Conservative Religious Leaders Are Denouncing Trump Immigration Policies – The New York Times

2018/06/16 Leave a comment

Significant. Unlikely that it will make any difference to the administration or congressional Republicans:

Conservative religious leaders who have long preached about the sanctity of the family are now issuing sharp rebukes of the Trump administration for immigration policies that tear families apart or leave them in danger.

The criticism came after recent moves by the administration to separate children from their parents at the border, and to deny asylum on a routine basis to victims of domestic abuse and gang violence.

Some of the religious leaders are the same evangelicals and Roman Catholics who helped President Trump to build his base and who have otherwise applauded his moves to limit abortion and champion the rights of religious believers.

The Rev. Franklin Graham, a son of the famed evangelist the Rev. Billy Graham and an outspoken defender of President Trump, said in an interview on Tuesday on the Christian Broadcasting Network, “I think it’s disgraceful, it’s terrible to see families ripped apart and I don’t support that one bit.”

He quickly made it clear that this had not dimmed his enthusiasm for Mr. Trump, adding, “I blame the politicians for the last 20, 30 years that have allowed this to escalate to where it is today.”

Leaders of many faiths — including Jews, Mainline Protestants, Muslims and others — have spoken out consistently against the president’s immigration policies. What has changed is that now the objections are coming from faith groups that have been generally friendly to Mr. Trump.

A coalition of evangelical groups, including the National Association of Evangelicals and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, sent a letter to President Trump on June 1 pleading with him to protect the unity of families and not to close off all avenues to asylum for immigrants and refugees fleeing danger.

The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative evangelical denomination that is the nation’s largest Protestant church, passed a resolution on Tuesday at its meeting in Dallas calling for immigration reform that maintains “the priority of family unity.” The measure called for both securing the nation’s borders, and providing a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants living in the country. It passed on a near unanimous vote of the thousands of delegates in the room.

“We declare that any form of nativism, mistreatment, or exploitation is inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ,” the resolution said.

The Rev. Alan Cross, a Southern Baptist minister from Montgomery, Ala., who works on immigration issues, and attended the meeting, said, “It was motivated by what is happening at the border with parents and children being separated, and messengers were affected by that and submitted resolutions.”

“It was a really strong statement,” he said. “We’re saying we love these people, they’re made in God’s image, we should care for them, we don’t want families to be separated.”
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When Vice President Mike Pence addressed the Southern Baptists, his speech hailing the accomplishments of the administration received only a mixed reception.CreditAndy Jacobsohn/The Dallas Morning News, via Associated Press
The resolution also called for elected officials, especially those who are Southern Baptists, “to do everything in their power to advocate for a just and equitable immigration system,” and for Southern Baptist churches to reach out and serve immigrant communities. This is not a new initiative for Southern Baptists, but it comes at a time when white evangelicals, according to polls, are strongly supportive of President Trump’s moves to limit immigration.

A White House representative did not respond to a request for a comment.

When Vice President Mike Pence addressed the Southern Baptists on Wednesday, his speech hailing the accomplishments of the administration received only a mixed reception.

On the same day, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops, opened their meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with a strong statement from the group’s president that cast asylum as a “right to life” issue — language usually applied only to issues like abortion and euthanasia.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the United States Catholic bishops’ conference and archbishop of Galveston-Houston, denounced a recent decision by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that women fleeing domestic violence and families fleeing gang violence are not eligible for asylum.

“At its core, asylum is an instrument to preserve the right to life,” said Cardinal DiNardo in a statement he read aloud to the bishops.

The Catholic church has long advocated for the rights of immigrants and refugees, and while the bishops have criticized Mr. Trump’s immigration policies before, this letter amounted to their strongest censure yet.

“Families are the foundational element of our society and they must be able to stay together,” the Cardinal wrote. “Separating babies from their mothers is not the answer and is immoral.”

Bishop Edward Weisenburger of Tucson, Ariz. suggested to the meeting that “canonical penalties” be imposed on Catholics “who are involved” in the policies of family separations, though he did not specify what he meant. Canonical penalties can involve denial of the eucharist or even excommunication. His suggestion was not adopted.

But they did take up a suggestion by Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark that a delegation of bishops go to the border to inspect the detention centers where children are being held. The visit would be, he said, “a sign of our pastoral concern and protest against the hardening of the American heart.”

via Conservative Religious Leaders Are Denouncing Trump Immigration Policies – The New York Times

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Trump Refuses to Release Data on Immigration Crackdown – Bloomberg

2018/06/16 Leave a comment

Never a good sign when governments use press releases rather than regular data releases but in keeping with the Trump administration’s overall approach:

Five days into his presidency, Donald Trump took aim at illegal immigration with executive orders signaling a new era of heavy enforcement. Not only did he threaten to go after undocumented immigrants, many of whom he labeled violent criminals, he also vowed to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities that thwart the federal government’s attempts to round up people who are in the U.S. illegally. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security promised to put out weekly updates that would include information on localities that release immigration violators and the criminal records of those released.

The first reports were filled with inaccuracies and in several instances called out counties for not cooperating with detainer, or detention, requests that were actually sent to other places with similar names. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had to issue a list of corrections, and soon it simply stopped putting out the reports. For the past 18 months, ICE has also refused to release other key data about its enforcement activity that had been routinely available.

This disappearing data is at the heart of two lawsuits brought against ICE by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a small research group at Syracuse University. As of January 2017, ICE stopped handing over records it had provided under the Freedom of Information Act for years, including any details about how effective Trump’s crackdown has been. If ICE prevails in court, it could give other agencies a legal rationale to deny public access to the vast cache of government data now kept in electronic databases.

At a time when U.S. authorities are separating children from their parents at the border—and then losing track of them—and the president continues to assert that many immigrants are violent criminals, the lack of basic data on government enforcement has created a fog of uncertainty over an already charged issue. TRAC was founded in 1989 by co-directors Susan Long, a statistician, and David Burnham, an investigative journalist, specifically to cut through this sort of political rhetoric by amassing data on federal policy. It uses FOIA requests to pull in 250 million records from various agencies each month, and its website offers tools to help analyze the data. TRAC had long requested and received information on detainers, as well as deportations aimed at removing undocumented immigrants with criminal records. After ICE abruptly stopped providing the information last year, Long and Burnham sued it in federal court in New York to regain access to the detainer data, and then in the District of Columbia over the missing deportation records.

“We have this huge political debate going on in the country over secure communities and sanctuary cities and all the claims that the government is making about how essential this is, and the very data that would allow you to evaluate the program, they’re withholding,” Long says. ICE argues that many of the records TRAC has asked for don’t exist in the form requested and says producing responses would require searching its database, a process the agency claims amounts to creating new records, which isn’t required under FOIA. ICE didn’t reply to a list of questions and a request for comment.

“If they’re going to court to try to keep information hidden about the detainer policy, they’re probably hiding something,” says Peter Boogaard, a former DHS press secretary in the Obama administration. More broadly, transparency has become a function of political convenience, Boogaard says. “They’re happy to say that immigration is causing huge problems, but at the same point, they are not sharing information.”

It’s still possible to track the overall number of detainers ICE issues—about 14,000 a month on average through November 2017. That’s up from the last months under Obama, but much lower than the peak of close to 28,000 in 2011. Left out are details on whether ICE takes custody—or the criminal records of those targeted. Under Obama, TRAC found that even when local law enforcement held an individual under a detainer, more than half the time ICE agents didn’t show up to take custody—and that few ICE detainers targeted serious criminals. That sort of analysis is now impossible to do. “It’s really frustrating to not be able to get a holistic picture of what’s happening,” says Emily Ryo, an associate professor of law and sociology at the University of Southern California, who’s tried with TRAC to get data on detentions. “It really is an important moment for the public to understand what’s happening and for researchers to be able to document what is going on.”

In place of detailed reports, ICE issues press releases describing raids and arrests, citing criminal records of detainees, and complaining about the lack of cooperation from sanctuary cities. “I don’t want bullet-pointed press releases that say some large numbers of people were apprehended over the weekend and here are five examples of how dangerous these individuals were,” says César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an associate professor of law at the University of Denver. “I want to know details about the large number of people. I want percentages. I want actual numbers about what kinds of crimes.”

The data García Hernández has been able to cobble together show a reality at least partly at odds with Trump’s rhetoric. In fiscal 2017, a period that covers the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the current one, the average daily population held in immigration detention centers rose by 3,730 people, an 11 percent increase from fiscal 2016. The average length of stay has also risen, to 43.7 days, up from fewer than 35 the previous year.

The number of prosecutions for immigration crimes fell by more than 10,000, or 15 percent, over the same period. That’s striking given the emphasis the Trump administration has put on prosecuting undocumented immigrants. It’s an incredibly complex system that’s shifting all the time, making accurate data more important than ever. Data from this year that TRAC got using another FOIA request show a jump in prosecutions of border crossers. And the detention system may be nearing its limit: This month, authorities are transferring 1,600 detainees to federal prisons while they await civil court hearings.

The inaccuracies in ICE’s statements about enforcement actions have caused a furor within the agency in recent months. James Schwab, a spokesman for ICE in San Francisco, resigned in March over misleading statements from agency leaders about an ICE raid in Oakland. The bigger implication is how agencies are allowed to draw the line when it comes to producing electronic records, and the distinction between creating a record and just extracting one from a database, according to Sean Sherman, a lawyer at Public Citizen Litigation Group who’s representing TRAC in Washington. “ICE is saying that by basically searching for these electronic records, that constitutes creating new records,” he says. “That just can’t be right, because that’s basically true of all government records right now.” Meanwhile, ICE is withholding data in many more of TRAC’s FOIA requests. Says Long: “We could file a new suit every week, if we were going to aggressively litigate this.”

via Trump Refuses to Release Data on Immigration Crackdown – Bloomberg

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Canadian Immigrants in the United States: Migration Policy Institute study

2018/06/15 Leave a comment

Good overview of Canadians abroad, with detailed numbers:

Canadian migration has generally been a small share of immigration to the United States, historically fluctuating according to economic factors in the two countries. In 1960, Canadian immigrants made up about 10 percent of the total U.S. foreign-born population. Though the number of Canadians in the United States has decreased and levelled off since then, this population has grown more diverse, and today includes students, family migrants, skilled professionals, and retirees. As of 2016, about 783,000 Canadians lived in the United States, accounting for less than 2 percent of the roughly 44 million U.S. immigrants.

The motives of Canadian migrants have changed over time. Beginning in 1867, migrants from Eastern Canada came to the United States to work in the burgeoning manufacturing sector. In 1900, the U.S. Census recorded 747,000 English-speaking and 440,000 French-speaking Canadian immigrants. The two groups settled in different regions: Most Anglophone Canadians took up residence near the border, in states such as Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Rhode Island, allowing them to easily move between the two countries, while Francophone Canadians largely moved to New England and California. French Canadian migration increased between 1900 and 1930, driven by discrimination as well as poor economic conditions in Quebec. After 1930, increased political autonomy for Quebec and the growth of the Canadian economy following World War II led to a steady decline in Canadian arrivals.

In the second half of the 20th century, Canadian migration shifted and diversified significantly, especially after enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Canadian immigrants now include highly educated professionals, students, those seeking family reunification, and “snowbirds,” people in or near retirement attracted by warmer southern climates. Canadian students are the fifth-largest group of foreign students enrolled in U.S. higher education, and high-skilled Canadians receive the third-largest number of employer-sponsored H-1B temporary visas. Many Canadians also come to the United States on NAFTA Professional (TN) visas to work in a variety of professional occupations, although the exact number is unknown.

Click here to view an interactive chart showing trends in the size of U.S. immigrant populations by country of birth, from 1960 to the present.

The United States is by far the top destination for most Canadian emigrants, with others settling primarily in the United Kingdom (92,000), Australia (57,000), France (26,000), and Italy (26,000), according to mid-2017 estimates by the United Nations Population Division. Click here to view an interactive map showing where migrants from Canada and other countries have settled worldwide.

Most Canadians in the United States who obtain lawful permanent residence—also known as receiving a green card—do so either as immediate relatives of U.S. citizens or as employer-sponsored immigrants. Compared to the overall foreign-born population, Canadians have a higher median income, are less likely to live in poverty, and are more likely to have health insurance and to be college educated. They are significantly older, on average, than the overall immigrant and U.S.-born populations.

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau (the most recent 2016 American Community Survey [ACS] as well as pooled 2012–16 ACS data) and the Department of Homeland Security’s Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, this Spotlight provides information on the Canadian population in the United States, focusing on its size, geographic distribution, and socioeconomic characteristics.

Note: Data from ACS and DHS represent persons born in Canada; they do not include immigrants born outside of Canada who then gained Canadian citizenship via naturalization and later moved to the United States.

via Canadian Immigrants in the United States | migrationpolicy.org

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Senate spares impaired immigrant drivers from ‘sledgehammer’ penalty

2018/06/15 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see whether the Commons accepts this amendment and whether or not the opposition makes this a high profile issue:

The Senate has passed a critical amendment to the Impaired Driving Act that would spare permanent residents sentenced to less than six months from being deported.

Bill C-46 intends to raise the maximum penalty for impaired driving in Canada from five to 10 years. As originally proposed, it would have automatically classified all DUI offences as “serious criminality.” That designation, under immigration law, would have resulted in the loss of permanent residence status even for a first-time offender who caused no bodily harm.

The Senate decided that the “serious criminality” designation for impaired driving should not apply to permanent residents and foreign nationals sentenced to less than six months in jail.

Critics, including the Canadian Bar Association, had argued that the proposed legislation would have had a “disproportionate” impact on immigrant offenders who, unlike their Canadian peers, would be penalized by both the criminal and immigration systems. This would have affected foreign students, workers, visitors and permanent residents.

Under the current immigration law, a permanent resident found guilty of any crime resulting in a sentence of more than six months faces deportation. The bill, as originally proposed, would have made an immigrant offender deportable regardless of the length of sentence.

“If any of these permanent residents break the law in terms of drunk driving, then they should pay the price, like any other Canadian, because we cannot afford to jeopardize the lives of innocent people on the streets,” said Senator Ratna Omidvar, one of 47 senators who voted in majority for the amendment Tuesday evening.

“But I don’t believe that permanent residents should bear an added punishment — not just another punishment, not just another fine — but a sledgehammer of a punishment of inadmissibility and deportation. This is exactly what Bill C-46 will do if we allow it to leave this chamber without this amendment.”

Immigrants who commit a serious crime should be deported, said Senator Mobina Jaffer, who introduced the amendment. Bill C-46 would have created a system that would make all impaired driving offences not equal, she said.

“We are a country that gives people who make a mistake another chance, as long as it’s not a serious offence,” she added.

The amended bill will be sent back to Parliament for a final vote before it becomes law.

Source: Senate spares impaired immigrant drivers from ‘sledgehammer’ penalty

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Impact of Trump’s immigration vision comes into focus in Washington

2018/06/15 Leave a comment

Good overview. Most interesting point is possible role evangelicals may play in opposing some of the Trump administration measures (after having been silent on so many other issues) as well as how this will play in the mid-terms:

America is heading for a moment of reckoning as the results of more than a year’s worth of hardline Trump administration immigration measures pile up, raising questions fundamental to the character of the nation itself.

A shock-and-awe sequence of policy moves and legal gambits, many by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, may elevate immigration past the Russia investigation and the accelerating economy into an issue with the capacity to shape the midterm elections. It also is spurring congressional leaders from the President’s party — who did not want another immigration fight this year — to vote and go on the record on what is often a politically perilous subject.
The moves in many cases are the logical culmination of a presidential campaign rooted in Donald Trump’s willingness to demagogue immigration controversies in order to inflame his conservative voting base. They are the product of 17 months of work by Sessions, and White House immigration czar Stephen Miller, that is starting to fundamentally change the immigration system and America’s treatment of many people who come from abroad, with or without authorization.
House DACA deal in final stages as GOP leaders link compromise bill to Trump
To many Trump voters, the rapid pace of change will be seen as a validation of the vote they cast for the President back in 2016. Trump made a case that previous Republican and Democratic leaders had failed to enforce immigration laws and made an implicit argument that the nature of American culture and society were under threat from an influx of newcomers.
But news coverage of children being taken from parents who had crossed the border illegally and the increasing human and economic implications of the administration’s assault on legal immigration are beginning to merge into political arguments about tough Trump stances.
“I just go back to week one of the Trump administration — those first two-three executive orders that the President signed — they were the foundation on which everything that we are seeing being executed right now is built,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a nonprofit advocacy organization for immigrants and immigration. “All those things are coming to a head right now.”
Increasingly there is debate not just about the policy implications of the administration’s actions, but also whether they square with the humanitarian and moral standards that America has historically set for itself — even among some evangelicals who strongly back the President.

Crackdown

In recent days, the administration has acted aggressively to enact its tough immigration agenda and the human consequences of Trump’s earlier executive orders become increasingly clear.
Sessions has cracked down on rules on asylum, potentially reducing claims by the thousands by deciding that victims of domestic and gang violence are not eligible for protection.
The Justice Department said late last Friday that it would not defend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in a Texas lawsuit, potentially opening an eventual path to a Supreme Court ruling on the fate of young undocumented immigrants brought to the US as kids.
Sessions has also pressured judges to increase their workloads to accelerate the pace of deportations.
The Department of Health and Human Services has said that some military bases in Texas are being assessed as possible holding centers for unaccompanied migrant children.
At the southern border, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras sobbed as she said federal officials had taken her infant daughter as she breastfed her, highlighting the administration’s policy mandating the separation of families who cross the border illegally.
The Department of Homeland Security is vigorously cutting the numbers of people from 10 nations, including El Salvador and Haiti, who live and work in the United States under the Temporary Protected Status covering nations hit by famine, war or national disasters. In May, nearly 90,000 Hondurans lost their status, meaning they could be forced to go back home.
Then there are multiple, but less visible, ways that the Trump administration is trying to curb legal immigration: lowering refugee admissions, targeting H1-B visas for skilled foreign workers and introducing more restrictions and red tape for other classes of entry permits.
All in all, the flurry of activity adds up to another set of promises kept for Trump that he can lay before his most loyal voters as he pleads with them to go to the polls in November to stave off a Democratic wave that could crimp his room to maneuver as President.

Capitol Hill imbroglio

But there are growing signs that the emotive immigration debate and the questions it raises about American values do not automatically add up to a big win for the President.
An imbroglio in the House of Representatives over an attempt by moderate Republicans to force a vote on securing protections for DACA recipients shows how some GOP lawmakers fear the hardline administration positions could damage them as they fight for re-election.
A Republican leadership compromise could allow conservatives to vote on a tough immigration bill but also proposes a compromise measure that Trump could support if it honors his four policy pillars: a solution for DACA recipients, border security financing and changes to border protocol, and ending parts of family based migration and the visa lottery.
The President’s demands probably mean the bill still will not be able to pass the Senate and is most likely to end up underlining Congress’s failure to act meaningfully on immigration.
But the fact that the Republican leadership is willing to hold votes on such a toxic issue months before Election Day is a testament to how immigration is barging its way up the political agenda.
The one thing that could break the logjam is a concentrated intervention by the President. And Miller was on Capitol Hill Wednesday and told Republicans the White House is open to the compromise package. Still, the President has vowed to fix the DACA issue and to throw his weight behind legislation before only to fail to live up to his promise.
Democrats, meanwhile, are emboldened, viewing the increasingly visible humanitarian consequences of the Trump administration’s policies as an opening to broaden an assault on the President and enliven their own base voters.
“
Our moral compass has gone astray and I will continue to speak out against this injustice until the administration realizes this is not who we should be as Americans,” said Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas, referring to the asylum rules and treatment of children crossing the border.
At a weekly Democratic leadership meeting, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley of New York painted a picture of children being ripped from their mothers’ arms at the border.
“If that is not psychological torture, I don’t know what is,” Crowley said, branding the policy an “abomination” and an “indelible mark on the soul of our nation.”

Dissent from evangelicals

There was also rising criticism for the implications of the administration’s immigration push from unusual quarters.
Evangelist Franklin Graham, who is close to Trump, slammed the separation of parents and children who had crossed the border illegally.
“It’s disgraceful, it’s terrible to see families ripped apart, and I don’t support that one bit,” said Graham on CBN News on Wednesday, blaming politicians over 30 years for failing to act.
Hours earlier another key evangelical voice, the Southern Baptist Convention, passed a resolution calling on the government to implement a “just and compassionate path” to legal status for undocumented immigrants once borders had been secured.
It also declared that any form of “nativism, mistreatment, or exploitation is inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ” in a statement that could be seen as criticism of some of the sentiments that have helped Trump’s immigration policies prosper.
All this is a long way from a backlash against the administration’s approach, and it is not clear if it will open a seam of opposition in the evangelical bloc, which was a vital component of Trump’s winning coalition in 2016.
But Noorani argued that in the end, shifting sentiments of more moderate Trump voters and independents could be as important in molding the politics surrounding the administration’s immigration policies as the strong mobilization they whip up on the left.
“We surmised and we predicted that over time it would be the Trump voters at the end of the day who were going to start asking the most important questions,” he said.

Source: Impact of Trump’s immigration vision comes into focus in Washington

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It’s Time For Canada To Truly Open Its Borders

2018/06/14 Leave a comment

Provocative though piece by Harald Bauder of Ryerson.

Important part of the conversation as the distinctions between the various classes are less clear cut than they might appear (e.g., about half the economic class are family members). However, unclear how this approach would a) be managed and b) would enjoy any broader public support (IMO, not):

Between Jan. 1 and April 30, 7,600 asylum seekers crossed irregularly from the U.S. into Canada and were apprehended by the RCMP.

Theseborder crossings are often blamed on a tweet by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from January 2017 in reaction to U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel ban: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you.”

I suggest that Trudeau’s well-intended tweet did not go far enough. He should have presented an open-borders vision to counter xenophobic rhetoric, anti-immigrant panic and suspicion emanating from south of the border and discourage similar sentiments from gaining momentum in Canada.

An open-borders policy entails that all people regardless of citizenship, origin, wealth or skills are permitted to enter Canada, and no one would need to cross the border irregularly. Criminals, however, could still be stopped for smuggling or trafficking.

This open-borders scenario may be dismissed as absurd. But so was gender equality 100 years ago. Even though we still have a long way to go to achieve equality between women, men and LGTBQ+ people, today many Canadians are proud that the bold vision of equality has guided their political path.

By embracing an open-border vision, Canada could reassert itself as a world leader of forward-looking migration policies.

Unfortunately, Canada is losing this opportunity.

Rather than embracing the 7,600 asylum seekers who arrived in Canada in the first four months of this year, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen respondedthat “we do not appreciate or welcome irregular migration” and that there is “no free ticket to Canada.” The Liberal government wants to spend an additional $173 million to prevent unauthorized border crossing — a figure that conservatives say is not enough.

What if Hussen had instead announced that we appreciate and welcome all migration, and are working on dismantling immigration barriers?

As a political aspiration, the open-borders vision does not mean that border controls must immediately be abolished. Our welfare, health care, education and other public service systems are not set up to cope with free migration. As borders are gradually opened, we would need to find ways to ensure that health care and other social services are paid for, that everyone is making equitable contributions, and that our labour and educational standards are protected. By the same token, open borders would mean that foreign seasonal agricultural workers could stay and actually redeem the employment insurance and other contributions they are making.

The case can be made from across the political spectrum.

What speaks especially for open borders as a political aspiration is that the case can be made from across the political spectrum.

Political liberals argue that denying people entry into a country based on the citizenship they acquired at birth is akin to feudal privilege. Modern democracies reject such birth privilege. If borders were open, then a person born in a country with unfavourable conditions could move to a country where conditions are more favourable. Free cross-border mobility should be a fundamental liberty. Liberal thinkers like Phillip Cole pursue such arguments.

Free-market supporters would agree. Distorting the free mobility of labour across national borders causes economic inefficiencies. By eliminating this source of market distortion, open borders would reduce international wage differentials and improve the economic efficiency of national and global economies. None other than Ronald Reagan suggested during the 1980 U.S. presidential primary debate to “open the border both ways” between the U.S. and Mexico so that workers can enter the U.S. and pay taxes there.

Critics of market capitalism, such as British author and activist Teresa Hayter, also support open borders. They argue that borders are an instrument of oppression. Border restrictions apply predominantly to poor and low-skill workers, creating what Karl Marx once called a “labour reserve army” that can be exploited in low-wage countries, such as Mexico or Bangladesh, where wages and labour standards are low. Open borders would eliminate this source of exploitation.

The list of positions supporting open borders goes on: open border would be a way to end a form of global apartheid; cross-border mobility would disproportionately benefit women; remittances would help distribute the benefits of open borders to the global south; and even conservative Christianvoices advocate for open borders.

From a practical viewpoint, open borders would prevent thousands of deaths every year globally. At last count, the International Organization for Migrationrecorded more than 1,400 migrant fatalities worldwide in 2018 alone — almost 800 lives were lost in the Mediterranean Sea and 113 along the U.S.-Mexico border. And these numbers keep rising. Borders have become deadly because states are keeping migrants from crossing them. Opening them would stop the deaths.

Borders are already largely open to information and the environment. Over the last 40 years, we have also relinquished much control over the cross-border movement of money, goods and services through international trade agreements. Open borders for people are the logical next step. Regressing to mid-20th Century nationalism — as Donald Trump apparently seeks to achieve — is a path many Canadians reject.

Because the case for open borders can be made from various ideological and practical positions, it serves as a powerful political vision to counter the closed-border rhetoric steeped in fear and intolerance. With so much xenophobic rhetoric, anti-migrant panic and suspicion on the rise in many parts of the world, we need this bold vision more than ever.

Source: It’s Time For Canada To Truly Open Its Borders

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Tougher impaired driving penalty ‘a double whammy’ for immigrants

2018/06/13 Leave a comment

The complexity of balancing a legitimate policy objective and one of the possibly unforeseen impact on Permanent Residents:

A proposed law to raise the maximum penalty for impaired driving offences in Canada could have a “disproportionate” impact on first-time immigrant offenders who would see their permanent residence status revoked and be deported, critics say.

But advocating equal rights for impaired drivers is a delicate issue, one that some senators and immigrant lawyers are trying to tackle as the Red Chamber sits this week to seek amendments to Bill C-46, the Impaired Driving Act, before sending it back to the House of Commons for a vote.

Currently, someone convicted of impaired driving could receive a maximum penalty of not more than five years in jail, but the offence would still be considered “ordinary criminality” under immigration law. An immigrant’s permanent residence status is not affected unless a sentence of six months or more is imposed.

However, under the proposed legislation, the increased maximum penalty to 10 years would automatically classify impaired driving as “serious criminality.” As a result, even if a first offender, who is not a Canadian citizen, is convicted and is only ordered to pay a fine, they would still lose their immigration status and be banned from Canada. This would affect foreign students, workers, visitors and permanent residents.

“We take impaired driving very seriously and we don’t want impaired drivers behind the wheel,” said Senator Ratna Omidvar in an interview. She noted that if a Canadian citizen is convicted of impaired driving for the first time, they could be sentenced to as little as a fine and walk free afterwards.

“A permanent resident in the same situation would pay the fine and face deportation,” Omidvar added. “It is a double whammy not on all people but just on a class of people. That’s an unintended consequence. The impact on permanent residents would be huge and disproportionate to what a Canadian would get.

In its submission to the Senate, the Canadian Bar Association also urged “careful consideration” of the bill, warning that the changes could put “a significant strain” on the immigration system and border officials in handling increases in inadmissibility and deportations.

The bar association wants the Senate to make the maximum jail penalty for impaired driving offences “10 years less a day” so they would still be classified as “ordinary criminality” and not trigger the automatic loss of a person’s permanent residency. At the very least, it says, there should be an exception to the 10-year penalty threshold for such offences that do not involve serious bodily injury or death.

“We remain concerned that Bill C-46 will introduce uncertainty into the law and result in significantly increased litigation and delays,” said bar association. “Our recommendations are intended to continue to protect Canadians from impaired driving, without triggering the serious criminality consequences.”

It’s not known how many immigrants would be affected by the proposed legislation, but immigration lawyer Robin Seligman said impaired driving is among the most common criminal offences and immigrants are not any more or less likely to commit the crime.

Statistics Canada said police reported a total of 72,039 impaired driving incidents in 2015 and given almost 300,000 newcomers and hundreds of thousands of visitors are coming to the country every year, the impact of the increased maximum penalty could be huge, said Seligman.

“Under the immigration law, serious criminality refers to terrorism, (threats to) national security and membership to organized crime. Lumping first-time impaired driving offenders with them is disproportionate and unfair. It’s an overkill and oversight,” Seligman said.

While repeat offenders of impaired driving deserve to be deported, immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman said first-timers should be allowed an opportunity for rehabilitation, especially where there’s no one hurt in the incident.

“There are definitely a lot of concerns over this bill, but it is always difficult for MPs to advocate for those convicted of any criminal offence,” said Waldman, who fears Ottawa would rush to pass the bill without amendments to fulfil its promise to legalize marijuana this summer.

Source: Tougher impaired driving penalty ‘a double whammy’ for immigrants

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USA: Border protection commissioner talks ‘zero tolerance,’ family separations and how to discourage immigration

2018/06/13 Leave a comment

Good insights into the operationalizing of the various policies at play by U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan:

…How are you handling the family separations?

We still have children in the same place where we had unaccompanied children.

It’s really important for your readers to understand the difference between the concept of family separation and prosecuting adults who cross the border illegally, even if they are bringing in children with them.

We do not have a policy of administrative separation. We are not doing that. Families or people that come across as a group, as a family-unit group, are being separated only if the adults are being prosecuted or if there’s a determination made by the agent that there’s not actually a family relationship, which has happened several hundred times just in the sector this year.

We do see the attempt by smugglers and those crossing to try to exploit the loopholes created by court decisions which don’t allow for ICE to detain family units through the completion of their immigration process. So they have to release them within 20 days. That means it’s incentivizing people to pretend to be families even if they’re not. That’s [happened] 600 times just in Rio Grande Valley sector this fiscal year.

We’re prosecuting the parents; they’re temporarily separated for prosecutors. So they go to the U.S. marshals; they will be prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office. Then they’re detained by ICE while the child is sent to Health and Human Services, in the custody of HHS.

So that’s incentivizing people to come fraudulently with kids?

That’s the catch-and-release loophole due to the interpretation of the Flores [2015 class-action lawsuit] settlement by the 9th Circuit District Court that says that ICE cannot detain families more than 20 days. So instead of being allowed to keep that family together through their immigration process, ICE is forced to release the family. So that’s the loophole that incentivizes people to present as a family even if they’re not.

Is there anything you can say about the U.S. potentially classifying Mexico as a “safe third country” for asylum seekers, which would force them to seek asylum there?

I’ve traveled to a refugee camp in Turkey, the Norway border with Russia, the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala — all to understand migration phenomena. And from those experiences, it’s very clear that the best way to manage migration flows and to assist populations that are struggling in their home country is for destination countries and transit countries to be aligned, and for efforts to aid the populations in their country of origin.

U.S. policy very clearly, for this administration, is to support Central American security and prosperity. We need to invest in their governance efforts and their economic development and in their security against gangs, smugglers, drug cartels and so forth to help prevent the push factors from existing in those countries and to help support their economic development.

But migration flows respond to incentives and success. If they believe that they will be allowed to stay in the destination country, they will try to make it. If they believe that they will be slowed down or turned around by a transit country, that will change the process.

All you have to do is look at the Arctic route in Norway. In 2015, in three months,. 5,500 people from 38 countries arrived from Russia. The Norwegians worked with Russia to recognize the Russian asylum system and that shut down overnight — those 5,500 stopped coming.

With [German] Chancellor Angela Merkel and [Turkish] President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, they reached an agreement in 2015 on the flow of Syrian nationals through Turkey to Greece and said that they would support refugee camps in Turkey. Those flows stopped overnight from Turkey to Greece.

You need to collaborate on regional migration. Mexico has been a leader in the region. They’ve gathered Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Panama and the U.S. together to talk about ways we can all get better at managing our policies in this area. Continued dialogue would be outstanding — to partner with all countries in the region on migration flows….

Source: Border protection commissioner talks ‘zero tolerance,’ family separations and how to discourage immigration

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US launches campaign to strip immigration cheaters of citizenship, once a rare process

2018/06/13 Leave a comment

No issue with cracking down on fraud and misrepresentation, unlike some of the other Trump administration policies, although legitimate concern over how it may be done:

The US government agency that oversees immigration applications is launching an office that will focus on identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and seek to strip them of it.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna said his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalisation.

Cissna said the cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, whose attorneys could then seek to remove the immigrants’ citizenship in civil court proceedings. In some cases, government attorneys could bring criminal charges related to fraud.

Until now, the agency has pursued cases as they arose but not through a coordinated effort, Cissna said. He said he hopes the agency’s new office in Los Angeles will be running by next year but added that investigating and referring cases for prosecution will likely take longer.

“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalising people who should not have been naturalised in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”

He declined to say how much the effort would cost but said it would be covered by the agency’s existing budget, which is funded by immigration application fees.

The push comes as the Trump administration has been cracking down on illegal immigration and taking steps to reduce legal immigration to the US.

Denaturalisation – the process of removing citizenship – is very rare.

The US government began looking at potentially fraudulent naturalisation cases a decade ago when a border officer detected about 200 people had used different identities to get green cards and citizenship after they were previously issued deportation orders.

In September 2016, an internal watchdog reported that 315,000 old fingerprint records for immigrants who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security database that is used to check immigrants’ identities. The same report found more than 800 immigrants had been ordered deported under one identity but became US citizens under another.

Since then, the government has been uploading these older fingerprint records dating back to the 1990s and investigators have been evaluating cases for denaturalisation.

Earlier this year, a judge revoked the citizenship of an Indian-born New Jersey man named Baljinder Singh after federal authorities accused him of using an alias to avoid deportation.

Authorities said Singh used a different name when he arrived in the United States in 1991. He was ordered deported the next year and a month later applied for asylum using the name Baljinder Singh before marrying an American, getting a green card and naturalising.

Authorities said Singh did not mention his earlier deportation order when he applied for citizenship.

For many years, most US efforts to strip immigrants of their citizenship focused largely on suspected war criminals who lied on their immigration paperwork, most notably former Nazis.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, officials began reviewing cases stemming from the fingerprints probe but prioritised those of naturalised citizens who had obtained security clearances, for example, to work at the Transportation Security Administration, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University law school.

The Trump administration has made these investigations a bigger priority, he said. He said he expects cases will focus on deliberate fraud but some naturalised Americans may feel uneasy with the change.

“It is clearly true that we have entered a new chapter when a much larger number of people could feel vulnerable that their naturalisation could be reopened,” Chishti said.

Since 1990, the Department of Justice has filed 305 civil denaturalisation cases, according to statistics obtained by an immigration attorney in Kansas who has defended immigrants in these cases.

The attorney, Matthew Hoppock, agrees that deportees who lied to get citizenship should face consequences but worries other immigrants who might have made mistakes on their paperwork could get targeted and might not have the money to fight back in court.

Cissna said there are valid reasons why immigrants might be listed under multiple names, noting many Latin American immigrants have more than one surname. He said the US government is not interested in that kind of minor discrepancy but wants to target people who deliberately changed their identities to dupe officials into granting immigration benefits.

“The people who are going to be targeted by this – they know full well who they are because they were ordered removed under a different identity and they intentionally lied about it when they applied for citizenship later on,” Cissna said. “It may be some time before we get to their case, but we’ll get to them.”

Source: US launches campaign to strip immigration cheaters of citizenship, once a rare process

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‘Anything would be better:’ Critics warn Ottawa’s family-reunification lottery is flawed, open to manipulation – The Globe and Mail

2018/06/12 Leave a comment

Almost comical if it were not for the impact on people. And it should not be surprising, given our immigration system’s emphasis on high skilled economic immigrants, that some of them should have the mathematical and technical smarts to point out the lack of randomness:

Canada’s family-reunification program is using a common spreadsheet application to select candidates as part of a process critics say is flawed and open to manipulation.

As the first step in the program, the federal government uses Microsoft Excel to randomly pick applications in its lottery, The Globe and Mail has learned. Experts have warned that using Excel to conduct such a sensitive lottery could be problematic, and that the lottery process itself may make the system less fair over all.

The Parents and Grandparents Program allows Canadians to sponsor family members for permanent-resident status. The Liberals introduced a lottery in 2017 in an effort to make the system fairer – previously, applications were accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. The program receives roughly 100,000 applications each year and selects 10,000.

Details on the lottery, obtained through an Access to Information request shared with The Globe, show a procedure carried out in just a few steps: Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) uses Excel to assign each application a random number, then takes the first 10,000 numbers.

Excel’s method for generating random numbers is “very bad,” according to Université de Montréal computer-science professor Pierre L’Ecuyer, an expert in random-number generation. “It’s a very old generator, and it’s really not state-of-the-art.” Prof. L’Ecuyer’s research has shown that Excel’s random-number generator doesn’t pass certain statistical tests, meaning it’s less random than it appears. Under the current system, “it may be that not everybody has exactly the same chance,” Prof. L’Ecuyer said.

Excel uses pseudo-random number generators, a class of algorithms that rely on formulas to generate numbers. These generators have a key flaw – they rely on a “seed” number to kick off the mathematical process. In the case of Excel, this seed is generated automatically by the application. “If you know one number at one step,” Prof. L’Ecuyer explained, “you can compute all the numbers that will follow.”

This means the process could be exploited by someone with the right skills. It’s happened before: In 1994, IT consultant Daniel Corriveau discovered a pattern in a keno game – which uses a random numbering system – at the Casino de Montréal and won $620,000 in a single evening. An investigation later determined the game was using the same seed number at the start of each day.

Using more robust generators, such as the ones used for cryptography, may not cost the government much, either. “Cryptographic generators are free. They are on the internet,” Prof. L’Ecuyer said. “Just pick one, you need to know about it and that’s all. It’s not complicated.

“Anything would be better.”

For its part, IRCC is satisfied with its use of Excel, spokeswoman Shannon Ker said in an e-mailed statement. “We stand by this randomized selection process as a sufficient means of equal opportunity for all who look to express an interest in sponsoring their parents and grandparents.”

Others would rather see the lottery scrapped altogether. For the past two years, Igor Wolford, a data-analytics manager at Loblaws, has applied to sponsor his parents in Russia. He hasn’t made it past the lottery stage, and recently started a website to petition the federal government to abandon the system.

Mr. Wolford has corresponded with members of Parliament about his concerns. “I actually prepared an Excel sheet showing how random processes work,” Mr. Wolford said. “After 10 years of selection, only half of people who were eligible 10 years ago would be selected.”

Number of people from an original pool of 95,000 applicants who haven‘t made it past the lottery stage
Assuming 20,000 new applicants each year and 10,000 applicants selected each year

https://s3.amazonaws.com/chartprod/cZByyEpAhKuPixSBk/thumbnail.png 

Although the lottery selects roughly one in 10 applications, the number of people who pass additional vetting and ultimately make it into the program is far lower.

“Last year, they selected the original 10,000 people [during the lottery], but only 6,000 people actually [made it into the program],” Mr. Wolford said. This is partly be cause the lottery is the first step in the process, meaning anyone can fill out the form.

IRCC responded to these complaints in 2018 by including a self-assessment screening for applicants. However, the questions are still optional, as one Twitter user noted.

When told the lottery was conducted in Excel, Mr. Wolford wasn’t surprised. “That’s a very sad process. It’s easily manipulatable,” he warned. According to IRCC, the process is double-blind, and to date there is no indication the system has been manipulated.

“The process has become unpredictable,” Mr. Wolford said. “Before, you knew that it would take seven years from start to finish, and you could plan your life. Right now, you don’t know if it will happen this year, in five years, in 15 years.”

“Because it’s a lottery, you might never be selected.”

via ‘Anything would be better:’ Critics warn Ottawa’s family-reunification lottery is flawed, open to manipulation – The Globe and Mail

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