Biden Wants Census To See ‘Invisible’ Groups: LGBTQ, Middle Eastern, North African

2020/11/16 Leave a comment

Of note:

As the incoming Biden administration prepares for office, the Census Bureau is already looking ahead to changes for the 2030 count.

While Biden’s transition team has not announced any specific policies yet for the next once-a-decade tally of the country’s residents, the president-elect’s campaign has previewed what could end up on the new administration’s agenda. They include ideas that gained steam during the Obama administration but stalled after President Trump took office.

Biden will direct federal agencies to “improve their collection efforts, including enhancing demographic information around race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability status,” Jamal Brown, the national press secretary for the Biden-Harris campaign, told NPR in a statement before the election.

Here are two specific policy proposals that could change how LGBTQ people and people with roots in the Middle East or North Africa can identify themselves for the next census and future federal surveys, and could give policymakers and researchers better insight into the U.S. population.

Census questions about sexual orientation and gender identity

One proposal by the Biden campaign would require the Census Bureau to gather voluntary information about people’s sexual orientation and gender identity through its census forms and survey questionnaires — a policy that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris supported as a senator.

There are currently no reliable national-level data about how many LGBTQ people live in the U.S., and that, many public policy experts say, makes it difficult to know whether the government is fully meeting the needs of LGBTQ groups. A change on this year’s census form is expected to generate the most comprehensive demographic information to date about same-sex couples who live together in the U.S., but other LGBTQ groups, including transgender and non-binary people, will be left out.

During the Obama administration, four federal agencies asked the bureau to start asking a sample of households questions about sexual orientation and gender identity on the bureau’s American Community Survey. That survey, which goes out to about 1 in 38 households every year, is considered a testing ground for the decennial census, which every household has to complete.

The Census Bureau, however, stopped working on the request after the Trump administration came into office, specifically after the Justice Department — which had said it needed the data to better enforce civil rights protections for LGBTQ people — backed down from its ask.

Under federal law, the bureau cannot release any census information identifying individuals until 72 years after it is collected. It can, however, put out anonymized data about demographic groups at levels as specific as neighborhoods.

Some data privacy experts have flagged concerns that this data could be used against LGBTQ people.

Biden’s campaign website says that the president-elect will “ensure” that federal agencies collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity are “vigorously enforcing appropriate privacy protections.”

Meanwhile, the Census Bureau has started conducting research on potential questions and response options on the Current Population Survey it carries out monthly for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Cultural and generational differences in how people describe their sexual orientation and gender identity make the wording on forms especially key to avoiding undercounts and overestimates of LGBTQ people, a working group formed by federal agencies during the Obama administration found.

A census check box for people with Middle Eastern or North African roots

Another Biden campaign proposal is creating a new category on census forms for people of Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) descent, including Arab Americans.

A person with “origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa” is officially categorized as white in data about race and ethnicity released by the Census Bureau and other federal agencies, according to the U.S. government’s current standards.

Some advocates for MENA groups in the U.S., however, have long pushed for a check box of their own on census forms.

In a report about research on collecting race and ethnicity information, Census Bureau researchers wrote that in 2010, focus group participants with Middle Eastern or North African roots “often did not know how to respond and/or felt excluded” when presented with the current census racial categories, which are set by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Including the terms “Lebanese” and “Egyptian” as examples under the white racial category — as they were on this year’s census form — was seen as “wrong or incorrect” by the focus group members.

During the Obama administration, the bureau recommended creating a separate response option for “Middle Eastern or North African” on the 2020 census form as part of a broader overhaul of the questions about race and Hispanic origin. The change would have likely produced more accurate data about people with MENA origins, while shrinking the share of people checking the “White” or “Some other race” box on the census, the bureau’s testing in 2015 suggests.

But the efforts to create a MENA category stopped in 2018 under the Trump administration. After decades of waiting for the addition, the move was bittersweet for some longtime advocates who were worried about how the rollout could have been perceived in the wake of Trump issuing travel bans that targeted people from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa such as Iran, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Still, earlier this year, that decision prompted an awkward exchange between Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham, a Trump appointee who joined the bureau in 2019, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan whose parents are Palestinian immigrants to the U.S.

“Dr. Dillingham, do I look white to you?” Tlaib asked in February during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the census.

“Congresswoman, I think that if you tell me what you identify with,” Dillingham replied, “I think I would respect that.”

Tlaib went on to describe how the decision to not move forward with a MENA category for the 2020 census will make people living in the U.S. who identify as Middle Eastern or North African “invisible” for the next 10 years when new census data are used to distribute federal funding, conduct health research and determine what kind of language assistance communities need.

“Director,” Tlaib pushed back, “we need to get it right because I’m not white.”

Getting a MENA category right on the census will require the bureau to work through how to represent the diversity among people with origins in regions that have no universally agreed-upon borders.

Among the suggestions the bureau has received so far are to highlight “Kurdish” as an example of a transnational group and to include “Israeli” as an example to encourage people born in Israel or with Israeli ancestry to identify with the category on the form.

Source: Biden Wants Census To See ‘Invisible’ Groups: LGBTQ, Middle Eastern, North African

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A Biden Immigration Policy: New Hope For Immigrants And Businesses

2020/11/09 Leave a comment

Good overview. Money quote: “The simplest rule Joe Biden and his team may follow on immigration policy would be to ask: What would Stephen Miller and Donald Trump do? And do the opposite.”:

Joe Biden is the next president of the United States. Unless Democrats win two runoff elections in Georgia, Biden may not have a Democratic majority in the Senate, making ambitious immigration legislation more challenging. Despite that, Joe Biden will have an opportunity to enact significant changes to U.S. immigration policy.

Legal Immigration: By 2021, Donald Trump will have reduced legal immigration by up to 49% since becoming president – without any change in U.S. immigration law, according to a National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) analysis.  Reducing legal immigration most harms refugees, employers and Americans who want to live with their spouses, parents or children, but it also affects the country’s future labor force and economic growth: “Average annual labor force growth, a key component of the nation’s economic growth, will be approximately 59% lower as a result of the administration’s immigration policies, if the policies continue,” according to the NFAP analysis. Reversing these policies could be a vital part of the Biden immigration agenda.

High-Skilled Immigration: If the Biden administration understands only one thing about business immigration, it should be this: H-1B visas are inextricably linked with the ability of highly educated people to become employment-based immigrants and eventually American citizens. Restrictions on H-1B visas can prevent the next potential founder of a billion-dollar company from gaining a green card and certainly will hurt international students. In addition to academic research that shows imposing H-1B restrictions push more jobs outside the United States, the country’s future can be affected in other ways: 75% – 30 out of 40 – of the finalists of the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search had parents who worked in America on H-1B visas.

Legislative reforms could make it easier for individuals to gain permanent residence without an H-1B, but until that happens (if it ever does), an H-1B will remain the only practical way for many people to work long-term in the United States, including international students. Approximately 75% to 80% of fulltime graduate students in key technology fields at U.S. universities are international students.

H-1B visa holders understand that H-1B status is part of the American Dream for many outstanding future immigrants, which is why Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, focused so much energy on restricting H-1B visas.

The Trump administration did not pursue “merit-based” immigration. “Denial rates for new H-1B petitions for initial employment rose from 6% in FY 2015 to 29% through the second quarter of FY 2020,” according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis. An April 2020 proclamation blocked the entry of legal immigrants to the United States in nearly all categories, including employment-based immigrants. Before a judge issued a preliminary injunction against it in October, a June 2020 proclamation suspended the entry of foreign nationals on H-1B, L-1 and certain other temporary visas.

In October 2020, the Trump administration issued three new regulations that would profoundly change – and broadly restrict – H-1B visas:

–       The Department of Labor’s (DOL) rule that inflates salaries for H-1B visa holders and employment-based immigrants.

–       The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) H-1B rule that changes the definition of a specialty occupation and seeks to codify restrictions against companies whose H-1B employees conduct work at customer locations.

–        A rule to eliminate the H-1B lottery and replace it with a highest-to-lowest salary system likely to shut out international students and younger information technology (IT) professionals.

Legal challenges to the regulations may tell much of the story of the Trump administration’s legacy on H-1B visa policy. Companies will be relieved if a Biden administration returns U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) policies to those of the Obama administration. There is a reasonable chance that will happen.

USCIS and State Department Processing: “One barrier that will be hardest to break is the enormous backlog with both USCIS and State,” said Jeffrey Gorsky, senior counsel at Berry Appleman & Leiden and a former State Department attorney, in an interview. “While Biden is likely to shift resources from enforcement to adjudication, it may take a year or years to burn through the piles of unfinished work. For the State Department, once normal processing resumes, bearing in mind that some of this suspension is due to legitimate Covid-19-related concerns and not just immigration restrictions, it may increase the visa wait times by 6 months to a year.”

A priority at USCIS should be to rescind memos that have slowed processing, increased Requests for Evidence and made it more difficult to gain approval of previously-approved applications, such as the 2017 memo that no longer provided deference to previous adjudications. Putting the USCIS fiscal house in order will take a combination of a more reasonable fee rule, using the authority Congress provided for premium processing and a legislative funding or loan package.

Executive Orders, Proclamations and Regulations: Analysts believe if the Biden administration is smart, it will make a clean break from the Trump era by undoing all executive orders and proclamations on immigration that are not directly tied to health concerns related to Covid-19. That would include the most high-profile measures, such as the ban on the entry of individuals from primarily Muslim countries. Undoing the April 2020 immigration proclamation would allow immigrants in the family-sponsored and Diversity Visa categories to enter the United States, once State Department processing is normalized. Reversing regulations, most notably the public charge rule, may take more time and be influenced by court rulings.

H-4 EAD and Per-Country Limits: For years, the Trump administration has placed a proposed rule on the regulatory agenda to rescind an existing regulation that allows many spouses of H-1B visa holders to work – called H-4 EAD (employment authorization document). The administration could still attempt to take some restrictive action before Donald Trump leaves office.

A priority for the Biden administration should be to fix processing for H-4 EADs. In a recent lawsuit, plaintiffs argued H-1B spouses cannot renew their H-4 employment authorization documents because USCIS added an unnecessary biometrics requirement and adopted an erroneous interpretation of government regulations by prohibiting automatic extensions of H-4 work authorization.

Biden’s immigration policy document mentions eliminating the per-country limit for employment-based immigrants. Due to per-country limits, an employment-based green card applicant from India can potentially wait decades before gaining permanent residence. Legislation to address the problem passed the House of Representatives, but a series of demands by senators, the latest beings Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), first slowed then blocked the bill. It is unclear whether anything will change this Congress but if major immigration legislation moves next year, fixing the per-country limit is likely to be included. Another standalone bill may be possible as well.

DACA and Dreamers: Over the past four years, it took a great deal of legal activity, including a Supreme Court ruling, to protect the legal status of more than 600,000 recipients of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Joe Biden said protecting Dreamers will be a priority. How he protects them will matter.

Biden administration attorneys will need to decide if keeping the current program intact is the best approach legally or if a different administrative approach would work better. Continuing protections for DACA recipients is favored by a 2-to-1 margin among voters, according to poll results released by FWD.us. That does not mean a legislative solution will be easy, particularly one that goes beyond DACA recipients, which the Biden campaign has said he will pursue. Even if Democrats control the Senate at some point during the next four years, some compromise on the scope of a legislative solution (i.e., how many unauthorized immigrants, other immigration measures) is expected to be necessary for a bill to become law.

International Students: The Trump immigration team made it a priority to break the link between international students and their ability to work in the United States after graduation. The DOL and DHS H-1B rules, along with along with eliminating the H-1B lottery, would make it much more difficult for international students to work in America after completing their studies, say universities. “For students considering a degree abroad, 62% mentioned that being able to work in the country following the degree is very important,” according to a survey of international students by Studyportals.

The comment period ended last month on a significant proposed rule, opposed by U.S. universities, to limit the period of stay for international students. New enrollment of international students in the U.S. has fallen for years (while rising in other countries), and this rule would drop U.S. levels lower. Generating uncertainty as to whether students can complete their studies in the U.S. is a good way to ensure they won’t come to America in the first place. Research has found the proposed student rule is based on flawed DHS reports on student overstay rates. A Biden administration may need to decide what to do with this rule.

Refugees, Asylum and TPS: The first immigration challenge of the Biden presidency could be how to address asylum seekers at the southern border. Biden has pledged to end the process that has forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers to live in camps in Mexico. Ending the camps with an orderly process and providing a set of new procedures that will affect other asylum seekers may need to be accomplished quickly. The priority will be to ensure human rights and avoid scenes of overwhelmed Border Patrol agents. It would be a disaster if after campaigning against “kids in cages,” a shorthand reference to the Trump administration’s family separation policies, a Biden administration created anything remotely similar.

Biden officials should consider solutions that allow refugees to be interviewed outside the United States, including in their home countries, and develop solutions to enable individuals to work legally in the United States at jobs that do not require a high school degree, similar to, or even including, H-2B visas. Not everyone fleeing danger may qualify for asylum, but offering opportunities to earn a living in safety may be a desirable alternative, and it can take place in an orderly fashion.

The Biden administration is likely to pursue unraveling Trump administration rules and Bureau of Immigration Appeals decisions that restrict asylum. That includes a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order that expels individuals before they are allowed to apply for asylum. Reforms to the system of immigration judges, including legislative reforms to make immigration courts independent, may be on the agenda.

Joe Biden’s immigration policy document states, “He will set the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000, and seek to raise it over time commensurate with our responsibility, our values, and the unprecedented global need.” Donald Trump reduced the annual refugee ceiling by over 86%, down to 15,000 in FY 2021, compared to 110,000 in the final year of the Obama administration. Biden has the authority to adjust the annual refugee ceiling after taking office, although rebuilding refugee processing and resettlement will take time.

“Order an immediate review of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for vulnerable populations who cannot find safety in their countries ripped apart by violence or disaster,” is cited in the Biden policy document. Biden mentioned TPS for Venezuelans during the campaign, but hundreds of thousands of individuals from other countries, primarily from Central America, have lived in the United States for years and seen their TPS status ended by the Trump administration. The document mentions including such individuals in a possible legislative solution.

Startup Visas: Startup visas is a modest, bipartisan legislative idea that could see renewed interest, given the need for job creation. It was part of an immigration bill that passed the U.S. Senate in 2013. The United States does not have a startup visa for foreign-born entrepreneurs. A National Foundation for American Policy reportfound the federal startup program in Canada has helped create jobs, as has a program run by the province of Quebec. The U.K, Australia and New Zealand also have startup visas. The Trump administration attempted to rescind a modest effort to allow foreign entrepreneurs to stay in the U.S. via parole.

A Difference in Tone: During the final days of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump warned people in Minnesota that Joe Biden would turn their state into a refugee camp. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plastered the faces of dark-skinned immigrants on billboards in swing states. Building a wall to keep out foreigners remained one of the federal government’s top priorities. That will change in a Biden presidency: The ICE billboards will come down, and construction crews on the border wall will go home.

The difference between the two presidents’ rhetoric on immigrants and refugees should be night and day. “Generations of immigrants have come to this country with little more than the clothes on their backs, the hope in their heart, and a desire to claim their own piece of the American Dream,” reads the Biden immigration plan. “It’s the reason we have constantly been able to renew ourselves, to grow better and stronger as a nation, and to meet new challenges. Immigration is essential to who we are as a nation, our core values, and our aspirations for our future. Under a Biden Administration, we will never turn our backs on who we are or that which makes us uniquely and proudly American. The United States deserves an immigration policy that reflects our highest values as a nation.”

What will be the guiding principles of a Biden-Harris administration on immigration? Stephen Miller spearheaded the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, working tirelessly to move the United States as close as possible to a policy of zero immigration. The simplest rule Joe Biden and his team may follow on immigration policy would be to ask: What would Stephen Miller and Donald Trump do? And do the opposite.

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Biden Has No Reason to Back Down on Immigration Now

2020/11/09 Leave a comment

From the libertarian Cato Institute which continues to provide good analysis of US immigration:

After Joe Biden won the Democratic Party nomination, he made no adjustments to his aggressively pro‐​immigration agenda. Some ideas—a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants—have long been standard Democratic Party positions, but Biden’s ideas went farbeyond this. Biden’s platform was probably as pro‐​immigrant as any winning candidate since Abraham Lincoln. Yet despite repeated attacks by President Trump, Biden stuck to his message—even on border and asylum issues which many see as the most difficult politically. With public opinion on immigration even further on his side than the presidential vote count, he has absolutely no reason to back down now.

Biden Stuck to a Pro‐​Immigrant Message

The most remarkable moment in this campaign for me as an immigration analyst was when President Trump attacked Biden in the second presidential debate for the Obama‐​Biden administration allowing what he calls “catch and release” of immigrants at the border. Rather than pivoting back to normal Democratic attacks about Trump’s child separation policy, Biden took Trump’s bait and launched into an extended defense of exactly what Trump was attacking him for—even going so far as to counter‐​attack Trump for forcing Central American asylum seekers to live homeless in dangerous cities in Mexico.

Without Trump’s anti‐​asylum policies, it is inevitable that the United States will have a very significant increase in immigrants requesting asylum. Of all the Trump policies, I believed—as many analysts still do—that these asylum restrictions would be the most difficult politically for Biden to end. Yet Biden took his few minutes on a national debate stage to assert that he’s willing to embrace greater acceptance of asylum seekers as a good thing. If the new administration accepts them all at ports of entry, grants them status and employment authorization, there will not even be the issue of immigrants breaking the law to create any potential political liability.

Little Reason to Change

Now that he appears to have beaten President Trump, will Biden suddenly reverse? It’s possible. It wouldn’t be the first time that Biden has flipped on immigration. But he absolutely no political reason to change. He won on a pro‐​immigrant message. House Democrats won on a pro‐​immigrant message.

Moreover, Biden is assuming office at a time when the public has never been more sympathetic to the pro‐​immigrant cause. For the first time in its 55‐​year history, Gallup’s immigration poll found more support for increasing than decreasing immigration (Figure 1). Support for immigration grows when Gallup only asks about legal immigration. More than three quarters tell Gallup that they believe immigration is a good thing. Pew Research Center pollsfind that large majorities reject that the arguments immigrants increase crime, that they tax the welfare state, and that they do not assimilate. Trump has actually lost ground even among Republicans on his anti‐​immigration message, as I explained here.

Even the old President Obama advisors who oversaw the most deportations ever and will likely resurface in a Biden administration understand that they have a mandate from Biden to gut and replace Trump’s anti‐​immigrant agenda in a way that they did not until very late in Obama’s term. I fully expect that the agencies will go beyond reversing them and create even better processes for immigrants—legal or otherwise. He will also push aggressively for Congress to enact legislation to create a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants and expand legal immigration.

Potential Problem Areas

The most likely problem areas for Biden are on guest worker visas. Biden said he wanted to make the H-2A and H-2B guest worker programs for lesser skilled seasonal jobs less “cumbersome, bureaucratic, and inflexible.” Moreover, Biden “will support expanding the number of high‐​skilled visas.” But in both cases, he also falls into the erroneous labor union narrative that these visas can hurt U.S. workers and calls for strong enforcement of the “prevailing wage”—a made‐​up governmental minimum wage for foreign workers.

In the case of the H-1B skilled worker visa, Biden specifically calls for greater restrictions on “entry level wages”—which could effectively stop the hiring of foreign college graduates by U.S. companies. Since nearly all employer‐​sponsored foreign workers enter first on temporary visas, restricting them would do very significant harm to both employers, foreign workers, and U.S. workers in complementary positions.

Conclusion

Overall, Biden has given immigrant advocates a reason for optimism. He faced down President Trump’s attacks and doubled down on his pro‐​immigrant positions. He may impose new restrictions on guest workers and not follow through on every campaign promise, but he will restart a legal immigration system that has almost entirely been stopped by this administration, and he will generally make positive reforms beyond that.

Source: Biden Has No Reason to Back Down on Immigration Now

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U.S. election results one factor that could impact immigration to Canada next year

2020/10/29 Leave a comment

Will likely be more analysis and commentary once the results are known and how that affects or not the forthcoming immigration levels plan:

After four years of Canada positioning itself as a more welcoming destination than the U.S. for new immigrants, the upcoming presidential election could change that dynamic.

But as the Liberal government prepares to lay out its immigration targets for the coming year, the domestic discourse on the issue appears to be changing as well.

A new poll by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies suggests Canadians are feeling skittish about any planned increases to immigration next year, after months of low numbers of new arrivals due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fifty-two per cent of those polled this week say they want the levels to stay low for the next 12 months, a figure that can be pegged to the pandemic, said Jack Jedwab, the president of the Association for Canadian Studies.

“When health authorities are telling you that one of the principal causes of the virus is migration — they’re not saying international migration, just people moving in general — and they are telling you not to go abroad, you’re going to conclude to some degree that immigration carries a risk right now,” said Jedwab.

The survey polled 1,523 Canadians between Oct. 23 and Oct. 25. It cannot be assigned a margin of error because online surveys are not truly random.

Border closures, civil servants working from home, flight cancellations and vanished job opportunities have all had an impact on the immigration system: estimates suggest that as of August, immigration levels were down 43.5 per cent versus last year and the government’s plan to welcome 341,000 newcomers in 2020 is out the window.

While the Liberal government has maintained a pro-immigration stance throughout and has begun easing restrictions on who is allowed into Canada, what the Liberals think immigration overall could look like next year will be clearer later this week.

Despite some Americans’ “If Trump wins, I’m moving to Canada” line, the U.S. election might not affect the total numbers for new arrivals.

But it could affect the demographics of who arrives.

Upon assuming the presidency in 2017, Donald Trump immediately moved to impose restrictions on immigration, and Canada’s messaging immediately went in the other direction.

The most public response was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s #WelcomeRefugees tweet, posted after Trump’s first changes were announced.

Meanwhile, Trump’s travel bans on certain countries, crackdowns on temporary visas issued to citizens of others, and efforts to make it harder for highly skilled workers to get visas would go on to have a trickle-up-to-Canada effect.

How so became tragically clear earlier this year when Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was shot down just after taking off from Tehran.

Upwards of 130 people on the flight were headed to Canada. With Iran on the U.S. blacklist, the Iranian diaspora in Canada had swelled.

The tech sector as well began actively promoting Canada as a place to move as the U.S. made it harder for skilled workers to get visas.

A study earlier this year by the international real estate company CBRE concluded that Toronto had seen the biggest growth in technology jobs in the last five years, outpacing hot spots like Seattle and San Francisco.

Should Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden win the election, it’s expected that U.S. immigration policy will shift, said Andrew Griffiths, a former director general of citizenship and multiculturalism at the Immigration Department.

How far is hard to know: Trump made a lot of changes, he said.

“It’s going to take a major effort to go through them one by one and make changes and there may not be political will to reverse them all,” he said.

But there is one area where there could be a quick change.

Since 2017, nearly 60,000 people have crossed into Canada from the U.S. at unofficial border points to seek asylum in Canada.

The reason is the Safe Third Country Agreement, which doesn’t allow for asylum claims at land border points, on the grounds that both countries are safe, and someone must ask for refugee status in the first safe country he or she reaches.

Canada has been trying to renegotiate, and if there’s a change in power, the dynamics of those talks could shift as well.

On the other hand, points out Griffiths, it could also result in the number of people seeking to cross into Canada that way declining markedly. One “push factor” sending asylum-claimants north has been a U.S. crackdown on visa renewals by people from certain countries.

The political dynamic in the U.S. will always have a strong and vocal anti-immigrant component that doesn’t exist at the same level in Canada, Griffith said.

If Trump loses, the more “outrageous” aspects of his approach might disappear, he said.

“A Biden administration would reduce the strength of the Canadian advantage that we had in all our messaging, but it won’t completely eliminate it.”

Source: U.S. election results one factor that could impact immigration to Canada next year

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Biden Pledges To Dismantle Trump’s Sweeping Immigration Changes — But Can He Do That?

2020/09/15 Leave a comment

More on the challenges that a possible Biden administration would face:

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is pledging to dismantle the sweeping changes President Trump has made to the American immigration system, if he wins the White House in November.

But that’s easier said than done.

“I don’t think it’s realistic that Biden in four years could unroll everything that Trump did,” says Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

“Because of the intense volume and pace of changes the Trump administration enacted while in office, even if we have a new administration, Trump will continue to have had an impact on immigration for years to come,” Pierce says.

The Trump administration has undertaken more than 400 executive actions on immigration, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Those include tougher border and interior enforcement, restricting asylum, rolling back Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), slashing refugee visas, streamlining immigration courts, and creating Remain in Mexico.

“What the administration has sought to do is to simply turn off immigration and to do it unilaterally by presidential edict, without the approval of Congress or the consent of the American people,” says Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “That project should be reversed.”

That’s exactly what Biden pledges to do. His position paper on immigration — 51 bullet points that fill 22 pages — seeks to roll back Trump’s accomplishments, and re-enact Obama-era policies.

“If I’m elected president, we’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities. We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers,” Biden said in his acceptance speech at the virtual Democratic National Convention.

The former vice president has an exhaustive to-do list. Within his first 100 days, Biden says he would implement a wide range of policies: not another mile of border wall, no more separating families, no more prolonged detentions or deportations of peaceable, hardworking migrants.

Biden also says he would restore the asylum system and support alternatives to immigrant detention, such as case management, that allow an applicant to live and work in the community while their case works its way through the hearing process. Trump has derisively called this “catch and release.”

And Biden would fully reinstate DACA, which allows migrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children to live and work without fear of deportation.

But if he’s elected, Biden would face a host of obstacles that could slow his immigration counter-revolution.

First, there’s the specter of renewed chaos at the Southern border. Last year, groups as large as 1,000 Central Americans at a time waded across the Rio Grande into El Paso, Texas, to request asylum. The Border Patrol was overwhelmed, and ended up detaining families in primitive, unsanitary conditions. Immigration hawks are wary that Biden would throw open the gates again.

“They don’t want to create such a chaotic situation at the border by welcoming or incentivizing another massive influx from Central America,” says Jerry Kammer, who is affiliated with the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors restrictions on immigration.

Federal border officials are worried what would happen if Biden cancels bilateral agreements with Mexico that have dramatically slowed the migrant flow.

“If Mexico right now decided they weren’t going to continue to help us, people would start coming through like we saw in the caravans two springs ago. There’s no reason that it wouldn’t come back as bad as it was,” says Ron Vitiello, former deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

NPR asked a senior adviser to the Biden campaign what would happen if a new president gave migrants a green light. The advisor said they are cognizant of that “pull factor.”

In fact, the people most closely watching to see if Biden defeats Trump and reverses his immigration crackdown may be beyond U.S. borders.

Some 700 migrants languish in filthy tents pitched in a public park amid mud, rats and clouds of mosquitoes. The encampment is in Matamoros, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. They’re seeking asylum in the U.S., but stuck there under a Trump initiative known as Remain in Mexico.

“We place our hope in Joe Biden, who is the Democratic nominee, because he would treat the immigrants very differently than Trump has,” says Carla Garcia, speaking at her cluttered campsite. She and her 7-year-old son are seeking protection in the United States after fleeing criminal gangs in Honduras.

“We hope he wins and changes all of this that Trump has created,” Garcia says, motioning to the bedraggled camp. “This is discrimination and racism.”

For his part, the president is touting the success of Remain in Mexico, which the administration calls the Migrant Protection Protocols.

“We don’t want ’em here. We want ’em outside,” Trump told cheering supporters in Yuma, Ariz., last month. “We got sued all over the place, and we won. So now they don’t come into the United States. They can wait outside.”

While the president says he has single-handedly restored a broken immigration system, human rights advocates are appalled at what they call the cruelty of his policies. And immigrant advocates say they have high hopes that a new administration would rebuild the immigration system based on “American values.”

“There’s no doubt about it, this is a monumental challenge,” says Heidi Altman, director of policy for the National Immigrant Justice Center. “That means a complete and utter reorientation of the culture of the agencies that administer immigration law and policy in the United States.”

But that’s a tall order — and another obstacle Biden would face. Immigration agents have enjoyed extraordinary support from the White House over the past 45 months. The Trump administration has bragged about “unshackling” them to let them do their jobs more aggressively.

“That isn’t something that’s a light switch. You can’t change culture within an organization that vast overnight,” says Angela Kelley, senior adviser to the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “So I agree that it’s going to be a long, long road.”

For an example of how the Border Patrol is marching lockstep with the White House, look to a video titled “The Gotaway,” posted earlier this month.

CBP produced an ominous, fictionalized video on the Border Patrol’s YouTube channel that depicts a Latino migrant who had just escaped from agents, attacking and knifing a man in a dark alley. The video was released at a time when Trump has been stoking fears about violent immigrants at his campaign rallies.

NPR inquired why the video was made and why it was removed a week later before being re-posted. Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott said in a statement that the video was produced “to enhance awareness that effective border security helps keep all Americans safe,” and it was briefly pulled because they misused copyrighted materials.

A Biden presidency also would likely find itself skirmishing with conservative lawyers the way the Trump administration has been tied up in federal courts fighting immigrant advocates.

“If Biden is elected and his administration starts rescinding executive actions that Trump had firm legal authority to do, groups like us will sue. That is a fact,” says R.J. Hauman, head of government relations at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “We did so under President Obama, and we’ll do so again.”

Finally, there’s the pandemic. An NPR/Ipsos poll shows that a majority of Americans support Trump’s decision to shut the nation’s borders to all types of immigrants to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Biden has not said if he would reverse that order to reopen the borders and jump-start the asylum process, which has been suspended. So it’s anybody’s guess when the virus will subside and the nation can welcome immigrants again.

Source: Biden Pledges To Dismantle Trump’s Sweeping Immigration Changes — But Can He Do That?

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