The Unauthorized Immigrant Population Expands amid Record U.S.-Mexico Border Arrivals

2025/02/10 2 Comments

Helps explain some of the Trump administration concerns with the Southern border (but not the Northern one). Good series of explanatory charts:

Amid record encounters of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal years (FY) 2021 and 2022 and wide use of humanitarian parole to allow entry of migrants arriving without visas, the size of the unauthorized immigrant population has reached its highest level yet. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates that approximately 13.7 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the United States as of mid-2023, up from 12.8 million the year prior. MPI revised upwards its estimates for 2022 and prior years, using an updated methodology that permits better addressing the Census Bureau’s undercount of new immigrants.

Between 2019 and 2023, the unauthorized immigrant population grew by 3 million, or an average of 6 percent per year (see Figure 1). The nation had not seen yearly increases this large since the early 2000s.

This growth is partially explained by increased irregular arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border, with a rising mix of nationalities from across the Western Hemisphere from countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, as well as hundreds of thousands of people who entered with humanitarian parole from Ukraine, Mexico, Haiti, and other countries. And it also stems from sizable numbers of Europeans and others who overstayed their nonimmigrant visa.

Most of the changes are expected continuations of trends that started several years ago. For example, the unauthorized immigrant population from Venezuela started to grow quickly following the severe economic and political turbulence that began there in 2015. Likewise, the unauthorized populations from Honduras and Guatemala grew rapidly starting around 2019….

Source: The Unauthorized Immigrant Population Expands amid Record U.S.-Mexico Border Arrivals

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Legal Pathways and Enforcement: What the U.S. Safe Mobility Strategy Can Teach Europe about Migration Management

2024/12/17 Leave a comment

Usual solid analysis from MPI, with approach and results undercover by media and not discussed by Harris campaign:

As the Biden administration comes to an end on January 20, so does one of the most ambitious migration management policy agendas in recent memory. Over the last four years, the administration initiated an innovative strategy mixing increased regional cooperation on immigration enforcement and a more orderly system for border arrivals with a significant expansion of lawful pathways and efforts to push humanitarian protection decisions away from the border. Based on the notion of “safe mobility,” this strategy eventually saw irregular migration to the U.S.-Mexico border drop to its lowest level in almost five years after a period of record arrivals. But it took a long time to implement the various elements—a period during which the U.S. public became increasingly restive over perceived chaos at the border and large numbers of irregular arrivals. Even as some key aspects of the strategy have yet to be fully implemented, the incoming Trump administration will assert its own, differing vision for migration management at U.S. borders and relations with neighboring countries.

Still, the Biden-era innovations have been watched with interest across the Atlantic, where many European governments are struggling to find an effective answer to similar mixed movements of asylum seekers and irregular migrants. While some of the U.S. measures were more developed than others, together they provide the seeds of an approach that ensures greater border control while advancing pathways for humanitarian protection.

The Biden experience makes clear, though, that sequencing matters. Many of the elements promoting protection pathways preceded the efforts for greater regional enforcement and heightened U.S. requirements to seek asylum at borders. It was not until June 2024 that many enforcement measures, including greater cooperation with the Mexican and Panamanian governments and narrowing of asylum eligibility at borders, were fully implemented, with irregular arrivals then dropping precipitously. As a result, the administration will likely be remembered more for the several million migrants who were allowed across the U.S.-Mexico border, rather than the combination of measures that finally brought irregular migration under control.

The incoming Trump administration will undoubtedly pursue a strategy based primarily on enforcement, not lawful pathways, and further reduce access to humanitarian protection. That does not mean, however, that a balanced approach that includes robust enforcement and lawful pathways is dead. Instead, for countries that want to pursue this, it points to the need for a more pragmatic approach that achieves early reductions in arrivals while also preserving pathways for protection, not delaying the enforcement-focused elements of the strategy….

Finally, the Biden administration initiatives offer a crucial lesson about managing public trust and messaging. First, it has become almost gospel that the orderliness of migration (in a planned, legal way) matters almost as much or more than the absolute numbers arriving. The CHNV and SMO programs would seem to have fulfilled this criteria—migrants arrived with authorization at airports and with a sponsor or local agency ready to receive them and support their initial reception costs. Yet there was little messaging to U.S. publics by the government about either program, leaving the door open for critics to exploit the narrative, accusing the administration of paying to fly in future voters. It also seems that numbers may, in fact, matter after all. While more than 860,000 migrants came in through CBP One appointments and another 800,000-plus through the CHNV process and similar parole processes for Ukrainians and Afghans, nearly 4.2 million other migrants were allowed in after crossing a border without authorization, in addition to others who managed to cross the border undetected. For many local communities and service providers, who received minimal support from the federal government for the costs incurred in addressing the needs of these new arrivals, the pace of change and demands placed upon them were great….

Source: Legal Pathways and Enforcement: What the U.S. Safe Mobility Strategy Can Teach Europe about Migration Management


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Experts pour cold water on Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship — but issue a stark warning

2024/12/12 Leave a comment

Think this assessment largely correct. More performative but not without consequences and distracts from what the administration can and will do:

…”President-elect Trump is trying to send a message to people all over the world and also to unauthorized immigrants in the United States that he’s going to be tough on immigration,” argued Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a nonpartisan think tank.

“He hopes that people will choose not to make the trip to the United States and not try to enter,” she told Salon in a phone interview. “I think he also hopes that people who are living in the United States without status might opt to leave the country on their own.”

Trump has signaled an interest in repealing birthright citizenship since his first run for president, including the change in his immigration policy proposal in 2015, according to CNN. Trump insisted to Axios in 2018 that it was possible to do so through an executive order and last May, Trump released a campaign video proclaiming he would sign an executive order to roll back the right on day one of his presidency, according to NBC News.

The impact of repealing the right would be immense. A 2020 MPI and Pennsylvania State University analysis found that ending birthright citizenship for U.S. babies with two undocumented immigrant parents would lead to a 4.7 million-person increase in the population of unauthorized people by 2050, including one million children born to two parents who had been born in the U.S. themselves.

That population would skyrocket to 24 million by 2050 from 11 million at the time of the analysis’ publishing if U.S. babies with only one undocumented parent were also denied citizenship, the researchers found.

Gelatt said that such an action from the Trump administration would create a “multigenerational class of people who are excluded from full rights” and citizenship, which would restrain their ability to achieve higher earnings, support their families and contribute to the country through taxes.

“Denying people that legal status, even if they’re born in the United States, would put people in a much more legally vulnerable, economically vulnerable position,” she said.

Depending on the exact language of Trump’s proposed executive order, ending birthright citizenship could also impact U.S.-born children’s parents, added Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School. Such an order could potentially prevent officials from issuing passports, Social Security numbers or providing welfare benefits to family members of those children.

But Trump has no viable legal pathway to repealing birthright citizenship, Yale-Loehr told Salon in an email. An executive order can’t repeal an amendment, and any executive action Trump took attempting to do so would “trigger immediate litigation.”

Birthright citizenship was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution in 1868 with the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which was intended to grant citizenship and civil liberties to formerly enslaved African Americans. Contrary to what Trump told Welker, more than 30 nations, largely in the western hemisphere, provide birthright citizenship.

Amending the Constitution to upend the 14th Amendment would require a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate as well as ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures. Even with slim Republican majorities in both chambers during Trump’s next term, such a proposal would be unlikely to get past either chamber.

His proposed executive order is also unlikely to withstand any legal challenges as the likelihood of the Supreme Court, despite its conservative majority, striking birthright citizenship from the Constitution is slim to none, added Hiroshi Motomura, a UCLA School of Law professor and faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and policy.

“Even though people say that the court has become more conservative, this would be even further in the direction of trying to overturn the past than we’ve seen,” he told Salon in a phone interview.

Ending birthright citizenship would upend the foundation of how the nation has historically seen itself — as a country of immigrants — flying in the face of the purpose of the American Civil War and much of the United States immigration history since its founding, Motomura said. He pointed to the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim ArkSupreme Court decision that held that U.S.-born children of Chinese immigrants were U.S. citizens under the 14th Amendment even though their parents were, at the time, legally barred from obtaining citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Acts.

“This is all part of the racial history of the United States. This is why this is so bedrock compared to other things that the Supreme Court is sometimes characterized for doing as being quite radical,” he explained. “This goes way beyond overruling Roe v. Wade. I think that was a radical move, but this is no comparison. This is quite a bit more of a rethinking of what the country is even about.”

Given how unlikely it is that Trump would succeed at repealing birthright citizenship, what purpose, then, could Trump’s focus on ending the right serve? Generating political value, Gelatt and Motomura argued, the former pointing to the importance of illegal immigration and the border to voters during the 2024 election.

Source: Experts pour cold water on Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship — but issue a stark warning

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MPI: Immigrants and Crime in the United States

2024/10/19 Leave a comment

A reminder given the falsehoods in the USA election:

Immigrants in the United States commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population, notwithstanding the assertion by critics that immigration is linked to higher rates of criminal activity. This reality of reduced criminality, which holds across immigrant groups including unauthorized immigrants, has been demonstrated through research as well as findings for the one state in the United States—Texas—that tracks criminal arrests and convictions by immigration status.

A growing volume of research demonstrates that not only do immigrants commit fewer crimes, but they also do not raise crime rates in the U.S. communities where they settle. In fact, some studies indicate that immigration can lower criminal activity, especially violent crime, in places with inclusive policies and social environments where immigrant populations are well established….

Source: MPI: Immigrants and Crime in the United States

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MPI: Rollback of ‘Golden Passports’ Shows Their Elusive Shine

2022/10/18 Leave a comment

Good in-depth discussion of the practice and related issues.

Money quote: “greater concerns have emerged when CBI programs interfere with good governance, resulting in corruption of public officials, scandals, money laundering, or tampering with elections. These have been a rule rather than an exception in every single existing investor citizenship program:”

Little more than a month after Russian forces invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta began to heed the call of the European Union’s institutions advocating the abolition of “golden passports” by cracking down on Russian oligarchs, who were among the key beneficiaries. Formally known as citizenship by investment (CBI) programs, these schemes enable individuals to become citizens of a country by means of an economic contribution, often without any other substantive conditions such as residency periods, local language knowledge, or civic tests.

These programs have been a heated topic in the European Union ever since October 2013, when Malta decided to offer its passport in exchange for investment in the country’s economy. Its Individual Investor Program ran between February 2014 and September 2020, and that November the country introduced a new route for investors to receive citizenship after three years of residence, which could be reduced to one year on the basis of providing “exceptional services.” The pushback from EU institutions against these schemes has been driven by three main concerns: that national citizenship is a gateway to rights such as free movement across the bloc, that these programs often lead to corruption of public officials, and that investors do not have a genuine connection with their new country. In late September, the European Commission referred Malta to the Court of Justice of the European Union, claiming its program was incompatible with the concept of EU citizenship and violated the Treaty on European Union.  

Previously, these concerns did not substantively resonate with Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta, but security unease amidst the war in Ukraine did. Bulgaria and Cyprus have since discontinued their CBI programs; Malta has fully abolished it for Russian and Belarussian citizens. On top of that, authorities of Cyprus and Malta have already initiated several withdrawals of investment-based passports previously granted to sanctioned Russians and Belarusians supportive of the war in Ukraine; at this writing, Bulgarian authorities were reviewing the beneficiaries of their CBI program to see if any were under sanction.

CBI programs are a part of a much broader phenomenon of investor migration, which also includes the more widespread “golden visas,” or residence by investment (RBI) programs. These kinds of schemes enable investors to gain residency rights in a country by purchasing a house, as is the case in Greece, Portugal, and Spain; making a financial investment, as in Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom; or creating a certain number of jobs, as required under the American EB-5 visa.

Unlike the RBI programs, which frequently require investors to effectively migrate to the destination country, CBI documents are often used only for international mobility or as insurance. So why are they so controversial?

This article discusses the history of citizenship by investment, the main beneficiaries of CBI programs, the benefits and criticisms associated with them, and what the future might have in store for these programs.

Are “Golden Passports” a Novelty?

Investment-based citizenship is often perceived as a new phenomenon. Yet obtaining legal status through wealth is not a historical novelty. Romans, too, offered citizenship to men who could afford it, provided they also met other requirements such as residence, ethnicity, and military service. Things have changed since. Nowadays, a financial contribution is all that is needed to secure the passport of a country running a CBI program. The amount can be as low as USD 100,000, as in the Commonwealth of Dominica. It can be as high as 3 million euros, as was required in Cyprus in 2014 and 2015 to address consequences of the 2013 international bailout from the financial crisis.

What has caused this development, where is it possible to obtain citizenship in exchange for an investment, donation to the government, or real estate purchase, and why?

The first modern-day CBI programs emerged in islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, shortly after they became independent from large colonial powers. The process of decolonization took a particular toll on these microstates. As a result of their small size, unfavorable climate and terrain, or remote geographic location, these new nations were faced with major economic adversities, often threatening their survival as sovereign states. These conditions stimulated the sale of passports in the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu in the 1980s and the 1990s. Such practices were often done informally by public officials, who would provide investors with passports short of full citizenship. For instance, people who leased land in uninhabited parts of Tonga would receive a Tongan Protected Person Passport (TPPP). This document did not give holders the right to enter the country or live in it but rather served as a travel document.

The first official CBI program was established by Saint Christopher and Nevis in 1984. In the years that followed, the island state introduced legislation that enabled the grant of citizenship for those who invested in real estate or donated to special funds. One such fund was aimed at diversification of the workforce previously employed in the country’s now nonexistent sugar industry. In the two decades that followed, citizenship by investment was an oddity, confined mostly to tropical islands. It was an issue that attracted hardly any public attention.

The scene changed substantively with the 2008 global financial crisis, which drew a number of countries towards alternative mechanisms for raising revenue, including the development of three main investment migration routes. More than 140 states have general provisions in their existing citizenship laws to naturalize individuals who contribute to their national interest, such as artists, athletes, scientists, and investors. A few other countries such as Bulgaria, Cyprus, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, and Turkey developed CBI schemes similar to those in the Caribbean and Pacific states. And a majority of the world’s countries opened routes for investors—coupled with tax relief—to become residents, with the possibility of obtaining citizenship after a number of years and subject to meeting language, civics, and other requirements.

Discretionary provisions in citizenship legislation, CBI, and RBI programs have often been conflated, despite having distinct roots, objectives, and target beneficiaries, and despite raising different concerns in the context of good governance (such as corruption and money laundering) or the economy (such as skyrocketing real estate prices).

The Growth of a Citizenship Industry

Lack of understanding of the different ways in which CBI and RBI schemes operate has, in part, been caused by the growing market for investor citizenship and residence. Over the past two decades, this market has given birth to and raised a citizenship industry composed of companies that act as intermediaries between states operating these programs and individuals seeking to benefit from them. This industry includes large multinational companies such as Arton Capital, CS Global, and Henley and Partners, which often provide a wide range of services to states including designing and marketing the new program or running it through a concession. These companies may also offer their services to individuals to assist with the application, manage funds, or lease and purchase property. The industry has also branched out through specialized firms such as BDO, Exiger, and Thomson Reuters, which are engaged in due diligence of applicants, or Astons and JM, which manage real estate purchases. The industry’s final component is local law firms and agents, which facilitate investor applications through their knowledge of the language and the local context.

Citizens used to be unaware of the growth of this industry. That is until they read an in-flight magazine in which companies acting as intermediaries advertised specific programs and their own services, or passed through the Zurich Airport where until recently the passport of Malta was displayed in a shop window next to a luxury watch retailer. The industry is no longer unknown, due to a combination of factors including new marketing strategies and engagement of intermediary firms with the media. There has also been a growing public interest in the profile of beneficiaries, corruption scandals, and public protests associated with these programs.

A Connection to Mobility and Life Opportunities for a Select Few

As the international order became reconstituted after World War II, the governance of cross-country mobility became highly diversified. With the growth of global interconnectedness, possessing a particular passport determined the number of countries one could access, the countries in which one could settle, and where one could do business. Passports became connected with mobility and life prospects—both highly unequal around the world and both very much dependent on one’s birth. The increasing tolerance of dual nationality since the 1960s also enabled individuals to acquire additional passports without losing that of their country of origin, as had previously been the case.

Those obtaining citizenship by investment are, however, a tiny minority compared to the total pool of people who become citizens of a foreign country. This is nearly always the case in countries that grant citizenship to investors on grounds of national interest, where numbers are capped (for example Estonia limits these to ten applications annually) or where parliamentary approval is required, as in Bulgaria and Latvia.

The exact numbers of people who obtain citizenship through official CBI programs in most cases are not in the public domain. The majority of countries have no reporting obligations and public authorities are often slow or unwilling to provide the information. The background study for a 2019 European Commission report revealed that 12 applications were approved in Bulgaria in 2017 and at least 738 were approved in Malta from the program’s launch in 2014 until 2017. While no information on the number of applications in Cyprus was available in the report, a subsequent Al Jazeera investigation discovered that between 2007 and 2020 Cyprus granted citizenship in 6,779 instances to investors, mainly of Russian origin. In September 2020, Malta’s authorities confirmed that program reached its 1,800 approved applications cap; the more recent program is capped at 400 certificates annually and 1,500 overall, however there is no information on how many have been granted so far.

Numbers of those who obtained a passport from countries outside the European Union are even more difficult to ascertain. Grenada and Antigua and Barbuda reported 303 and 330 applications respectively in 2017; in 2018, the government of St. Kitts and Nevis reported that, since the opening of the program in 1984, a total of 16,544 investor citizenships had been granted. After lowering the investment threshold to USD 250,000 in 2017, by September 2021 Turkey had granted 7,242 passports to foreign investors, mostly of Iranian, Yemeni, Afghan, and Iraqi origin.

Whose Passport Is “Golden”? 

Different passports come with different opportunities. Being born a U.S. citizen or a citizen of an EU country comes with substantively more personal and travel freedom than, for instance, being born as a Kosovan or Congolese citizen. This fact sets the financial parameters of the global market for investor citizenship and has a major impact on the structure of beneficiaries.

Unsurprisingly, “price tags” on passports of Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta were substantively higher than those of the Caribbean and Pacific countries, or of Moldova, Montenegro, and Turkey. The program running in Malta between 2014 and 2020 entailed an overall investment in the range of 1.15 million euros, and the one introduced in 2020 refers to an unspecified direct investment. Cyprus, which required investments between 2 million and 3 million euros between 2014 and 2022, had the scheme with the highest contribution. These two CBI programs directly offered rights of EU citizenship, such as free movement across the European Union. Passports of Cyprus and Malta also grant visa-free access to 176 and 183 countries, respectively, slightly more than the 173 accessible to holders of a passport from Bulgaria, where the recently terminated CBI program required an investment in the range of 500,000 euros.  

The combination of the type of investment required and mobility rights attached to citizenship determined who would be interested in and able to become a CBI program beneficiary. For instance, the Cypriot program has had a disproportionate number of Russian applicants, in part because in 2014-15 it provided a special route for individuals who had lost more than 3 million euros due to a levy on foreign deposits imposed as a result of the economic bailout. Turkey’s program largely attracts investors from the Middle East, for whom the mobility rights attached to the Turkish passport are much higher than those of their countries of origin. As of September 2022, a Turkish passport provided visa-free access to 110 countries worldwide, while those of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen offered access to fewer than 35 countries each.

Beyond mobility rights linked to different passports, there are a series of other motivations that wealthy individuals may have in obtaining citizenship by investment. First, additional passports might offer a Plan B for escaping political and economic instability.

Second, most CBI programs are coupled with preferential tax regimes, which may be an important motivation for individuals with very high incomes. This potentially exempts them from paying taxes in jurisdictions in which they are not physically present or of which they are not citizens. For instance, St. Kitts and Nevis, with no personal income tax and low value-added tax (VAT), has become an attractive destination for wealthy Americans seeking to renounce their U.S. citizenship.

Third, for the rich from poor countries, a passport from a nation in the so-called Global North is also a status symbol that differentiates them from less affluent conationals. Speaking to Bloomberg News in July 2018, the chairman of one of the intermediary companies involved in the citizenship industry noted, “If you have a yacht and two airplanes, the next thing to get is a Maltese passport. It’s the latest status symbol. We’ve had clients who simply like to collect a few.”

Finally, obtaining a passport through a CBI program may serve some less noble purposes. In 2010, the former Prime Minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, who had faced corruption charges in his native country, was able to avoid extradition by having obtained a passport from Montenegro. Indian diamond mogul Mehul Choksi, charged with embezzlement in India, sought shelter in 2018 in Antigua and Barbuda, a country where he had previously become a citizen by investment. Russian oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin, as well as Ukrainian rent-seeking billionaires have gained protection on EU soil by acquiring Cypriot and Maltese passports.

The Dark Side of CBI Programs

The box of questions surrounding CBI and RBI programs is yet to be fully prized open. So far, there have been no systematic studies of the economic impact of these programs, which would highlight potentially beneficial aspects such as job creation or construction of roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure projects. However, a 2015 report of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) highlighted that funds from investor citizenship in recent years have come to account for substantive portions of gross domestic product (GDP) in some small island states. Recent IMF studies point out that, between 2012 and 2021, as much as 30 percent of the GDP of St. Kitts and Nevis and the Commonwealth of Dominica came from investments from CBI programs. In 2020, revenue from Vanuatu’s CBI program amounted to 42 percent of the national budget, raising questions of potential overdependence on CBI.

Yet balancing economic benefits and potential dependency is not the most contentious aspect of these programs. While many have questioned whether it is just to exchange passports for investment, greater concerns have emerged when CBI programs interfere with good governance, resulting in corruption of public officials, scandals, money laundering, or tampering with elections. These have been a rule rather than an exception in every single existing investor citizenship program.

For instance, since 2017, citizens of the Commonwealth of Dominica have been protesting the country’s CBI program, which international observers such as Freedom House also regard as controversial. The protests were sparked by the country’s opposition, which demanded the prime minister resign because of corruption linked to construction fraud involving CBI beneficiaries from Iran and China. Initially focusing on domestic issues raised by the CBI program, the protests gained an international dimension when concerns emerged over how the program helped the growth of Chinese and Iranian influence in the Caribbean islands, and the potential adverse effects of such influence on Dominica’s relationship with the United States.

In the same vein, the program in Malta had been connected not only to abuse of power by public officials whose family members had a stake in CBI services, but also to the October 2017 assassination of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. Prior to her death, Caruana Galizia had been investigating connections between high-ranking government officials involved in investor citizenship and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. The scandal that unfolded around the murder investigation eventually led to the resignation of Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat. These and many other instances of institutional corruption, including allegations that the citizenship industry used the political strategy firm Cambridge Analytica to influence elections to create a favorable environment for introducing CBI programs in places such as Malta and St. Kitts, have sparked substantive international criticism of investor citizenship.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Transparency International, and Global Witness are among the organizations that have highlighted the potentially contentious aspects of CBI programs. The European Commission and the European Parliament have been particularly active in seeking to phase out programs in Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta. Given that CBI programs in the European Union are connected to the rights of European citizenship—including free movement—any citizen of Malta has the right to settle in any of the 27 EU Member States. For this reason, even though granting citizenship is the sole prerogative of sovereign states, the citizenship regimes within the European Union are interconnected and can obligate other Member States.

EU institutions have continuously voiced concerns over whether the bloc’s citizenship should be for sale and have raised questions over the potentially adverse effects of CBI programs run by Member States. The 2019 European Commission report on investor citizenship and residence schemes highlighted some of the effects and their implications across the bloc. A year later, the European Commission took legal action against Cyprus and Malta on the basis that CBI programs are not “neutral with regard to other Member States and the EU as a whole,” and that individuals obtaining passports in such a way have no “genuine connection” to the country of which they are becoming citizens. While Cyprus has terminated its scheme, Malta is as of this writing facing a process at the Court of Justice of the European Union for continuing to apply its 2020 scheme, which the European Commission finds to be incompatible with the concept of “Union citizenship” and the principle of “sincere cooperation,” both of which are enshrined in treaties governing the bloc.

The Future of “Golden Passports” 

The future of CBI programs will depend on how countries decide to respond to a range of global events and dynamics.

Issues such as major natural disasters linked to climate change or global security concerns could amplify demand on CBI programs due to individuals’ need to have a Plan B. The same issues might equally reduce the number of countries offering such programs due to fears of foreign influence increasingly associated with these schemes. These two trends are perhaps not even mutually exclusive. But they will influence the market for investor citizenship going forward.

As countries become more selective as to whom they want as citizens and under what conditions, they may decide that beneficiaries of CBI programs have a risky background and stop offering such passports. Alternatively, as intermediary industries become more powerful due to growing demand, they might be able to exercise political and economic influence on some countries to keep running their CBI programs, or on others to open new ones.

The most likely scenario is that of Cyprus or Malta, where CBI schemes have transformed into residence by investment programs or grants of citizenship based on exceptional service with unspecified contributions. These may be different legal routes but raise similar issues. Governments looking to address such concerns might ensure that these residence permits and any subsequent grant of citizenship be accompanied by mandatory physical presence and socialization requirements that require the holder to relocate to the destination state and actually live there. The question is whether the shine of such golden visas will be as elusive as that of golden passports.

Source: Rollback of ‘Golden Passports’ Shows Their Elusive Shine

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Saunders: How the pandemic may have made government agencies better at their jobs

2022/07/11 Leave a comment

Ironic timing, given that large immigration and passport backlogs in Canada. That being said, IRCC is moving on IT and more online services.

But perhaps MPI should have accompanied this analysis with a snapshot on backlogs in all the countries surveyed:

Chaos descended on governments more than two years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of frontline public-service workers and back-office bureaucrats to abandon their offices, stop meeting with clients and managing lineups, and switch quickly to improvised digital services in departments that in many cases had barely moved beyond the fax machine.

Unsurprisingly, some departments became frozen and dysfunctional, leaving a legacy of perpetual waiting lists, undelivered projects and unanswered calls. But an unexpected consequence of the global crisis was that some branches of government actually sharply improved their quality of service, in terms of both timeliness of delivery and effectiveness of results. The virus forced transformations, in many places, that should have happened decades ago.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way governments have changed how they deal with the process of immigration, settlement and the pathway to citizenship. If you’ve ever emigrated to new country, you know it involves years of day-long waits at government offices, repeat trips to bring in the proper documents, hard-to-arrange appointments with officials, forms that must be handled in person and often years of non-optional classes in language and citizenship. Even for a middle-class immigrant with resources, it’s a complex, disruptive process that can go on for years.

But the pandemic had a striking and often overwhelmingly positive effect on the Western world’s immigration bureaucracies. That’s made apparent in a new study, “The COVID-19 Catalyst,” by Jasmijn Slootjes of the Brussels-based Migration Policy Institute Europe, in which her team looked at the immigration bureaucracies of 14 countries, including Canada’s.

Pretty much every developed country faced twin problems during the pandemic. One, restricted travel and sometimes-closed borders made it very hard to bring in the people who were needed to keep the economy rolling, especially in suddenly crucial fields such as healthcare, eldercare and food production. And two, an already undersized bureaucracy was now working from home and unable to operate service desks, offices and classrooms.

Three important things happened, according to Ms. Slootjes.

First, the entire landing, settlement, integration and naturalization process was moved online. While this created some disadvantages – immigrants often value in-person meetings and the networking opportunities that come with them – these, the researchers were surprised to find, were usually far outweighed by the benefits, which allowed more people to be reached, far more quickly and effectively, across a wider geography and with less inconvenience.

This was particularly true for immigrant women and members of vulnerable refugee communities, who, for various reasons, previously had trouble making in-person meetings during business hours but now could be reached directly, in large numbers. Some countries did this immediately: Germany spent €40-million in 2020 developing online language-oriented integration classes.

Of course, some immigrants and especially refugee claimants have trouble finding internet connections and smart devices. But the speed with which this problem was solved surprised everyone. In the Netherlands, a major new program brought tech companies together with government to give devices to more than 12,000 people. Canada’s tech-donation schemes became far more active, and Ottawa launched a popular digital-literacy program for immigrants during the pandemic.

Second, national governments were forced to work with outside organizations and local governments, who actually have more front-line knowledge. (That’s the paradox of immigration: It’s a national policy area that manifests itself almost entirely at the municipal level.) “In Canada, Finland, Flanders and France, governments were forced to reach out to colleagues in other policy areas to address newly arising issues,” Ms. Slootjes writes

Many countries decided to follow the decentralization lead of Canada, whose settlement and integration services are mostly delivered not by the federal public service but by 500 not-for-profit institutions and local-government offices whose employees and volunteers are able to work longer and more flexible hours, adapt more quickly and work in more trusted relationships with clients, at lower cost.

And third, the pandemic forced government agencies to rethink their primary missions – and sometimes, their entire purpose.

The concept of “integration,” which in Europe had often meant language and “values” education, was quickly redefined around its more important meaning: inclusion in the country’s economy, education and housing systems.

Immigration agencies, which had previously seen themselves as gatekeepers that slowly filtered in the more desirable and well-off people from lists of applicants, suddenly found “a renewed appreciation of low-skilled migrant workers in essential roles,” and often invested in chartered flights and instant naturalization invitations in order to fill the economy’s yawning gaps with such people.

Countries that undertook this rethink are, in this year of overheated recovery, typically having less difficulty with shortages and inflation than countries that stuck to their old ways. And, thanks to the wholesale reinvention of their immigration bureaucracy, they’ve been able to respond better – and with less hassle or controversy – to the millions of Ukrainian refugees they now face.

Few of them will publicly credit a deadly pandemic with making them better at their jobs. But they could.

Source: How the pandemic may have made government agencies better at their jobs

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MPI: Rise in Remote Work, Including by Digital Nomads, Requires Adjustments to Immigration Systems

2022/06/24 Leave a comment

Canadian examples include not requiring a work visa when working remotely in another country and stopping the clock on residency tests:

The COVID-19 pandemic has vastly accelerated a shift toward remote work that has been ongoing for decades. As countless workers worldwide stopped coming into the office, many began working from home, with some “digital nomads” moving to work remotely in another country. But most immigration systems are poorly equipped to deal with remote work arrangements, whether admitting foreign workers who may end up working partly or fully remotely for a local employer or permitting digital nomads to visit and work remotely for an employer in another country. Similarly, unclear rules around taxation, benefits and employment law pose hurdles for digital nomads and employers alike.

Failing to address remote work in immigration policies is a missed opportunity, a new Migration Policy Institute report finds. Repositioning immigration systems to introduce greater flexibility for non-traditional working arrangements could bring sizable benefits, including economic development, permitting employers to tap new pools of talent and even allowing people displaced by conflict or environmental disaster to earn incomes.

There have been some policy innovations already. More than 25 countries and territories have launched digital nomad visas that admit foreign nationals who work for an employer outside the country, or in some cases are self-employed. These digital nomad visas differ from most work visas, which assume a person will be working in-person, full-time for an employer in the same country. Digital nomad visas have seen considerable appeal among countries whose economies are heavily reliant on tourism and that are looking to make up for the pandemic-induced loss of tourism revenue, with some encouraging international remote workers to stay in smaller towns and rural communities to contribute to their economic development.

The creation of a new standalone visa is not the only way countries are adapting their immigration systems to remote work trends. Some have adjusted existing employer-sponsored visa pathways, including by expanding flexibility on residency tests. Others allow a degree of remote work while holding a visitor visa, which can benefit business travelers and tourists alike.

The report examines the implications of remote work for immigration systems, workers and employers alike, and explores how governments can develop robust remote work strategies. The analysis benefitted from information on digital nomad visas and remote work trends shared by Fragomen, a firm that provides immigration services worldwide.

“Remote work, at scale, could change the terms of the global race for talent, which would require governments to develop a more expansive understanding of labor migration policy—one that looks beyond addressing domestic skills and labor shortages to think about how best to capture the benefits of cross-border movement,” write MPI analysts Kate Hooper and Meghan Benton. “To truly reap the benefits of remote work, governments need to understand that this is about more than generating revenue from digital nomad visa programs, but also making a country an attractive environment for temporary visitors, business activity and job creation (even for jobs overseas).”

As workplaces reopen, with many retaining more flexible remote work policies, the question of how to adapt is one with which countries must reckon. As policymakers rethink immigration systems for this new era of work, the analysis suggests they should consider:

• Creating flexible immigration policies that can allow a greater degree of remote work and/or attract digital nomads, in line with national economic priorities.
• Coordinating across portfolios to develop a remote work strategy that integrates immigration priorities with economic development and inclusive growth objectives.
• Working with other countries to streamline immigration, employment, social security and tax requirements so that it is easier for workers and employers to understand the rules and their obligations.
• Exploring how regions outside of major metro areas can capture the benefits of remote work.
• Creating temporary-to-permanent pathways so that some remote workers on visitor and nomad visas can transition to permanent residence.

You can read the report, The Future of Remote Work: Digital Nomads and the Implications for Immigration Systems, here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/remote-work-immigration.

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MPI: France Reckons with Immigration Amid Reality of Rising Far Right

2022/05/16 Leave a comment

A few of the excerpts that I found of interest:

A Significant Increase in Immigrants’ Educational Attainment

Perhaps in part due to the efforts of successive French administrations, immigrants’ level of education has risen sharply in recent decades. In 1975, just 3 percent of immigrants had a higher education degree (which includes a postsecondary diploma or a certificate from a professionally oriented program), compared to 28 percent in 2018.

Immigrants tend to be at one end or the other of the education spectrum: Compared to the overall population, a greater share of immigrants had only a primary-level education (33 percent of the foreign born and 14 percent of the total population in 2018) or a university degree (19 percent and 22 percent respectively; see Figure 3). At the same time, the proportion of immigrants with some postsecondary education (which may include certificates from professionally oriented programs) but not a bachelor’s degree are lower than in the resident population. However, recent immigrants who have been in France for less than five years tend to be better educated.

Immigrants Who Enter as Students Increasingly Stay on to Work

In recent years, France has had one of Europe’s largest populations of international students, with 283,700 at the start of the 2018 academic year (including EU nationals), second only to the United Kingdom and representing 11 percent of France’s students in tertiary education. Between 2000 and 2018, an average of 47,400 third-country students entered France each year, with steadily increasing numbers after 2012 and as many as 65,800 in 2018, when students represented around one-quarter of all immigrants.

Many of these students stay in France for multiple years. Between 42 percent and 50 percent of international students who arrived from 2000 to 2014 continued to hold a valid residence permit five years later, a range that has remains remarkably stable over time (see Figure 5). Most were still students, although since 2006 an increasing share has obtained work permits (notably for highly qualified individuals), reflecting greater labor market integration of immigrants arriving as students. The figures decreased slightly for the cohorts that arrived in 2007 and 2008, reflecting actions by the interior and labor ministries in 2011 asking prefectures to “rigorously” examine students’ applications for change of status, although these provisions were repealed the following May, after François Hollande became president.

Conclusion: Outsized Focus at Odds with Reality

Despite these political pressures, immigration trends in France are comparable to other countries and not, as some of the far right have claimed, a reflection that the government has lost control. Immigrants represent just about 10 percent of France’s total population and the numbers have not increased dramatically in recent years, yet issues of migration were prominent during the 2022 election and appear likely to persist.

In particular, government efforts today are focused on encouraging immigration of highly educated people deemed to be good for the French economy, and limiting arrivals of everyone else. In many ways, this is simply an updated version of France’s decades-old focus on welcoming immigrants whose characteristics and skills are considered useful to the economy, as it did in the years after World War II. Yet the distinction between beneficial and detrimental migration is misplaced, both because it can be deeply hurtful to those who are deemed unwanted, but also because economic analysis by the author and others shows that family migration has led to an increase in France’s per capita gross domestic product and that asylum seekers do not burden European economies.

Political figures on France’s far right have advanced an apocalyptic and radical vision of how immigration is changing their country, which is out of step with current realities. During her campaign, Le Pen promised to stop family reunification, make it harder for children of immigrants born in France to be citizens, and limit welfare benefits to French citizens. Even in defeat, her performance in 2022 underscores how willing many French voters are to embrace these kinds of approaches.

Source: MPI: France Reckons with Immigration Amid Reality of Rising Far Right

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MPI: Naturalized Citizens in the United States

2021/11/18 Leave a comment

Useful background:

Naturalization is perhaps the most powerful marker of immigrants’ integration, as they take the fullest step towards participation in the civic life of their new country by becoming citizens. In the United States, naturalized citizens have the same privileges and responsibilities as U.S.-born citizens, including the right to vote and similar access to government benefits and public-sector jobs. They also receive the ability to sponsor immediate family members for immigration and cannot be deported.

More than 613,700 immigrants naturalized during fiscal year (FY) 2020, fewer than at any other point in the last decade. This decline may be partly due to impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, including delayed oath ceremonies; the FY 2020 number represented a 27 percent decline from the 843,600 naturalizations the prior year, which marked the largest number since FY 2008 (see Figure 1). Notably, trends for new naturalized citizens do not necessarily follow those for new lawful permanent residents (LPRs). Overall, there were 23.2 million naturalized U.S. citizens in the United States in 2019, the most recent reporting available, making up 52 percent of the overall immigrant population, which stood at 44.9 million.

Figure 1. New Naturalizations and New Lawful Permanent Residents, FY 1980-2020

Source: MPI tabulation of data from U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (Washington, DC: DHS Office of Immigration Statistics, various years), available online; DHS, “Legal Immigration and Adjustment of Status Report Fiscal Year 2020, Quarter 4,” accessed July 30, 2021.

In recent years, institutional factors such as processing times and case backlogs have affected the number of annual naturalizations, as have financial constraints in meeting the citizenship application fee of $725 and immigrants’ personal decisions about whether to apply. While the number of new naturalized citizens has fluctuated each year, processing wait times have increased. The average processing time for N-400 applications for naturalization increased to 11.5 months in FY 2021, up from 9.1 months in FY 2020 and about 10 months in FY 2019.

In order to become a citizen, applicants must meet a set of requirements outlined in the Immigration and Nationality Act. These include maintaining lawful permanent residence, also known as getting a green card, for several years (generally five, though a green-card holder married to a U.S. citizen can naturalize after three years), proving basic proficiency in English and knowledge of U.S. history and government, and passing a background check to demonstrate good moral character. In addition to legal benefits, naturalized citizens also tend to have better economic outcomes than other immigrants, including higher incomes and rates of homeownership.

Using the most recent available data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Immigration Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau (the most recent 2019 American Community Survey [ACS]), and other sources, this Spotlight provides information on new naturalized citizens in the United States, including historical trends, characteristics of naturalized citizens, and the population potentially eligible for naturalization.

Source: http://my.migrationpolicy.org/salsa/track.jsp?v=2&c=RWMKmxNCrz2UlS%2FeRjM5hkPuFzZ27T2g

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Rethinking the U.S. Legal Immigration System: A Policy Road Map

2021/05/05 Leave a comment

Of interest. Two ideas Canada could consider:

  • “a new “bridge” visa as the main route for admission for most foreign workers arriving on employment visas. This bridge visa would cut across occupations, allow for circularity and bridge the artificial dichotomy between temporary and permanent pathways.” Already happening to a certain extent in Canada given increased numbers of temporary to permanent resident transitions.

  • “creation of an independent expert body within government that makes recommendations on annual admissions based on careful, nonpartisan review of labor market, economic, demographic and immigration trends.”

    • New reporting by the Census Bureau that the United States saw the second slowest rate of population growth since the decennial census began in 1790 represents a warning sign for a country seeing rising shares of retirees and a declining child population. In fact, the Census Bureau is projecting that the United States will have more seniors than children in less than 15 years. In this context, immigration will become increasingly important for sustaining the growth of the U.S. labor force.

    Yet the legal immigration system, which was built on a scaffolding first established in 1952 and saw its last major legislative update in 1990, is profoundly misaligned with these demographic realities and other key factors shaping migration to the country. This misalignment is the principal cause for illegal immigration, with an unauthorized immigrant population estimated at 11 million people. It is also responsible for the mounting backlog in legal immigration streams, with some in the green-card queue scheduled to wait an impossible 223 years for an employment-based visa. 

    The consequences of the failure by Congress and past administrations to update immigration laws to match current realities have been enormous for the country and for its economy, as a new policy brief from the Migration Policy Institute’s Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy initiative makes clear. In Rethinking the U.S. Legal Immigration System: A Policy Road Map, MPI analysts Muzaffar Chishti, Julia Gelatt and Doris Meissner sketch the broad contours of some of the most needed reforms in the legal immigration system.

    “Immigration policy should fundamentally be tailored to serve U.S. national interests,” they write. “As such, it should reflect factors inside the United States that create a need for immigrant workers and position the country well to benefit from immigration. The age structure of the U.S. population and shifts in the U.S. economy are two such factors, both of which clearly establish sustained immigration as an asset that benefits the country and the economy.”

    The policy brief offers a quick tour of the new framework that MPI is advancing through its Rethinking Immigration initiative. The vision includes:

    • A meaningful and responsible reform of the U.S. immigration system must begin with addressing the challenge of the country’s unauthorized immigrant population, 60 percent of which has been in the United States a decade or more, with legalizations that could be accomplished in incremental steps.
    • Restructuring the employment-based system to better reflect economic and demographic realities and the behavior of employers and workers with three streams: 1) seasonal/short-term workers on briefer stints than current H-2A or H-2B workers but with the same protections as comparable U.S. workers; 2) direct admission of immigrant workers recognized as the best and brightest in their fields as permanent residents; and 3) a new “bridge” visa as the main route for admission for most foreign workers arriving on employment visas. This bridge visa would cut across occupations, allow for circularity and bridge the artificial dichotomy between temporary and permanent pathways. It would more accurately reflect how immigration and labor markets already operate, given 80 percent of those getting an employment-based green card adjust from a temporary work visa in the United States. Under MPI’s proposal, the U.S. government would also pilot a points-based immigration system, similar to those used in Canada, Australia and other countries.
    • Retaining family-sponsored immigration as a major priority of the U.S. immigrant selection system, but with changes to some backlogged categories.
    • Reforming the humanitarian protection system, including U.S. asylum system reform that MPI has been championing for more than two years, to improve efficient and fair adjudication.
    • Injecting much-needed flexibility into immigration levels, with creation of an independent expert body within government that makes recommendations on annual admissions based on careful, nonpartisan review of labor market, economic, demographic and immigration trends.

    “Harnessing the benefits of immigration has long been a source of strength for the United States,” the authors conclude. “Redesigning immigration pathways to match with today’s realities—and building flexibility so that the system can evolve to match tomorrow’s as well—would allow the United States to better reap the advantages of immigration for its economy and society.”

    The road map is the latest in the multi-year Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy Initiative. The initiative is generating a big-picture, evidence-driven vision for the role immigration can and should play in America’s future. Reports focusing on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) governance, the immigration detention system, the immigration courts and the bridge visa are among those that will be published in the coming weeks and months. 

    Read the legal immigration road map here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/rethinking-us-legal-immigration-road-map.

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