working so hard to keep us in ignorance.

Immigration’s Border-Enforcement Myth

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What Part of “Illegal” Doesn’t Donald Trump Understand?

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/25/16929600/trump-immigration-bill

Could Trump get perp-walked out of 1600 Pennsylvani Avenue?

Poor Stephen Miller. On January 25 he finally got to present his full anti-immigrant program as the nonnegotiable position of the U.S. executive branch—and suddenly his spot in the limelight was stolen by a New York Times report that yes, Donald Trump really had tried to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. People like Miller love the word “illegal,” at least when applied to people with dark skin. They fail to notice the irony that they are working for a man whose whole career has been based on breaking or circumventing laws—a career that started with violations of anti-discrimination laws and may end with an effort to get around the special counsel statute. So if 11 million people should be deported for “unlawful presence” in the U.S., what should we do about Donald Trump’s unlawful presence in the White House?—TPOI editor

The immigration deal Trump’s White House is floating, explained

1.8 million immigrants could ultimately get access to citizenship — but the White House wants big cuts to family-based immigration in return.

By Dara Lind, Vox

January 25, 2018

The Trump administration is finally playing ball on immigration.

On Wednesday, it announced it would release a “framework” for a bill it hoped to see pass Congress. On Thursday, details of that framework leaked to several news outlets, including NBC and the Daily Beast.

Those reports say that the administration is willing to allow 1.8 million unauthorized immigrants who came to the country as children to become legal residents and ultimately apply for US citizenship — including the 690,000 beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as well as others who would have been eligible for DACA but did not apply — in exchange for a $25 billion fund for its wall on the US/Mexico border; reallocating slots currently given to immigrants via the diversity visa lottery on the basis of “merit”; and preventing people from sponsoring their parents, adult children, or siblings to immigrate to the US.[…]

Read the full article:

Trump Ordered Mueller Fired, but Backed Off When White House Counsel Threatened to Quit

By Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, New York Times

January 25, 2018

WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered the firing last June of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, according to four people told of the matter, but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive.

The West Wing confrontation marks the first time Mr. Trump is known to have tried to fire the special counsel. Mr. Mueller learned about the episode in recent months as his investigators interviewed current and former senior White House officials in his inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice.[…]

Read the full article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/politics/trump-mueller-special-counsel-russia.html

The immigration debate at the center of the government shutdown, explained

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DACA and TPS: Trump Plans to Push 1 Million More Into the Shadows

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/8/16862898/trump-tps-salvador-ms13-immigrants

Trump rants about Salvadoran gangs. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

On January 9 the administration announced that it was terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for some quarter million Salvadorans. Along with the termination of DACA and most other TPS programs, this will end protection from deportation for a total of about 1 million immigrants. Few of them will be able or willing to return to their countries of origin. The undocumented population in the U.S. has remained stable at around 11 million for a decade; now the White House, which regularly denounces “illegals,” actually seems to be working to increase the number. Maybe we should ask why.—TPOI editor

Trump’s attacks on humanitarian immigration just became a full-blown war

He’s trying to force 260,000 immigrants to return to El Salvador after decades in the United States.

By Dara Lind, Vox

January 9, 2018

On Monday, the Trump administration announced that it was stripping approximately 260,500 Salvadoran immigrants — who’ve been in the US for at least 17 years, since a 2001 earthquake — of temporary legal status as of July 2019.

It’s the latest, and most significant, blow in the administration’s fight against Temporary Protected Status, an immigration program that lets the government allow immigrants to stay in the US and work legally after their home countries are struck by natural disasters or war.[…]

Read the full article:

Ending Salvadorans' protected immigration status will exacerbate problems Trump aimed to fix

[T]he termination of TPS for Salvadorans likely will cause a significant humanitarian and economic impact for cities such as Washington, D.C., Miami and Los Angeles.

By Geoff Thale and Elyssa Pachico, The Hill

January 8, 2018

It is no secret that protection offered by the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program to Salvadorans, Hondurans and Nicaraguans lasted beyond “temporary,” extending over many years. Under TPS, migrants unable to return to their home countries because of war, natural disasters or other “extraordinary” conditions can live and work in the United States. The U.S. government granted TPS to Salvadorans in 2001, following two devastating earthquakes in the Central American country, and because of violence and instability in subsequent years, continued to approve extensions to the program.[…]

Read the full article:

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/367982-ending-protected-immigration-status-for-salvadorans-will-exacerbate

Save the Salvadorans

So long as our immigration system is built on contortions of logic like these, it will be vulnerable to Trump-style cruelty that’s then justified on the basis of common-sense law enforcement.

David Leonhardt, New York Times

January 9, 2018

The roughly 200,000 Salvadorans whom the Trump administration is subjecting to deportation are deeply ensconced in American society.

They have lived here for at least 17 years. Together, they have about 190,000 children who were born in the United States. The immigrants “work in a wide array of jobs, from defense contractors to school cafeteria workers, commercial office cleaners and restaurant owners,” Maria Sacchetti of The Washington Post writes.[…]

Read the full article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/opinion/salvadorans-tps.html

Book Excerpt: What Are “Chain Migration” and the “Visa Lottery”?

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On December 29 President Trump tweetedthat “there can be no DACA without the desperately needed WALL at the Southern Border and an END to the horrible Chain Migration & ridiculous Lottery System of Immigration etc.” As usual, he had no idea what he was tweeting about, but there’s a lot of confusion about these terms in the general public—especially about “chain migration,” which is now misused to describe what was previously known as “family reunification,” “family-based immigration,” or the “family preference visa.”

Here's what we say in The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers, second edition, Chapter 4, “Why Can’t They Just ‘Get Legal?’”:

Can’t immigrants bring their extended families here?

If you’re a U.S. citizen, you can generally apply to bring your “immediate relatives”—spouses, parents or unmarried children under twenty-one—here as permanent residents, although there are plenty of hoops to jump through, and it’s not always quick or easy. For other types of “family preferences,” an even more complex set of rules lays out “priority” categories and annual caps based on the family relationship and country of origin. Waiting times of ten to twenty years are not uncommon. In February 2015 the government was still processing family visa applications from as far back as August 1991. While they wait, applicants are disqualified from visiting the United States because they have shown “immigrant intent” by applying for immigrant visas.

Some conservatives now object to the “family preference” system, but it was actually introduced into the 1965 Immigration Act as a concession to conservative politicians who wanted to keep Asians and Africans out of the United States. Family preferences would mean “there will not be, comparatively, many Asians or Africans entering the country,” Representative Emmanuel Celler, a liberal New York Democrat who cosponsored the 1965 law, said in Congress during the final debate on the bill, “Since the people of Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries because they have no family ties to the U.S.”

What about the work visa and the “visa lottery”?

The government can also issue up to 140,000 immigrant visas a year for five categories of workers, and each of these has its own numerical limitations. The categories include professionals, people with special skills, and cultural or sports figures. There are openings for religious workers, former U.S. government employees, and investors, but only 5,000 visas can be issued to unskilled workers.

In 1986, Congress created a temporary category of “diversity” visas to bolster immigration from Europe, which had slowed thanks to a growing European economy. The Immigration Act of 1990 made the program permanent starting in 1995. The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, often called the “visa lottery,” allocates 50,000 immigrant visas to different parts of the world under a formula favoring regions that have sent relatively few immigrants in the previous five years. Natives of countries that have sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States during the past five years are disqualified from participating in the lottery.

[We’re occasionally posting excerpts from the new edition of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers. You can order here or from your favorite bookseller.]

Sometimes the Corporate Media Get Immigration Right

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/upshot/the-word-may-be-toxic-but-amnesty-is-everywhere.html

Many of the current misconceptions about immigration were heavily promoted by the corporate media in the past, but establishment outlets have occasionally published sensible articles on the subject recently—especially since Trump entered the White House.

In this selection, a New York Times piece shows that “amnesty” shouldn’t be a dirty word—living here without legal status is one of the few violations that don’t get a routine amnesty through the statute of limitations. At the Washington Post a Mexican-American citizen explains that she isn’t better than undocumented Mexicans just because her father immigrated here before there were limits on Mexican immigration. And at Bloomberg News Noah Smith deconstructs the fantasy that mass deportations would somehow help U.S. citizens (although he does repeat the tired and questionable cliché about crops rotting in the fields).—TPOI editor

The Word May Be Toxic, but Amnesty Is Everywhere

By Amanda Taub, New York Times
October 11, 2017

The biggest taboo in the immigration debate is the idea of an “amnesty.” Immigration opponents routinely paint amnesties for undocumented immigrants in the United States as catastrophic blows to the rule of law.

The implication is that the only proper thing to do is enforce laws uniformly, all the time, without exceptions — and that an immigration amnesty would thus be a threat to truth, justice and the American way.

But there’s a problem with that theory: Amnesties, though not always labeled as such, are central to how the nation’s legal system functions.[...]

Read the full article:

My family immigrated here legally. I used to think that made us special.

It took travel and time for me to realize how arbitrary and unfair our immigration system is.

By Amanda Machado, Washington Post

October 13, 2017

Amanda Machado is a writer and educator who lives in Oakland, Calif.

During my first year in college, in 2006, I walked across campus one day and found hundreds of white crosses staked on the main green. An immigration activist group had created a mock graveyard to honor people who had died crossing the border. As I passed the demonstration, I felt uncomfortable.

As a Latina with U.S. citizenship, I didn’t know how to identify with the undocumented-immigration battle, which is again raging after hard-line immigration proposals from the White House.[…]

Read the full article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/my-family-immigrated-here-legally-i-used-to-think-that-made-us-special/2017/10/13/ee08b130-aec6-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html

Mass Deportation Is a Lose-Lose Proposition
Ousting undocumented workers can hurt the economy and put American freedoms at risk.

By Noah Smith, Bloomberg News

October 5, 2017

In its zeal to deport unauthorized immigrants, the U.S. risks turning itself into a quasi-police state -- all for little or no benefit to the native-born.

First of all, net illegal immigration to the U.S. ended a decade ago [...]

Read the full article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-05/mass-deportation-is-a-lose-lose-proposition

DACA Update #2: What Sessions Said, What It Means, Prospects for Resistance, and Sessions’ Problem With Mere Facts

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As expected, the Trump Administration announced on September 5 that it was rescinding the five-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, with a six-month delay before the cancellation takes full effect. President Trump dodged making the announcement himself; he stuck Attorney General Jeff Sessions with the job. And later in the day Trump seemed to contradict the announcement with a tweet threatening to “revisit” the issue in six months if Congress fails to put together some sort of DACA replacement. What that meant was anybody’s guess.

What does it mean for DACA Recipients?

Sessions’ official announcement was vague, but the administration clarified some pointsduring the day. No new DACA applications will be accepted, but people who have already applied can expect their applications to be processed in the usual way. Current recipients whose two-year deferrals and work authorizations are set to expire before March 6, 2018, can apply to renew their deferrals and work authorizations, but they must do so before October 5. Current recipients whose deferrals expire on or after March 6 are simply out of luck.

In public pronouncements the White House tried to make its approach sound humane, but a talking points memo the administration circulated in Congress on September 5 had this chilling remark: “The Department of Homeland Security urges DACA recipients to use the time remaining on their work authorizations to prepare for and arrange their departure from the United States—including proactively seeking travel documentation—or to apply for other immigration benefits for which they may be eligible.”

According to the memo, the total number of DACA recipients as of September 4 was 689,821, somewhat lower than estimates in the media of about 800,000.

What Can We Expect from Congress?

“Congress, get ready to do your job - DACA!” Trump tweeted, implying that Congress now had six months to find some legislative solution for the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who came here as children. In other words, he was calling for some version of the DREAM Act, a legislative proposal that has been kicking around on Capitol Hill since 2001. It’s true that the DREAM Act has bipartisan support, and the latest version might well pass Congress if there was a straight up-and-down vote. But various observersnote that this hasn’t happened in the past 16 years—and the current session of Congress has had a lot of trouble passing anything.

Some Republicans will be pushing for a divide-and-conquer strategy: they’ll back the DREAM Act in exchange for an agreement to fund Trump’s border wall. But the Dreamers themselves seem to have no patience for this sort of horse trading. “I’m not going to step on top of my community to get ahead,” a DACA recipient protesting outside the White House told The Daily Beast on September 5.

DACA protest at White House, September 5

What Is the Resistance Doing?

Sessions’ September 5 announcement sparked protests that day, including civil disobedience and arrests, throughout the country. But what will the long-term response be?

Several legal organizations have already started to challenge the DACA cancellation in court, and at least three state government seem ready to mount their own challenges. These would be unlikely to overturn the White House’s decision, but they could delay implementation, just as the right wing’s challenges to President Obama’s Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) tied the program up in court until Obama’s successor could repeal it. Meanwhile, a number of organizations are gearing up to pressure Congress with online petitions calling for passage of the DREAM Act.

Some of the organizations we can expect to lead efforts to protect DACA recipients include Mijente, Moviemiento Cosecha, Presente and United We Dream,

What Are the Prospects for Resistance?

DACA recipients and their friends and families add up to a substantial part of the population, and young Dreamers have been especially forceful in the past as activists. Add to this their potential appeal to native-born citizens. A Morning Consult/Politico national tracking poll from August 31 to September 3 showed 58 percent of respondents supporting a path to citizenship for DACA recipients, while another 18 percent felt the immigrant youths should be allowed to become legal residents but not citizens. Only 15 percent wanted them deported. In other words, like the ObamaCare “repeal and replace” effort, the DACA cancellation is only popular with Trump’s hardcore base—and is extremely unpopular with the great majority of the population.

One way to build on this potential support among the native born would be to confront economic issues—especially the one often misrepresented as “they take our jobs.” Although much anti-immigrant feeling is simply racist and xenophobic, a good deal comes from native-born workers who find their own wages held down because of lower pay for undocumented immigrants. As a recent Economic Policy Institute (EPI) blog post puts it, “The reasonable fear unauthorized workers feel keeps them docile and quiet, which in turn diminishes the bargaining power of Americans who work alongside unauthorized workers.” The corollary, rarely mentioned in the media, is that providing authorization for undocumented workers raises their pay and puts upward pressure on the pay of other workers in the same fields.

A 2016 survey found that after receiving DACA protection, including work authorization, recipients found their wages increasing by 42 percent on average. Other factors probably contributed to the wage increase, but the main factor was certainly the DACA work authorization. So what happens when DACA recipients are forced back into low-paying jobs in the informal economy? “Ending DACA and forcing these young workers out of the formal, regulated labor market, thus making them easily exploitable will not help American workers,” the EPI blog concludes. “[I]t will do the opposite.”

Did Sessions Lie, or Is He Just Clueless?

A little more than two hours after Sessions’ September 5 briefing, Voxposted an article entitled “4 lies Jeff Sessions told to justify ending DACA.” One of these was his claim that DACA “among other things contributed to a surge of minors at the southern border with humanitarian consequences,” a reference to an uptick in asylum seekers from three Central American countries in the spring of 2014.

It is well known that the principal cause for the uptick was a sharp increase in crime in the three countries, but did DACA have anything to do with it? The Voxarticle said there was “a lot of disagreement” on this but indicated that the increase in asylum seekers was mostly due to “increasing violence and worsening economic conditions in Central American countries.” PolitiFact found Sessions’ claim “mostly false.” Actually, it’s completely false.

Sessions was repeating disinformation perpetrated by the right wing—including an office of the Border Patrol—in the summer of 2014, disinformation that was never sufficiently debunked by the corporate media. A leaked Border Patrol report about interviews agents conducted with asylum seekers one day in May 2014 attributed the uptick to “misrepresentations” about DACA. But someone also leaked the original report about the interviews. This report showed clearly that any “pull” factor from the United States for the uptick was the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA), not DACA.

Sessions probably wasn’t aware of any of this. He—or whoever wrote his statement—simply didn’t know the facts and couldn’t be bothered to find out what they were.

Trump Endorses Proposed Immigration Changes: Policy or Political Theater?

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http://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/raise-act-dramatic-change-family-immigration-less-so-employment-based-system

Cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz

On August 2 President Trump announced his support for a bill introduced into the Senate by Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue (R-GA), the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act. (Following a recent Congressional tradition, the title is chosen to produce a misleading acronym, in this case “RAISE,” falsely implying that the law would somehow push U.S. wages up.) Contrary to confused reporting in much of the media, most serious analysts think the bill will never be passed. If enacted, it would drastically reduce visas for family members of citizens, but it would have little effect on employment visas.

The New York Timeseditorial board correctly remarked that “[t]he only way to understand Mr. Trump’s vocal support of an obvious turkey is as yet another attempt to energize his dwindling base of right-wing and nativist supporters.—TPOI editor

RAISE Act Effects Both Bigger and Smaller than Billed, New MPI Analysis Finds

From Migration Policy Institute Letter

August 4, 2017

The RAISE Act, introduced this week by two Republican senators and endorsed by President Trump, has gotten major media and public attention even as its chances for approval by Congress appear scant. Still, the ideas at the heart of the legislation seem likely to surface in future discussion over reform of the U.S. immigration system.

A new Migration Policy Institute commentary analyzes the two major proposals in the legislation: Deep cuts to family-based immigration and the creation of a points system for the selection of immigrants coming via employer sponsorship.

Analysis suggests the family-based cuts would fall hardest on U.S. residents seeking to bring in relatives from a small number of countries, India and Vietnam among them. While much attention has focused on the proposed points system and the sponsors’ promise of “merit-based” immigration, in reality the legislation would change employment-based immigration less than some might anticipate. The points system would largely echo the existing preference for higher-educated, higher-paid workers or for investors, and for those already in the United States on a temporary basis.

“As a whole, the implications of the RAISE Act may be both bigger and smaller than promised by its sponsors,” writes MPI Senior Policy Analyst Julia Gelatt.[…]

Read the analysis:

Trump Embraces a Senseless Immigration Proposal

By the Editorial Board, New York Times

August 7, 2017

President Trump has endorsed legislation that would slash legal immigration by half, mainly by cutting the number of visas granted to relatives of citizens, while favoring people who speak English and have advanced degrees. The bill, which would do nothing to solve the country’s immigration and economic challenges, is unlikely to become law. The only way to understand Mr. Trump’s vocal support of an obvious turkey is as yet another attempt to energize his dwindling base of right-wing and nativist supporters.

The bill was introduced by two Republican senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia, who say it will protect American workers from competition from low-skilled foreign workers.[…]

Read the full editorial:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/opinion/trump-legal-immigration-senseless.html

Hundreds of American citizens end up in deportation proceedings each year, immigration data shows

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Activist: Threat to DACA Is a Reality Check

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Books on Immigration: Two Recommendations

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http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/en_los_campos_del_norte_20170630

Here are two books on immigration for which we’ve received recommendations from reliable sources, so please check them out..—TPOI editor

Elvira's Faith and Barack's Challenge: The Grassroots Struggle for the Rights of Undocumented Families

By Reverend Walter L Coleman (Author), John Womack (Editor), Elvira Arellano (Contributor)

Wrightwood Press (September 6, 2016)

John Womack, author of the acclaimed Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, writes this about Elvira’s Faith:

I can testify that it really is a wonderfully clarifying book, also a deeply encouraging book. It is about a young woman from Maravatío, Michoacán, intent in the economic wreckage of Mexico in 1995-96 just on making enough money to pay for her aged, unwell parents’ medicine, migrating north for work in Mexico, finally heading alone al Gran Norte, sin documentos, eventually for good in the US labor market, bearing a son here, eventually finding herself in Chicago, working in the crews cleaning planes at O’Hare, arrested in the typically hysterical post-9/11 raids to catch working people without papers, released, but under the constant threat of deportation—and then meeting the great Pilsen organizers, Emma Lozano and her husband, Rev. Walter Coleman, and joining their terrific fight for justice for undocumented migrants here.

Elvira is really the first of the great, conscious, brave, public champions of Sanctuary in the USA in the 21st century. She spent the year 2006-2007 living with her son in Rev. Coleman’s church, living every day protected night and day by the local community, then by plan, hers and the local underground’s, escaping “Homeland Security” to get secretly from Chicago to Los Angeles to begin a national campaign there for justice for the undocumented.

The rest you can read in the book, and hopefully colleagues, friends, and many students will too, learn from it, and act bravely on it. La lucha sigue.

In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte

By David Bacon

University of California Press; Bilingual edition (May 23, 2017)

UCLA African American Studies lecturer Paul Von Blum writes in Truthdig on June 30:

A new bilingual book by David Bacon offers both a dramatic antidote to the deplorable reality of racism and a majestic life-affirming view of these hidden women, men and children. "In the Fields of the North" is a landmark fusion of journalism and documentary photography. Bacon is an accomplished writer and photographer, with a long record of union organizing for the United Farm Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and others. He has effectively documented the impact of globalization, the degrading conditions of workplaces for many immigrants, the human consequences of migration, the political struggles for workers' and human rights, and many related topics in his books and commentary.

But above all, Bacon is a documentary photographer of extraordinary power, insight and skill. In his introductory comments to the book, he is modest-too modest-about contributing to the long history of socially conscious photography: "I hope my work contributes to this tradition today." I have had the privilege and pleasure of teaching and writing for many years about some of the giant American figures of this tradition, including Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks.[...]

Read the full review:

Immigration Practices Challenged in Court: Can They Detain Kids? What About Citizens?

Read

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/us/detained-immigrant-children-are-entitled-to-hearings-court-rules.html

A Ninth Circuit panel has ruled that the government needs to abide by its 1997 agreement to grant immigrant children bond hearings—for instance, the nine-year-old who was held in detention for 18 months. And now advocates are suing Miami-Dade County for holding a U.S. citizen overnight on an ICE detainer. (It was actually the second time immigration authorities mistook this person for an undocumented immigrant.)—TPOI editor

Detained Immigrant Children Are Entitled to Hearings, Court Rules

By Miriam Jordan, New York Times

July 5, 2017

LOS ANGELES — Undocumented immigrant children detained by federal authorities are entitled to

Border Patrol arresting kids. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

hearings to determine whether they should remain confined, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that immigration authorities must abide by a 1997 legal settlement that established a policy for the detention, release and treatment of minors in immigration custody.

That agreement, named the Flores settlement after the teenage girl who brought the original case, stipulated that a child in deportation proceedings be afforded a bond hearing before an immigration judge.[…]

Read the full article:

U.S. Citizen Detained by Mistake Sues Miami-Dade Over Immigration Enforcement

By Caitlin Dickerson, New York Times

July 5, 2017

Immigration lawyers in Miami-Dade County are challenging its practice of jailing people on behalf of federal immigration authorities, in a case that could test the Trump administration’s attempts to pressure so-called sanctuary cities and counties.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Federal District Court in Miami, lawyers representing a local resident, Garland Creedle, argued that the county had violated his Fourth Amendment right against unlawful seizure.[…]

Read the full article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/us/immigration-sanctuary-lawsuit-miami.html

Your immigrant ancestors came here legally? Are you sure?

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DACA: Trump Leaves Dreamers in Suspense

Read

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/us/politics/trump-will-allow-dreamers-to-stay-in-us-reversing-campaign-promise.html

Damocles and the sword

On June 16 the Trump administration rescinded Obama’s DAPA policy but left DACA in place, shielding some 800,000 younger immigrants from deportation for now. But the White House refused to say whether it would try to eliminate the program in the future.

Trump pledged during the campaign that he would rescind DACA. Probably his waffling on the issue reflects the program’s popularity and demonstrates once again the strength of the Dreamer movement, the young activists whose protests pushed Obama to grant DACA in the first place. Trump's failure to kill the program seemed to upset some people in the anti-immigrant right, while others suggested that Trump could use threats to DACA as a bargaining chip to push other parts of his program. As usual the rightwingers insisted on calling DACA an “amnesty.” Someone should tell Ann Coulter and the National Review how to use an online dictionary. An amnesty is a pardon; DACA simply puts off the possibility of deportation for a period of time, and provides no protection against arbitrary detentions by ICE agents. The appropriate comparison for DACA is to the sword of Damocles.—TPOI editor

‘Dreamers’ to Stay in U.S. for Now, but Long-Term Fate Is Unclear

“With Trump, we can expect anything. Tomorrow he can say that he wants to deport us,” he said. “I don’t know what to make of this, or what to believe.”

By Michael D. Shear and Vivian Yee, New York Times

June 16, 2017

WASHINGTON — President Trump will not immediately eliminate protections for the so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as small children, according to new memorandums issued by the administration on Thursday night.

But White House officials said on Friday morning that Mr. Trump had not made a decision about the long-term fate of the program and might yet follow through on a campaign pledge to take away work permits from the immigrants or deport them.[…]

Read the full article:

A day of rumors over deportation policy highlights divisions within the Trump administration

“There’s been a lot of work to change minds and hearts. So I don’t think it’s easy for Donald Trump to just end this program,” said Lorella Praeli, director of immigration policy and campaigns for the American Civil Liberties Union.

By Michael A. Memoli and Brian Bennett, Los Angeles Times

June 16, 2017

A flurry of rumors, conflicting reports and divergent statements on Friday highlighted deep divisions within the Trump administration over a major element of immigration policy — the fate of the roughly 750,000 so-called Dreamers who are shielded from deportation by an Obama-era policy.

The rumors began after Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, moving to meet a court deadline, issued a memorandum late Thursday evening that formally ended the legal fight over former President Obama’s 2014 DAPA program, known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents. That initiative sought to temporarily remove the threat of deportation for more than 4 million immigrant parents of children who are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.[…]

Read the full story:

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-daca-20170616-story.html

Trump Killed A Key Obama Immigration Program. But What He Didn’t Do Matters More.

Dreamers aren’t entirely safe, but the program created to protect them is still intact.

By Elise Foley, Huffington Post

June 16, 2017

WASHINGTON ― The Trump administration formalized an immigration policy shift on Thursday evening that was notable for what it didn’t do as much as what it did. The Department of Homeland Security rescinded DAPA, a never-implemented program that would have allowed some undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents to stay in the country.

But more significantly, it left in place the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a policy that President Donald Trump promised to eliminate, and one that has shielded hundreds of thousands from deportation.[…]

Read the full article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-daca-dreamers_us_5943f894e4b01eab7a2d351d?ncid=engmodushpmg00000003

Immigrants, Wage Theft, and Trump

Read

http://prospect.org/article/how-trump-made-wage-theft-routine

Undocumented immigrants are easy targets for employers who want to rip their workers off. The situation seems to be getting worse under Trump—which doesn’t mean it wasn’t bad before.—TPOI editor

Dairy workers protest. Photo: New York Upstate

How Trump Made Wage Theft Routine

…[W]ith Donald Trump as president, more employers think wage theft is even easier to get away with.

Eric Cortellessa, American Prospect

June 5, 2017

Enrique is a farmworker in California. He has a wife and two sons living in Mexico who depend on the money he sends them. For parts of the year—from May to November—he goes north to Washington to pick apples and cherries. Sometimes, he says, he isn’t paid for all the work he does. On one such occasion, he and his coworkers wanted to complain. Stiffing employees, after all, is a federal crime.

But it’s not so simple. Enrique is worried that reporting the crime could backfire against him by exposing his immigration status.

“When we get paid—sometimes we get paid and sometimes we don’t—we notice that there are hours missing, and we just fear saying anything, because we’ve been told repeatedly that if we say anything, they are going to call immigration on us,” he says.[...]

Read the full article:

Upstate immigrant dairy farm workers report injuries and intimidation

By Patrick Lohmann, New York Upstate

June 1, 2017

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Immigrant dairy farm workers who spoke to researchers in Upstate New York reported hazardous working conditions, wage theft and intimidation, according to findings published in a report by workers' rights groups and Syracuse University professors.

Researchers interviewed 88 immigrant workers at 53 Upstate dairy farms in 2014 and 2015. They did so without the farm owners' knowledge and granted the workers, most of whom came to the country illegally, anonymity for fear of being deported, the authors said.

Nearly half of the workers said they were bullied or intimidated by their bosses, and two-thirds said they'd suffered at least one injury. […]

Read the full article:

http://www.newyorkupstate.com/news/2017/06/upstate_immigrant_dairy_farmers_report_workplace_injuries_and_isolation_study_fi.html

Download the report:

https://milkedny.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/milked_053017.pdf