100,000 children in London ‘without secure immigration status’

2020/01/10 1 Comment

Of note:

New research estimates that more than 100,000 children are living in London without secure immigration status, despite more than half of them having been born in the UK.

Children who are undocumented may face problems accessing higher education, health care, opening bank accounts, and applying for driving licences, housing and jobs. The findings were condemned by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, as a “national disgrace”.

The study, commissioned by the mayor and undertaken by the University of Wolverhampton, estimated that there were around 107,000 undocumented children and 26,000 18- to 24-year-olds in London. Once an undocumented child turns 18, they face the threat of deportation to a country they may never have visited.

Undocumented people can include those who arrived in the UK with proper documentation but who stayed beyond their permitted time, those who entered without proper documentation, trafficked children, unaccompanied minors whose temporary leave to remain was withdrawn once they reached adulthood and young people born to parents who are themselves undocumented.

The research found that more than half of the UK’s estimated 674,000 undocumented adults and children live in London. It warns that the number of undocumented young people could rise dramatically if the estimated 350,000 young European nationals in the UK are not helped to apply for the EU Settlement Scheme that will enable them to remain after Brexit.

Assessing the size of Britain’s undocumented population is inevitably a challenging process, since there is no official data and it requires counting people outside most formal systems. Instead, the report has reviewed previous research and analysed all available data to come up with a conservative estimate. The study suggests that the population of undocumented migrant children has grown by 56% between March 2011 and March 2017.

The report highlights the high cost of regularising immigration status. “The Windrush scandal has exposed the barriers facing people who have lived in the UK for many years, including a complex application process, a lack of awareness of the system, cuts to legal aid and the high cost of applications – with the high court last month deeming as ‘unlawful’ a government decision to charge £1,012 to register children as British citizens,” the report states. “Since 2012, only 10% of families with undocumented children in the UK have applied to secure their immigration status.”

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Majority of Countries Don’t Approve of Trump’s Bid to Curb Immigration to U.S., 33-Nation Study Finds

2020/01/10 Leave a comment

More interesting public opinion research from Pew. Of most interest is that the same demographic patterns regarding concerns about immigration – right-oriented and rural area voters – are common to most countries:

Countries around the world strongly disapprove of President Donald Trump’s efforts to deter immigration to the U.S., a Pew Research Center poll of 33 nations has found.

In the Pew Research Center’s Spring 2019 Global Attitudes Survey, Canada joined countries including Spain, Sweden, Germany and Turkey in showing high rates of disapproval for Trump’s policy to “allow fewer immigrants” into the U.S.

Most nations in Asia-Pacific, Middle East and North African and Latin American countries, the Pew Research Center said, “disapprove of restricting immigration into the U.S.”

However, it asserted, there are “notable exceptions.”

In Europe, for example, Pew said a median of 51 percent of countries polled said they disapprove of Trump’s efforts.

However, the research center noted, “this masks relative support among many Central and Eastern Europeans for restricting immigration into the U.S.,” including Hungary and Poland, where approval ratings for Trump’s immigration efforts were higher than disapproval ratings.

“While majorities in Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, France, Spain and the U.K. oppose Trump’s immigration policy, about half or more in Hungary, Slovakia and Poland (as well as a plurality in the Czech Republic) approve,” the study said.

Another “clear exception” to the trend, the study found, was Israel, where 58 percent said they were in support of Trump’s plan to limit migration.

Israel showed the highest rates of approval for the U.S. curbing immigration, followed by Hungary, where 54 percent were, in favor and Italy and Poland, where 51 percent were in support across both nations.

The Pew Research Center also noted that “there are consistent demographic patterns on this question as well, with ideologically right-oriented respondents expressing more approval than those on the left in most countries.”

For example, in Italy, the poll found that at least six in ten of those who identified themselves as being on the “right end of the ideological spectrum” were in support of Trump’s immigration policies, compared to just 26 percent of left-leaning people.

The divide between European supporters of right-wing populist parties and nonsupporters was also clear in the study, with supporters of Marie Le Pen’s National Rally in France three times as likely to support restricting immigration to the U.S. compared to nonsupporters.

Rural areas, the study also found, were also more likely to show support for restricting immigration to the U.S., including rural areas across Britain, where 41 percent of people living in rural regions said they supported the effort compared to 24 percent who lived in urban areas.

Results for the survey, which was conducted in Spring 2019, are based on telephone and face-to-face interviews Pew says were conducted under the direction of Gallup.

Newsweek has contacted the White House and Department of Homeland Security for comment on this article.

Source: Majority of Countries Don’t Approve of Trump’s Bid to Curb Immigration to U.S., 33-Nation Study Finds

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Reaction to Fifth Estate segment on birth tourism

2020/01/10 Leave a comment

I was given a copy of this letter to CBC complaining of the segment on birth tourism on the Fifth Estate. CanadaLand also had a critical segment but one that was reasonably balanced.

My take is different. The segment focuses on birth tourism, characterized the 5,000 as non-residents and not all birth tourists, and had some good interviews with medical practitioners and politicians.

As to the numbers, I had shared my CIHI numbers with the Fifth Estate and had a number of exchanges regarding what they included and their limitations and do not believe these were mischaracterized as all 5,000 being birth tourists.

In any case, we will have better numbers hopefully late spring/early summer given the work underway by IRCC, CIHI and StatsCan to link immigration status and healthcare data, thus allowing us to isolate those on visitor visas from other temporary residents.

My impression is that some of these critiques reflect an unwillingness to consider that birth tourism is an issue (it certainly is in Richmond) and/or a means to raise other valid healthcare-related issues of asylum seekers and other precarious groups:

Dear Mr Nagler,

I wish to express my concerns about the seriously inaccurate and biased content of the 5th Estate’s documentary “Passport babies: The growing shadow industry of birth tourism”, broadcast on January 5, 2020, and the accompanying web articles.

Since 2003, I have worked as a researcher at the SHERPA Research Centre, affiliated with McGill University, focusing on the impact of public policies on the health and well-being of asylum seekers and precarious status migrants in Canada. Since 2012, one of my main research areas has been access to health care for asylum seekers and other precarious status migrants, and I have co-authored a number of scientific publications on this topic.

The major problem with the “Passport babies” documentary is that it incorrectly and repeatedly suggests that the 5000 ‘non-resident’ births per year in Canada all involve tourists who come to Canada for the sole purpose of conferring Canadian citizenship on the baby.

This phenomenon does exist. However, the documentary fails to explain that the category of ‘non-resident births’ is far broader than tourists. Although precise figures are very difficult to obtain, there is every reason to believe that babies born to tourists represent only a small minority of the 5000 ‘non-resident’ births per year in Canada. If the 5th Estate had done even minimal research on the question, they would have found this out. They clearly failed to conduct a basic, balanced investigation into the topic, and consequently produced a documentary that is very seriously misleading and inaccurate.

The figure of 5000 ‘non-resident’ babies per year is drawn from hospital financial databases. The category involved is actually people who do not have medical insurance and (usually) who do not have permanent status in Canada, rather than being people who do not live in Canada. The content of hospitals’ ‘non-resident’ category varies somewhat from province to province, and even between hospitals, but it typically includes:

  • International students in Canada with a temporary study visa. They generally have private insurance, but this typically does not cover costs related to pregnancy and childbirth, or only a small fraction thereof.
  • Some categories of temporary foreign workers (some temporary work visas allow access to public health care, others do not)
  • Non-status (undocumented) migrants living in Canada. This includes people who are in the process of regularizing their status, e.g., people who have applied for permanent residence based on humanitarian or compassionate reasons.
  • Canadian expatriates, who have lost their entitlement to provincial health coverage because they live outside of the country
  • Tourists who are in Canada for a brief period, with a temporary visitor’s visa

The reason that hospitals place these heterogeneous groups in a single category is because 1) they all have to pay their hospital bills out of their own pockets (no public or private medical insurance) and 2) they are either physically residing outside of Canada (in the case of expatriates and tourists) OR are residing in Canada, but with temporary status. In short, the category is based on billing procedure. Note that asylum seekers (refugee claimants) are in a different category because they are covered by the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP).

Sadly, there are tens of thousands of people living, working or studying, and paying taxes in Canada who do not have any public health care coverage. And even for those who have private medical insurance, childbirth costs are usually not covered. Most have temporary visas (student or work visas), while others are currently without formal status. In either case, these are not people who have come to Canada for a few months in order to have a ‘passport baby’, but rather people who are here for work or study who happen to get pregnant while they are here. In Québec, for example, hospitals typically charge about 10,000$ to 15,000$ for a birth without complications, and far more if there are complications (e.g., C-section). Unsurprisingly, this population often has difficulty paying these very steep bills.

The situation of tourists who deliberately come to Canada in order to have a ‘passport baby’ is very different. This is the group that is portrayed in the 5th Estate’s documentary. Typically, these are wealthy people who can well afford to pay the hospital and doctor’s bills, as well as the cost of the stay in Canada.

The fees charged to all individuals in the ‘non-resident’ group are unregulated. Typically, hospitals charge at least 3 times as much as they could claim from the public health insurance system. If the ‘non-resident’ is able to pay, this can be very lucrative for the hospitals and doctors. On the other hand, if the person is unable to pay (as is often the case for people living in Canada with a temporary visa or without status), the hospital may be unable to collect on the debt.

It is impossible to know what proportion of the 5000 babies in the hospitals’ ‘non-resident’ category are born to tourists who have come to Canada for the sole reason of having a ‘passport baby’. Logically, however, there is every reason to believe that this is only a minority, simply because the other groups – e.g., international students and non-status migrants living in Canada –   number in the tens of thousands.

To sum up, the 5th Estate documentary contains two major errors:

  • It incorrectly implies that the 5000 ‘non-resident’ babies born in Canada per year are all born to tourists seeking to have a ‘passport baby’. The documentary completely omits any mention of the groups that compose the majority of this category, who are almost all people living in Canada for extended periods in order to study or work.
  • With regard to the implications for the Canadian health system, the documentary confuses two separate issues.
    • Tourists who come to Canada to have ‘passport babies’ typically pay their hospital and medical bills; hospitals and doctors tend to see them as a lucrative source of income. There may be legitimate concerns that some hospitals prefer to prioritize the needs of these high-paying patients over those of people living in Canada.
    • On the other hand, people living in Canada with a temporary visa or without status may have great difficulty paying hospital and doctor’s fees associated with childbirth, especially if there are complications. Understandably, hospitals are concerned that some of these people may be unable to pay. Many experts in the field argue that public health insurance should extend to all people who are actually living in Canada (including those with a temporary visa or without status), at least for certain medical procedures, including childbirth. This is an ongoing debate.

Based on a fundamentally flawed analysis of the situation, the 5th Estate documentary concludes that it might be appropriate to change Canada’s laws in order to deny citizenship to babies born in Canada if the parents are neither citizens nor permanent residents. The documentary implies that this would affect only babies born to the tourists portrayed in the documentary.

In fact, it is very likely that the vast majority of these babies are born to international students, temporary foreign workers or people living in Canada without formal status. Many of the parents (notably international students) will apply for permanent residency in Canada, and eventually become citizens. Depriving their children of citizenship would be an extremely grave decision and a fundamental shift in Canadian values. It is unconscionable for the 5th Estate to present an inaccurate and misleading documentary in support of such a policy change.

I would respectfully urge you to take steps to ensure that appropriate retractions or corrections are issued concerning the 5thEstate’s documentary ‘Passport Babies’.

Janet Cleveland PhD

SHERPA Research Centre

University Institute with regard to Cultural Communities

CIUSSS Centre-Ouest de l’Ile de Montréal and McGill University

 

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Quebec invited 305 skilled worker candidates over two Arrima draws

2020/01/10 Leave a comment

Quebec’s equivalent of express entry. But hard to understand that this group includes diplomats, consular officials and others on government business. Odd:

A total of 305 candidates for Quebec immigration have been invited over two Arrima draws in December.

In the latest draw on December 17, 2019, a total of 220 invitations went to candidates who submitted their application under Quebec’s Regular Skilled Worker Program.

These candidates were either except from the cap that had been in place when they first applied to the Regular Skilled Worker Program or they were residing in Quebec on a study or work permit on June 16, 2019 when roughly 16,000 Regular Skilled Worker Program applications were cancelled.

Earlier in December, Quebec invited 85 candidates to submit an application for permanent selection.

There were two types of candidates in the December 12 cohort. Either they had a valid offer of employment, or they were staying in Quebec carrying out official duties as diplomats, consular officers, or representatives of intergovernmental organizations, among others.

Since the launch of the Arrima system in July 2019, Quebec has held nine draws and invited 2062 candidates to apply for a Quebec Selection Certificate (Certificat de sélection du Québec, or CSQ).

What is Arrima?

Arrima was introduced in 2018 to manage the bank of candidates for the QSWP after the program was switched from a paper-based “first-come, first-served” application approach to an Expression of Interest (EOI) system.

Quebec’s EOI system manages the bank of candidates for a Quebec Selection Certificate (Certificat de sélection du Québec, or CSQ), which is required in order to apply for permanent residence in the province through the QSWP.

Candidates express their interest by creating a profile in Arrima, which is then placed in the pool of candidates and ranked based on either a score or other criteria.

Quebec’s Immigration Ministry issues invitations to apply for a CSQ based on either a candidate’s score or other factors such as labour needs in the province’s regions.

Candidates who receive a CSQ can apply for permanent residence with Canada’s federal immigration ministry, which verifies medical and criminal admissibility.

Source: Quebec invited 305 skilled worker candidates over two Arrima draws

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Contrasting reactions to Air India 1985 bombing and Ukraine International Tehran crash: From “Indians” to Canadians

2020/01/09 4 Comments

Following the coverage of the UIA PS752 crash and the devastating number of Canadian victims, it struck me just how much Canada has changed in terms of how it characterizes the victims.

In the Air India case, the initial reaction was to dismiss the victims as Indians and it was only some 20 years later that is was formally recognized as a Canadian tragedy.

“During his first term, the Air India Flight 182 bombing occurred. This was the largest terrorist act of the time, with the majority of the 329 victims being Canadian citizens. Mulroney sent a letter of condolence to then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, which sparked an uproar in Canada since he did not call families of the actual victims to offer condolences. Gandhi replied that he should be the one providing condolences to Mulroney, given that the majority of victims were Canadians. There were several warnings from the Indian government to the Mulroney government about terrorist threats towards Air India flights, which arised questions remain as to why these warnings were not taken more seriously and whether the events leading to the bombing could have been prevented. (Brian Mulroney – Wikipedia)”

In contrast, UIA PS752 coverage and commentary named the victims as Canadians, full-stop, as did PM Trudeau’s statement and subsequent press conference. The federal, some provincial and municipal governments are flying the  Canadian flag at half-mast to commemorate this Canadian tragedy.

The personal descriptions of the lives lost illustrate the breadth of the Iranian Canadian community across Canada and their impressive contributions to Canada. Moreover, there have been calls for Canada to be part of the crash investigation and the commitment by the PM in his press conference for Canada to be involved.

“This morning, I join Canadians across the country who are shocked and saddened to see reports that a plane crash outside of Tehran, Iran, has claimed the lives of 176 people, including 63 Canadians.

“On behalf of the Government of Canada, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to those who have lost family, friends, and loved ones in this tragedy. Our government will continue to work closely with its international partners to ensure that this crash is thoroughly investigated, and that Canadians’ questions are answered.

Today, I assure all Canadians that their safety and security is our top priority. We also join with the other countries who are mourning the loss of citizens. (Statement by the Prime Minister on the fatal plane crash in Iran)”

Full press conference statement:nJustin Trudeau’s statement after plane crash in Iran: Full transcript

An encouraging reminder how Canada has changed in how we view our fellow citizens.

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‘A reminder of what it means to be Canadian’: Tehran crash a shock to our outdated ideas of identity

2020/01/09 Leave a comment

Good piece by Joseph Brean:

The meaning of disasters sometimes reveals itself in a spectacular instant. Planes exploding into Manhattan skyscrapers were obviously terrorism. A train of oil exploding in Lac-Mégantic was obviously an outrageous accident.

But sometimes the significance of mass casualty events must be discerned from more compelling falsehoods. Commonsensical intuitions can obscure as much as they reveal, and make it easier to dismiss faraway calamities that really ought to trouble the domestic Canadian soul.

This is how the crash of a Ukraine-bound plane outside Tehran that first looked obviously like military escalation in the standoff between the United States and Iran was revealed overnight as an especially Canadian aviation tragedy.

“This disaster is a reminder of what it means to be Canadian and to belong to this cosmopolitan nation,” said Payam Akhavan, a Tehran-born former United Nations war crimes prosecutor, now a professor of law at McGill University, who gave the 2017 CBC Massey lectures on the perils of “us versus them” politics.

“There is a certain fluidity of identity when you open your doors to the whole world,” Akhavan said, and this crash is a reminder of how outdated views of national identity can distance Canadians from their own tragedies.

The Canadians on board included professors of engineering at the University of Alberta in Edmonton; an expert in Iranian indigenous nomads pursuing a doctorate at the University of Guelph in Ontario; a staffer at an Ontario high school teachers union; students from schools across Canada; a nine-year old girl from Richmond Hill, Ont.; an eight-year-old girl from Toronto; a one-year-old girl on her first trip with her parents; and a young couple returning to their new house in Montreal after being married in their ancestral homeland.

Even the Iranians on board were largely young students coming or returning to Canada to study, according to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He said nearly everyone on board was bound for Toronto, transiting through Kyiv on a popular route. Trudeau said a plane arrived in Toronto from Kyiv on Wednesday with 138 empty seats, on which the victims were due to have travelled.

If the theory of an accidental crash holds up, this was a tragedy of dozens of Canadians and others killed through no fault of their own at high points in their lives. It involves a web of storylines that meander back from that field near Tehran’s airport through the Western prairies and Ontario university towns to the large urban communities in Edmonton and Toronto that grew throughout Iran’s post-revolutionary decline so much that they spawned good-natured nicknames used by the diaspora, like Tehranto.

As such, the crash is closer in kind to last year’s Ethiopian plane crash — which was also in a Boeing 737 that crashed soon after takeoff, with 18 Canadians among 157 passengers, second only to Kenyans — than to the Malaysian Airlines flight that was shot down in 2014 during a hot war between Ukraine and Russia, with one Canadian aboard.

But it initially seemed to be the other way round, given the rising tension between the U.S. and Iran, and the expectation of retaliation by Iran to the assassination of a top general. It seemed to be other people’s problems.

This search for meaning can be difficult for Canadians in the early days of a shocking new disaster, existing as Canada does on the periphery of so many global conflicts, without taking sides or bearing the burden of the fighting. Why should this plane crash not simply blur into the foreign news like the deaths of African migrants in the Mediterranean or the victims of an Asian typhoon?

A secondary tragedy of the 1985 Air India bombing, the worst-ever Canadian terrorist attack that killed all 329 passengers including 268 Canadians, was the common sense that this was a foreign outrage, an attack by Indians against Indians that just happened to occur after some of the victims and perpetrators had moved to Canada. Recognizing the racist folly of that view has been a civic challenge ever since, taken up by politicians, media, educators. It has invited reflection on definitional aspects of Canadian identity in an age of immigration and multiculturalism.

A generation later, in an age when dual citizenship is common and international travel accessible to the broad Canadian middle class, these sorts of things get especially confused. Canadians can long for distant homelands. They can leave home to go home without any contradiction.

The trouble with Iran is that, over the same period, it has seemed to get farther and farther away, such that for the average Canadian, travelling to Beijing or Mumbai can seem like simple tourism in the land of one’s ancestors, but travelling to Tehran just seems reckless.

Why would Iranian-Canadians go back, knowing dual citizens are regularly taken as hostages by the regime, such as Homa Hoodfar, and even killed, such as Zahra Kazemi?

“Exile is a longing to belong. It’s an emotional space that we confuse with a physical space,” said Akhavan, who fled Iran before the 1979 revolution and, as a member of the Baháʼí faith, could expect persecution, detention and worse if he ever tried to return. “There is this very strong identity which is based on historical continuity.”

Much of the Middle East was carved up in the 20th century by European opportunists out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire, but not Iran. Although the culture is diverse, Iranians have this deep attachment to what Akhavan described as “a rich mystical culture that refuses to be eclipsed despite the wars and invasions of the centuries.”

He described meeting Armenian Christians who love to speak Persian, which endured despite the spread of Arabic, and Iranians in Tel Aviv who share this national pride not just in cuisine, which every culture more or less shares, but also in unique traditions of poetry, literature, architecture, and art that are scarcely matched anywhere else.

The Iranian community in Canada is likewise diverse. It includes exiles, wealthy economic migrants, skilled entrepreneurs, and people in the orbit of the Islamist regime who have invested in Canadian real estate. So it is a common thing for people to go back for lavish weddings, to see family who stayed behind, to leave home for home.

One photo from Tehran by journalist Borna Ghasemi showed a girl’s red party shoe lying upright on gravel, its bow slightly singed but otherwise shiny and new, as if it had just been worn for the first time, as if at a wedding or family reunion.

Source: ‘A reminder of what it means to be Canadian’: Tehran crash a shock to our outdated ideas of identity

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A Field Guide to Polling: Election 2020 Edition

2020/01/09 Leave a comment

Useful advice in general, not just in terms of US political polling:

How can you tell a ‘good’ poll from a ‘bad’ one?

The longevity of phone polls has allowed scholars time to study them and establish basic standards and best practices. For this reason, it’s a fairly straightforward task to sort more rigorous phone polls from the rest. In general, rigorous surveys are those that are paid for and fielded by a neutral source; have selected a probability-based, random sample of the public (or the population of interest, such as registered voters); dial cellphones in addition to landlines; make multiple attempts to reach people; use live interviewers; and make public both the questionnaire and a detailed methodology.

On the other hand, creating a quality checklist for online opt-in polls remains a challenge and a work in progress.7 Some considerations are the same as for phone polls, as they too should be funded and conducted by a neutral source and transparent with their questionnaires and methodologies. Beyond these basics, evaluating the quality of an opt-in election poll should consider the following questions: Does the sample include all kinds of Americans? Does it include them in roughly the right proportion compared to their share of the population? If not, how are researchers working on the back end to address these issues?8

The Center is now several years into a sustained effort to evaluate these surveys, and several key findings have emerged. Online opt-in polls are not monolithic – some vendors produce more accurate data than others. What separates the better vendors is that they adjust their surveys to be representative on a large set of variables that includes both demographics (e.g., race, age, sex and, per the lessons of 2016, education) and political variables (e.g. party affiliation, voter registration status). Less accurate vendors tend to either not weight their data at all or adjust for just a few demographics. When evaluating these polls, look for evidence that the pollster has thought carefully about these kinds of problems and taken steps to correct them.

When it comes to opt-in online polls, enormous sample sizes aren’t necessarily a sign of quality.

Perhaps surprisingly, Center research found that having a sample that looked demographically representative of the country (through use of quotas or weighting) did not predict accuracy. In other words, just getting the survey to look representative with respect to age, sex, etc. does not mean that the survey estimates for other outcomes are accurate. At this stage in their development, opt-in polls require a very thoughtful, hands-on effort for those fielding the survey, requiring them to consider what they are trying to measure and how the characteristics of the sample may interact with those concepts. As a result, consumers of these polls should also be particularly attentive to these issues.

One last “false flag” to ignore: When it comes to opt-in online polls, enormous sample sizes aren’t necessarily a sign of quality. Given that opt-in surveys are so cheap to field, it’s not hard to drive up a sample size to provide the illusion of precision. But Center research suggests that an 8,000 person opt-in survey is not necessarily more accurate than a 2,000 person survey.

The bottom line for now is that, at least in our own explorations, “even the most effective adjustment procedures were unable to remove most of the bias”9 from opt-in polls. That said, the level of precision these opt-in panels can provide may be adequate for some research purposes.

Source: pewrsr.ch/34cknjD

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USA: New Immigration Fees To Hit Businesses Hard

2020/01/09 Leave a comment

Quite striking. Continues to strengthen the “Canadian advantage” in attracting high-skilled immigrants:

Will “Pay more for less service” be the Trump administration’s new marketing slogan for businesses dealing with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)? The administration plans to raise fees more than 50% for many business applications, while workers will need to pay more to become citizens or gain permanent residence.

On November 14, 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a proposed rule that would increase fees across key business immigration categories, in essence, levying a tax increase on employers that access the global market for labor. The fee increases come at a time when U.S. job openings in 2019 outnumbered the unemployed by “the widest gap ever,” which, along with a large body of economic research, undermines the argument that immigrants prevent natives from finding jobs.

The fee increases are unlikely to reduce processing times at the agency because USCIS states in the rule that it will not change the policies that have created the longer delays. Lack of money does not seem to be the problem: The average USCIS case processing time increased by 91% between FY 2014 and FY 2018, at the same time the agency’s budget rose by 30%, according to USCIS data, notes the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). Processing times became longer at the agency even when the number of new cases dropped by over one million between FY 2017 and FY 2018.

Case processing times have increased in the past few years due to:

  • The USCIS director requiring adjudicators to no longer defer to prior adjudications when evaluating extension of status applications, which has led to a larger workload and compelled many experienced employees of tech companies to leave the United States.
  • The administration employing terms such as “heightened screening and vetting” of applications to justify resource-intensive checks without analysis as to their benefit.
  • USCIS transferring resources, including personnel, to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

A close reading of the proposed fee regulation indicates USCIS will continue and, in some cases, expand these policies.

Below is a summary of the proposed fee changes by visa category:

H-1B and L-1 Visas: The fee for L visa petitions will increase by 77%, rising from $460 to $815. The fee for an H-1B petition will rise by 22%, from $460 to $560.

If enacted, much higher fees will be imposed on companies with more than 50 employees that have at least 50% of their workforce in H-1B and L-1 status. USCIS proposes in the fee regulation to reinterpret the law to impose an additional $4,000 fee not just on initial H-1B petitions and a $4,500 fee on initial L-1 petitions, as is the current practice laid out in the statute (Public Law 114-113). USCIS also proposes to impose the fee for extensions when the fraud prevention and detection fee is not collected.

“USCIS’s proposed change in how it interprets the applicability of the Public Law 114-113 fee is unreasonable and clearly unlawful as it runs counter to clear statutory language indicating the 50/50 fees should only apply to petition filings where the fraud prevention and detection fee is also required,” according to Vic Goel, managing partner of Goel & Anderson, LLC. “Given that this proposed interpretation is also diametrically opposite to USCIS’s own longstanding interpretation of this provision, it raises questions about the agency’s motivations for this change after so many years.” (See here for more on the legislative history.)

Other High-Skilled Employment Visas: USCIS is increasing a range of high-skilled visa petitions by more than 50%. Petitions for O visas (extraordinary ability/achievement) would rise by 55%, from $460 to $715. Fees would increase by 53%, from $460 to $705, for petitions for the TN (NAFTA professionals), E (treaty traders and investors), P (athletes/entertainers), Q (cultural exchange) and R (religious workers) categories, as well as for H-3 visas for training. USCIS will change the current I-129 form, now used for multiple categories, and rename the forms based on the visa type.

Premium Processing: USCIS proposes to change premium processing. The cost will remain the same. However, USCIS will now process a case within 15 business days, rather than the current 15 calendar days. That means it will take longer for employers to receive decisions when paying the additional $1,440 premium processing fee.

H-2A and H-2B Visas: The current fee for H-2A (seasonal agricultural) and H-2B (seasonal nonagricultural) petitions is $460. USCIS proposes to raise the fee for H-2A to $860 and H-2B to $725 for petitions with named workers and limiting an application to 25 workers. Costs for employers could rise considerably, since H-2A and H-2B petitions can now list 100 or more workers.

Increasing Costs for Workers, Including for Adjustment of Status: In its comments to the proposed fee rule, AILA notes applicants for adjustment of status (obtaining permanent residence inside the U.S.) will “see at least a 75% increase in the total cost of filing forms I-485 [for adjustment of status], I-765 [for employment authorization] and I-131 [for a travel document].” That is because USCIS will now charge separate fees for the three forms.

USCIS would increase the cost of the application to become a U.S. citizen by more than 80%, rising from $640 to $1,170 (although a separate $85 biometrics fee would be eliminated). USCIS would also raise the cost for an asylum applicant to apply for an employment authorization document from the current zero to $490, one of many policy changes to discourage asylum applications.

Doug Rand of Boundless said in an interview to anticipate at least two or three months into 2020 before a final rule on the fee increases is published. He believes lawsuits and preliminary injunctions are both possible.

Businesses are not pleased with the USCIS proposal to raise fees. “Many companies . . . consider this proposal as imposing increased costs on them for, at best, the same suboptimal services they current receive from USCIS,” commented the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The best way to understand the plan to increase fees is as another tax or tariff. It is aimed at admitting fewer immigrants, foreign-born workers and professionals by taxing them more. Given America’s demographic issues, the country’s demand for labor and the increasing importance of high-skilled workers, economists would question the wisdom of the administration’s policies.

Source: New Immigration Fees To Hit Businesses Hard

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Combat birth tourism by changing immigration law, B.C. mayor says

2020/01/09 Leave a comment

From twitter commentary, seems like he is a bit late to the discussion. But nothing is more frustrating to the public when each level of government points to the other rather than working more closely to assess and discuss the options (which of course, include doing nothing given the small provincial and national numbers):

Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie is calling on Ottawa to change immigration law to stop pregnant women travelling to Canada and giving birth to babies who are automatically granted citizenship.

The law says anyone born in Canada is automatically a Canadian citizen. According to the latest statistics, nearly 5,000 babies were born to non-residents in 2018-19.

A recent story by The Fifth Estate revealed that non-residents make up nearly a quarter of all births at the Richmond Hospital, which has led to complaints that birth tourists are compromising care for locals and putting strain on staff.

“People are abusing the system and we will pay a price right now with our medical system, but we’ll pay a bigger price in the long term with a number of people coming here who haven’t gone through any qualifications or procedures and they just come to our shores and will live in Canada,” said Brodie on The Early Edition on Tuesday.Brodie suggests changing federal law so that least one parent must be a Canadian citizen in order for a child to also become a citizen.

City ‘helpless’ to stop birth tourism: mayor

According to Brodie, the city has limited power to do anything about the issue because the medical system is the province’s jurisdiction and the federal government is in charge of the immigration system, which he said is the root of the problem.

All the city can do, said Brodie, is enforce short-term rental bylaws at so-called “birth houses,” where many of the women are known to stay, but often the women stay longer than a month and the city can only regulate rentals of 30 days or less.

“We are really helpless to do a lot about it. We can check a business licence if there is a business being run out of a home, but that’s about all,” said the mayor.

No federal action

He said Richmond has seen people abusing the system for years and, despite local members of Parliament raising the issue in Ottawa, there has been no federal response.

‘This is a law and this law can be changed and I don’t have any idea why they haven’t done it,” said Brodie. “The optimist in me says they simply haven’t gotten around to it.”The Early Edition requested an interview with Marco Mendicino, the newly appointed federal minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, but the minister was unavailable.

Source: Combat birth tourism by changing immigration law, B.C. mayor says

Filed under Birth Tourism, Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with ,

Homeland Security to share citizenship data with Census Bureau

2020/01/08 Leave a comment

Not surprising and there will certainly be some data issues as flagged, one’s that the administration will of course dismiss given the intent is more to disenfranchise minority voters and reduce the population count of states with higher numbers of immigrants (legal and other):

The Department of Homeland Security is agreeing to share citizenship information with the U.S. Census Bureau as part of President Donald Trump’s order to collect data on who is a citizen following the Supreme Court’s rejection of a citizenship question on the 2020 Census form.

Trump’s order is being challenged in federal court, but meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security two weeks ago announced the agreement in a report. It said the agency would share administrative records to help the Census Bureau determine the number of citizens and non-citizens in the U.S., as well as the number of immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

Information to be shared includes personally identifiable data, the Homeland Security document says. Federal law prohibits the Census Bureau from releasing personally identifiable data, and the bureau says in its fact-sheet on privacy, “Your answers can only be used to produce statistics — they cannot be used against you in any way.”

The Census Bureau has promised the data will be kept for no more than two years, and will then be destroyed, according to the agreement. The data will be used to help the Census Bureau create a model estimating the likelihood that each person in the U.S. is a citizen, non-citizen or an immigrant in the country without legal permission.

Among the information Homeland Security will provide is a person’s alien identification number, country of birth and date of naturalization or naturalization application. The department is awaiting word on whether it will be allowed to release information on asylum and refugee applicants, which typically is prohibited from being disclosed.

Because a person’s citizenship status can change often over time, the citizenship data provided by Homeland Security will likely be inaccurate, said Andrea Senteno, an attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, one of the civil rights groups challenging Trump’s order in federal court in Maryland.

“The information out there over whether someone is a non-citizen or what type of immigrant status they may be is going to have a lot of holes in it,” Senteno said.

The Homeland Security document acknowledges risks that the Census Bureau will assign an inaccurate immigration status to someone, that people won’t be able to correct mistakes about themselves and that Homeland Security information will be linked inaccurately to data from other sources used by the Census Bureau.

“Linking records between datasets is not likely to be 100% accurate,” the Homeland Security document notes.

Trump ordered the Census Bureau to collect citizenship information through administrative records from federal agencies and the 50 states after the Supreme Court ruled against his administration last summer by deciding that a citizenship question wouldn’t be allowed on this spring’s 2020 Census questionnaire.

The administration had said the question was being added to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters’ access to the ballot box. But Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four more liberal members in saying the administration’s current justification for the question “seems to have been contrived.”

Opponents of the citizenship question had argued it would scare off immigrants, Hispanics and others from participating in the once-a-decade headcount. The 2020 Census will help determine how many congressional seats each state gets as well as the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funds.

The federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s order to collect the citizenship data claims that the data gathering is motivated by “a racially discriminatory scheme” to reduce the political power of Latinos and increase the representation of non-Latino whites.

As part of the order, the U.S. Census Bureau has asked state drivers’ license bureaus for records, but so far only Nebraska has agreed to cooperate.

Gathering the citizenship data would give the states the option to design state and legislative districts using voter-age citizen numbers instead of the total population, Trump said in the order. The U.S. Constitution specifies that congressional districts should be based on how many people — not citizens — live there. But it’s murkier for many state legislative districts. Opponents fear that using just citizen figures would make legislative districts more Republican-leaning and less diverse.

“Whether that approach is permissible will be resolved when a state actually proposes a districting plan based on the voter-eligible population,” Trump’s order said. “But because eligibility to vote depends in part on citizenship, states could more effectively exercise this option with a more accurate and complete count of the citizen population.”

Source: Homeland Security to share citizenship data with Census Bureau

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

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