How a wealth test for immigrants could affect the U.S. economy

2020/01/30 Leave a comment

Interesting long and serious analysis:

Both supporters and opponents of a new Trump administration rule that creates additional barriers for immigrants trying to enter the U.S. or trying to gain legal permanent residency are using economic arguments to make their cases.

The so-called “public charge” rule bars immigrants from coming to the U.S., claiming that if they are deemed to be unable to support themselves financially, they are at risk of needing federal safety net benefits–or becoming a “public charge” of the federal government. It also penalizes immigrants living in the U.S. who are trying to become lawful permanent residents, if they use federal safety net programs.

The rule is being challenged in court, but the U.S. Supreme Court this week allowed the change to go into effect and become enforceable while it makes its way through the judicial system.

Under the new guidance, immigrants who use a public benefit for more than 12 months in a 36-month period would be penalized in their application to become a legal permanent resident– commonly known as a green card holder. Each individual benefit counts toward the total time, so using both food and housing assistance for one month, for example, could count as two months worth of benefits.

If the household income of an immigrant trying to come to the U.S. is less than 125 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines, or $21,550 for a couple, they could also be at risk of being denied entry. The Department of Homeland Security said it would use that threshold as one of several factors when deciding whether to admit an immigrant to the U.S. Immigrants with twice that income, or 250 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines, would be given higher preference.

Refugees are exempt from the rule.

The White House has argued the rule, which some are calling a “wealth test,” will benefit American workers and save taxpayer dollars. Immigration advocates counter that it is creating an unnecessary barrier for hardworking immigrants trying to better their lives and who contribute to the U.S. economy.

Meanwhile, economists caution that it’s difficult to estimate the exact cost or savings from the rule because it depends on how strictly it is enforced and there could be numerous ripple effects that will reverberate throughout the economy for years. It is also unclear what the cost would be for enforcing the rule, or for checking on immigrants’ household income before coming to the U.S.

Who uses federal assistance

On the whole, immigrants make up a small share of all Americans who use federal public assistance programs. U.S-born individuals, for example, make up 86 percent of both Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, recipients.

Immigrants also use less total welfare and entitlement benefits in dollar value than native-born Americans, according to a report from the CATO Institute, a libertarian think-tank.

In total, native-born Americans used $6,976 worth of welfare programs per person in 2016. That’s compared to $5,535 per immigrants–a 21 percent difference.

The discrepancy is largely due to a higher rate of native-born Americans using Medicare and Social Security benefits than immigrants. About 18 percent and 19 percent of native-born Americans use Medicare and Social Security benefits, respectively. That’s compared to 12 percent and 14 percent of immigrants.

Native-born Americans are also more likely to use the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); and SNAP, which is commonly known as food stamps.

Graphic by Megan McGrew/PBS NewsHour

Immigrants are more likely to use Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Medicaid than native-born Americans. About 4 percent of immigrants use SSI, compared to 3.5 percent of native-born citizens. Around 24.5 percent of immigrants use Medicaid, compared to 23 percent of native-born Americans, according to the CATO report.

Undocumented immigrants, which by some estimates make up half of all non U.S. citizens living in the country, are generally ineligible to receive federal benefits.

In response to public comments about the public charge rule, the Department of Homeland Security did not dispute the CATO findings but said they “are not inconsistent” with its final rule.

In a news conference last year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinnelli said the issue is not how immigrants’ benefits compare to native-born citizens, but whether the immigrants coming to the U.S. are self-sufficient.

“The benefit to taxpayers is a long-term benefit of seeking to ensure that our immigration system is bringing people to join us as American citizens, as legal permanent residents first, who can stand on their own two feet, who will not be reliant on the welfare system — especially in the age of the modern welfare state, which is so expansive and expensive,” Cuccinnelli said.

What immigrants cost and contribute to the U.S. economy

Estimates on how many people will be affected by the public charge rule varies widely.

Around 1.2 million people seeking to become green card holders each year would be subject to the rule, but many of those are not eligible for, or already choose not to use public benefits. However, there are likely millions more immigrants trying to come to the U.S. who could also be affected.

The Department of Homeland Security estimates 382,264 immigrants per year will be affected by the changes. The New American Economy, a nonprofit that focuses on immigration research, puts the estimate much higher–at 3.9 million.

If all of those immigrants were barred from living in the U.S., the nation’s economy would lose about $82 billion per year, the New American Economy analysis finds. That number includes $48 billion the affected immigrants would earn in income each year, plus an estimated $34 billion that would otherwise be generated because of the money they spend in the U.S economy and the amount they would pay in taxes.

The Department of Homeland Security has estimated a much lower cost–$144.4 million. It also estimates that federal and state governments will pay out $2.47 billion less each year in benefits–a key Trump administration argument for implementing the changes.

The public charge rule aside, first-generation immigrants generally cost the government more than U.S.-born Americans, according to a 2017 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. On average they cost about $1,600 per person annually.

But the children of those immigrants have a net positive effect on the U.S. economy, contributing about $1,700 per person per year. Third generation immigrants contribute about $1,300 annually.

The financial burden of immigration tends to fall more heavily on state and local governments because of the cost of their children’s public school. At the same time, investing in children’s education, health care and food security is likely to make them more productive workers with higher incomes later in life, which, in turn, generates more tax revenue.

“Adequate resources in childhood matter a lot for self-sufficiency and wellbeing later in life,” said Tara Watson, an economics professor at Williams College. “If we restrict benefits available to children who will grow up to be adults, in the long run we may be doing more harm than good.”

How federal benefits play into productivity

Studies have shown that people experiencing financial strain tend to be less productive in their work, largely due to the mental burden of not being able to meet their basic needs.

“If you are more concerned with your immediate needs to feed yourself, to house yourself, to make yourself warm, you are not able to make those investments that will help you make smarter decisions about your future and your family’s future,” said Andrew Lim, director of quantitative research for New American Economy.

Public welfare advocates say federal benefits, such as food stamps and housing assistance, alleviate financial stress, and more worker productivity tends to mean higher pay, which, in turn, means more contributions to federal taxes and the U.S. economy as a whole. Conversely, if a person does not have access to basic health care, they could become sick and unable to work.

The Department of Homeland Security has said it “does not agree that this rule would be the cause of such unfortunate events,” such as a person becoming ill.

How fewer lower skilled workers would affect certain industries

While higher-skilled immigrants tend to make more money and, therefore, contribute more to the U.S. economy, certain industries rely heavily on lower-skilled immigrants.

The hospitality, agriculture and construction sectors in particular have been facing labor shortages in recent years.

The expanding economy has been creating more jobs, but a crackdown on unauthorized immigrants, combined with better job opportunities in immigrants’ home countries–particularly in Mexico–have contributed to a shortage of workers.

If fewer low-income immigrants are allowed into the U.S. because of the public charge rule, those shortages are likely to worsen.

But the Trump administration has taken other steps to increase the number of immigrants workers allowed into the U.S. each year to work specifically in the agriculture industry and in seasonal jobs, which could offset some of the reduction that might be caused by the public charge rule.

A chilling effect?

Opponents of the public charge rule argue it could have a chilling effect, causing immigrants who are legally allowed to use federal public benefits to forgo utilizing those programs –particularly children who are U.S. citizens but live with their immigrant parents.

While it is unclear whether there is a direct link to the rule’s unveiling in 2018, SNAP participation rates among families with immigrant members fell between March 2018 and March 2019.

During the same time, the participation rate for households with no immigrants increased, according to Watson’s analysis of federal data that was first published in Econofact.

In response to concerns about a chilling effect, the Department of Homeland Security said in its final rule that it expects immigrants “will make purposeful and well-informed decisions,” but the agency said they declined to scale back the rule to avoid the possibility that individuals might choose not to enroll in welfare programs because “self-sufficiency is the rule’s ultimate aim.”

An economic or value judgment?

In the end, Watson said it is difficult to calculate exactly how much the public charge rule will affect the U.S. economy.

The change is a rule, not a law, and the language is fairly vague, so the next presidential administration could choose how much weight to give the income thresholds and public benefits measurements when considering the host of factors involved in an immigrants’ application for legal status.

While some countries put more emphasis on immigrants’ skillset when considering admission, the U.S. has historically prioritized family reunification. If the public charge rule is strictly enforced, the U.S. would be signaling a major shift in its immigration policy.

“We would lose the emphasis on families,” Watson said. “And that’s a value judgment the American people need to make.”

For their part, Trump administration officials have said the rule promotes the “ideals of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility.”

Source: How a wealth test for immigrants could affect the U.S. economy

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ICYMI: African Immigrants May Be Trump’s Next Target

2020/01/28 Leave a comment

Of note, with possible impact on future asylum seekers in Canada:
Last week, Politico reported that the Trump administration was considering adding seven new countries to its travel ban. A majority of them—Eritrea, Sudan, Tanzania, and Nigeria, which is by far the most populous of the seven—are in Africa. The rationalization appears to involve terrorism. In the “counterterrorism” section of a January 17 speech, Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, declared, “We’re establishing criteria that all foreign governments must satisfy to assist DHS in vetting foreign nationals seeking to enter our country … For a small number of countries that lack either the will or the capability to adhere to these criteria, travel restrictions may become necessary to mitigate threats.”Because the Supreme Court upheld Donald Trump’s travel ban in 2018 on national-security grounds, it’s not surprising that administration officials would cite that same rationale to expand the ban now. But the argument is weak. According to numbers crunched by the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh when Trump first imposed the ban three years ago, not a single person born in Eritrea, Tanzania, Nigeria, or Sudan killed a single American in a terrorist attack on American soil from 1975 to 2016. (The same is true of Belarus and Myanmar, two of the other three countries Trump may add to the travel-ban roster. Two people from Kyrgyzstan, the final country, were implicated in deadly anti-American terrorism incidents during the period, according to Nowrasteh’s tally.)
A Wall Street Journal article on the potential travel-ban expansion suggests a different justification: Travelers from Eritrea, Sudan, and Nigeria are more likely than travelers from other countries to overstay their visas. But if that’s the case—as Tom Jawetz, an immigration expert at the Center for American Progress, explained to me—the answer is to train the U.S. consular officers who give out those visas to better determine who won’t return home, or to actually increase visas to meet legitimate demand. The answer is not to collectively punish the population of an entire country.But if the Trump administration’s real motivation is to decrease immigration from Africa, then collective punishment has a certain logic to it. For several years now, Trump has trained his nativist ire on Muslims and Latinos. The travel ban suggests he’s adding a new target, just in time for the 2020 elections: Africans.According to the Pew Research Center, the number of black immigrants in the United States has grown fivefold over the past 40 years. America’s immigrant population from sub-Saharan Africa more than doubled from 2000 to 2016 alone. Trump’s allies have noticed. In her book Adios America, which Trump publicly praised, and parroted, when he launched 2016 campaign, Ann Coulter claims, “There were almost no Nigerians in the United States until the 1970s. Today there are 380,000.” This is a problem, she declares, because “in Nigeria, every level of society is criminal.” When 500 Congolese and Angolan immigrants showed up at the Texas border last June, Tucker Carlson warned that, because of “population growth … on the continent of Africa,” African immigration “could become a torrent” that could “overwhelm our country, and change it completely and forever.”

Trump himself, according to The New York Times, vented in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that on his watch the United States had admitted 40,000 Nigerians who would never “go back to their huts.” (Nigerian immigrants are actually twice as likely to have at least a bachelor’s degree as Americans as a whole.) During an immigration meeting in 2018, The Washington Post reported, Trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and nations in Africa as “shithole countries.” Soon afterward, the White House unveiled a proposal to remake America’s immigration system. According to the Center for American Progress, it would have reduced immigration from sub-Saharan Africa by 46 percent, more than any other region of the world.

But while Trump’s animosity to African immigration isn’t new, it has never before taken center stage in his administration’s policies or his public rhetoric. Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign talking about Mexican rapists. He made building a wall on America’s southern border his campaign’s rallying cry. He responded to the December 2015 jihadist attack in San Bernardino, California, by demanding a ban on Muslim immigration. He made Central American immigrant “caravans” the heart of his get-out-the-vote strategy in 2018.

So Trump is diversifying his array of immigrant threats. Singling out African countries could spark a public battle with the Congressional Black Caucus, Somalian-American Representative Ilhan Omar, and African American celebrities—just the sort of foes who rouse Trump’s base. Expect presidential tweets and Tucker Carlson monologues about Nigerian email scammers and crime rates in Lagos. In Trump’s ceaseless battle to terrify Republicans with the specter of an America no longer controlled by white men, a new front may be opening up.

Source: African Immigrants May Be Trump’s Next Target

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U.S. Supreme Court lets hardline Trump immigration policy take effect

2020/01/28 Leave a comment

Sigh:

The U.S. Supreme Court gave the go-ahead on Monday for one of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies, allowing his administration to implement a rule denying legal permanent residency to certain immigrants deemed likely to require government assistance in the future.

The justices, on a 5-4 vote, granted the administration’s request to lift a lower court’s injunction that had blocked the so-called public charge policy while litigation over its legality continues. The rule has been criticized by immigrant rights advocates as a “wealth test” that would disproportionately keep out non-white immigrants.

The court’s five conservative justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts and two justices appointed by Trump, carried the day. The court’s four liberal justices said they would have denied the administration’s request. The action was announced even as Roberts sat as the presiding officer in Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate.

Lawsuits aiming to block the policy were filed against the administration by the states of New York, Connecticut and Vermont as well as by New York City and several nonprofit organizations.

In imposing an injunction blocking it, Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge George Daniels on Oct. 11 called the rule “repugnant to the American Dream” and a “policy of exclusion in search of a justification.”

The administration asked the high court to let the rule go into effect even before the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules on Trump’s appeal of the injunction. The 2nd Circuit is considering the matter on an expedited basis, with legal papers to be submitted by Feb. 14 and arguments expected soon afterward.

The administration can now enforce the rule nationwide except in Illinois, where a lower court has blocked its implementation.

Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), praised the high court.

“It is very clear the U.S. Supreme Court is fed up with these national injunctions by judges who are trying to impose their policy preferences instead of enforcing the law,” Cuccinelli told reporters.

GREEN CARDS

At issue is which immigrants will be granted legal permanent residency, known as a “green card.” Under Trump’s policy, immigration officers would consider factors such as age, educational level and English proficiency to decide whether an immigrant would likely become a “public charge” who would receive government benefits such as the Medicaid health insurance program for the poor.

The administration has said the new rule is necessary to better ensure that immigrants will be self-sufficient. Critics have said the rule would disproportionately bar low-income people from developing countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia from permanent residency.

“Limiting legal immigration based on an applicant’s wealth is shameful and entirely un-American,” Democratic Senator Dick Durbin wrote on Twitter.

A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes visa applications, said it would “determine the most appropriate method to implement the public charge rule” and would release additional information soon.

Trump has made his tough immigration stance a hallmark of his presidency and 2020 re-election campaign.

U.S. immigration law has long required officials to exclude people likely to become a “public charge” from permanent residency. U.S. guidelines in place for the past two decades had said immigrants likely to become primarily dependent on direct cash assistance or long-term institutionalization, in a nursing home for example, at public expense would be barred.

The new rule expands the “public charge” bar to anyone deemed likely to receive a much wider range of public benefits for more than an aggregate of 12 months over any 36-month period including healthcare, housing and food assistance.

The vast majority of people seeking permanent residency are not eligible for public benefits themselves. A 2019 Urban Institute survey found that the administration’s rule was already deterring people from seeking benefits for U.S. citizen children for fear of harming their own future immigration status. Benefits for family members are not considered under the rule.

Claudia Center, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the rule targets disabled people applying for green cards and “enshrines the false stereotype that people with disabilities do not contribute to our society.”

The high court could give Trump more victories on immigration policy. The conservative justices signaled support in November for Trump’s bid to kill a program that protects hundreds of thousands of immigrants – dubbed “Dreamers” – who entered the United States illegally as children. A ruling is due by the end of June.

The court in 2018 upheld Trump’s “travel ban” targeting people from several Muslim-majority countries.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee who voted to lift the injunction, issued an opinion criticizing lower courts’ “increasingly common” use of nationwide injunctions to halt government policies. Gorsuch urged the court to confront the issue.

“What in this gamesmanship and chaos can we be proud of?” Gorsuch asked.

Two other federal appeals courts previously lifted nationwide injunctions ordered by lower courts blocking the rule.

Source: U.S. Supreme Court lets hardline Trump immigration policy take effect

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Canada Wins, U.S. Loses In Global Fight For High-Tech Workers

2020/01/27 Leave a comment

The latest article on the “Canadian advantage:”

Hundreds of tech workers pack an auditorium for a recent networking event in Toronto. The evening’s host glides around the room on a hoverboard, equal parts game show host and tech bro.

“Who here is new to Canada?” asks Jason Goldlist, the co-founder of TechToronto, an organization that helps newcomers navigate the city’s fast-growing tech ecosystem.

Dozens of hands shoot up in the air — one belonging to Alok Chitnis, who moved to Canada last year. Chitnis is originally from India. He went to graduate school in the U.S. and found a job in Colorado. But last May, he moved to Canada to launch his own startup.

“It’s vibrant. It’s very welcoming for immigrants,” Chitnis says. “There are a lot of services by the government to help newcomer entrepreneurs especially. So the whole ecosystem is pretty welcoming compared to the U.S.”

If there is a war for global tech talent, right now Canada is winning — and the U.S. may be losing its edge. Toronto saw the biggest growth in technology jobs of any North American city over the past five years, outpacing San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Vancouver also made the top five.

The tech industry across Canada is booming. And one of the biggest reasons is U.S. immigration policy. The Trump administration has made it harder for high-skilled workers to get visas. It also has blocked entrepreneurs from some majority-Muslim countries altogether under the travel ban, which it’s moving to expand to more countries.

Canada, meanwhile, has been making it easier for tech workers to immigrate there. A new streamlined visa in Canada has brought in more than 40,000 tech workers from around the world in the past two years alone.

“While the States has gone, ‘Let’s make it difficult to get the employees here on a visa,’ Canada’s gone the exact opposite, and it’s beneficial for Canada,” says Alex Norman, the other co-founder of TechToronto. “You had a fast-growing ecosystem here that’s been getting a shot of steroids.”

Under the Trump administration, high-skilled workers are getting rejected at a higher rate. In 2015, 92% of new H-1B visa applications were approved. But in the last two years, the approval rate dipped to only 75%.

Immigration authorities say they’re trying to ensure that companies follow the rules. Employers are required to show that hiring a foreign worker will not hurt Americans.

“You know, I have a high regard — as does the president — for protecting U.S. workers,” said Ken Cuccinelli, who was then the acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in an interview last year.

Cuccinelli was asked about the need to crack down on fraud and abuse. “The H-1B program has been controversial in this regard,” he said. “And it is concerning.”

Meanwhile, U.S. tech companies complain that they can’t find enough qualified candidates to fill all their open jobs.

More than a dozen hiring managers from tech startups recently squeezed into a private dining room at Del Posto, a high-end New York City restaurant. One of them was Susan Riskin, the head of human resources at Bitly, which is well-known for making Web addresses shorter.

“We doubled the size of our technology team in the last year,” Riskin said. “And we feel like we have exhausted New York and Denver. And now it’s like we’re trying to figure out where to go next, what we need to do.”

All of the hiring managers at the table were confronting a similar problem. They came for the New York strip steak and Italian wine — but also to hear a business pitch from Irfhan Rawji, the founder of a Canadian company called MobSquad.

“If you’d rather fill a job than go without, call us,” Rawji said. “We’ll open a virtual subsidiary for you in Canada. You get access to the world.”

Rawji’s pitch, in a nutshell, is this: Say your firm wants to hire an international tech worker, but the worker’s visa application is rejected or the application process is dragging on for months.

“The next-best solution to keeping them here in the U.S., if you can’t do that, is to put them in Canada,” Rawji said. “The flights are an hour and a half to two hours. It’s the same business culture. And we try to match or beat the total cost for you here.”

U.S. tech companies have long relied on a steady stream of engineers and software developers from China, India and elsewhere. The process of getting an H-1B visa was often expensive and slow, says Meagan Soszynski, the head of human resources for an advertising app called Yieldmo. But at least it was predictable.

“You followed a certain process, you paid a premium, but you pretty much always got the outcome that you wanted,” says Soszynski.

She says that’s not the case anymore.

“In the last year, I would say every one of my H-1B cases have been met with some sort of delay,” Soszynski says. “So the immigration changes are certainly being felt by us on the front lines.”

The U.S. remains a popular destination for international workers. The number of applicants for H-1B visas stills exceed the annual cap of 85,000. But in recent years, fewer are applying.

“The biggest thing that’s going to hurt the U.S. competitiveness is the overall rhetoric or tone” on immigration, says William Kerr, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of The Gift of Global Talent, who also serves on the board of MobSquad.

“If you think about migration, people are making a choice to come and invest in their lives, whether for school or for work, and they want to have long-term opportunities,” Kerr says. “And the uncertainty and the hostility really dampen that enthusiasm.”

President Trump says he understands the problem.

“We have to allow smart people to stay in our country,” Trump said in an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News this month.

“We don’t have enough of them. And we have to be competitive with the rest of the world too,” Trump said.

But global tech workers say the Trump administration’s policies make the U.S. less attractive.

Ozge Yoluk started a new job in Toronto this month. She was born in Turkey and studied in Europe. Yoluk worked as a postdoctoral researcher in computational biology at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. She says the field is “like playing video games” — except in these games, the characters are proteins and experimental drugs.

The company she joined, ProteinQure, is using tech to design new treatments. Pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. are doing similar work. But Yoluk says she didn’t even bother applying for those jobs.

“Getting a visa in the U.S. is not easy,” Yoluk says. “And it’s really costly, not just for the companies but also for the person itself.”

Yoluk says the higher rejection rate for work visas has made U.S. companies more reluctant to sponsor foreign workers — and foreign workers more reluctant to go through the process.

“I said I will not waste my time applying for positions in the States,” Yoluk said. “Whereas in Canada, the process was easy.”

Yoluk says she got her Canadian visa approved in about two weeks. She didn’t even need a lawyer to navigate the process.

A few blocks away, I met Milad Zabihi at a coffee shop in downtown Toronto. Zabihi is the CEO of a startup called Peekage, which helps companies target customers. Zabihi immigrated to Canada from Iran. Several of the company’s other co-founders are also Iranian.

“We are a bunch of friends from university time,” Zabihi says. “We were thinking of like, you know, starting something new.”

Zabihi says they wanted to locate this new venture in the United States. But then, Trump’s travel ban blocked most immigrants and visitors from Iran and several other Muslim-majority countries.

“Everyone’s like, OK, the U.S. is not an option,” Zabihi says. “Especially we like, you know, what is happening right now with the new administration and Islam. So we were basically thinking of, like, what would be the best next option.”

Now big U.S. tech firms are following global tech workers north of the border.

Google, Microsoft, Intel and Uber have either opened or announced plans for new offices in Canada.

“Toronto’s now the fastest-growing tech city in North America,” said Yung Wu, the CEO of the MaRS Discovery District, a technology hub in Toronto that’s home to 150 tech startups. It takes up most of a city block, with multiple buildings connected by a soaring glass atrium.

Wu says the Toronto tech industry has been growing for a while. But the U.S. immigration crackdown accelerated that growth.

“Look, every time Trump tweets, we get another sort of injection, which is all good from my perspective,” Wu says. “Companies are locating here because they can get access to foreign talent faster.”

Wu says hiring the right people at the right time can be the difference between a company that succeeds and one that doesn’t.

Canada is betting on it.

Source: Canada Wins, U.S. Loses In Global Fight For High-Tech Workers

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‘Mexico has become Trump’s wall’: how Amlo became an immigration enforcer

2020/01/27 Leave a comment

Of interest (just as the Safe Third Country Agreement acts as a wall with the USA):

When a group of Central American families forded the Suchiate River into Mexico last week, they were greeted by a wall of national guardsmen who locked riot shields and fired teargas into the crowd.

Questioned about the incident, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, dismissed it as “an isolated case” and said such scenes were “not the style of this government”.

The very next day, the national guard once again teargassed migrants near the border with Guatemala. News footage showed women and children howling in distress as guardsmen rounded them up and loaded them on to buses.

The president, generally referred to as Amlo, once railed against the abuse visited on migrants. In opposition, he pleaded for Mexico to provide safe passage to people heading for the US border.

But 13 months into his presidency – and under the looming threat of US tariffs – Amlo has assumed a new role: immigration enforcer.

The president his struggled to reconcile his past rhetoric with current actions, claiming good intentions at every turn, invoking human rights and even citing scripture to call for the proper treatment of migrants.

But Amlo has staunchly defended the national guard, a militarised police forced he created last year ostensibly to fight organized crime. Its first deployment was against migrants, even as violence continues to wrack the country.

“The national guard resisted a lot because there was aggression, on the part of the migrants,” he told reporters. “They didn’t fall in the trap of responding with violence, which is possibly what the leaders of these caravans and our political adversaries were looking for.”

Cabinet ministers parroted the same line: “In no way was there an act of repression,” said the interior minister, Olga Sánchez Cordero. “A tragedy was avoided,” said the foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard.

The National Immigration Institute, meanwhile, said that it had “rescued” 800 migrants – using the word as a euphemism for “arrested”.

As he swept to power in 2018, Amlo promised to end a bitter history of government repression: under successive administrations, soldiers and police have often been deployed to disperse – and disappear – protesters and opposition activists.

“Mexico has a long history of its government acting out against its citizens,” said Esteban Illades, editor of the magazine Nexos.

But the arrival of migrant caravans from Central America has exposed the extreme ideological promiscuity of Mexican politics. Like his ministers, members of Amlo’s coalition have followed the president’s lead and turned against the caravans.

Source: ‘Mexico has become Trump’s wall’: how Amlo became an immigration enforcer

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Scoop: Trump to target “birth tourism” in new immigration fight

2020/01/21 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see if this proposal proceeds and, if so, the inevitable implementation and court challenges:

The Trump administration has a new target on the immigration front — pregnant women visiting from other countries — with plans as early as this week to roll out a new rule cracking down on “birth tourism,” three administration officials told Axios.

Why it matters: Trump has threatened to end birthright citizenshipand railed against immigrant “anchor babies.” The new rule would be one of the first tangible steps to test how much legal authority the administration has to prevent foreigners from taking advantage of the 14th Amendment’s protection of citizenship for anyone born in the U.S.

  • “This change is intended to address the national security and law enforcement risks associated with birth tourism, including criminal activity associated with the birth tourism industry,” a State Department official told Axios.
  • The regulation is also part of the administration’s broader efforts to intensify the vetting process for visas, according to another senior administration official.

The big picture: “Birth tourists” often come to the U.S. from China, Russia and Nigeria, according to the AP.

  • There’s no official count of babies born to foreign visitors in the U.S., while the immigration restrictionist group Center for Immigration Studies — which has close ties to Trump administration immigration officials — puts estimates at around 33,000 every year.

How the new regulation would work: It would alter the requirements for B visas (or visitor visas), giving State Department officials the authority to deny foreigners the short-term business and tourism visas if they believe the process is being used to facilitate automatic citizenship.

  • It’s unclear yet how the rule would be enforced — whether officials would be directed to consider pregnancy or the country of the woman’s citizenship in determining whether to grant a visa.
  • Consular officers who issue passports and visas “are remarkably skilled at sussing out true versus false claims,” the senior official said.
  • “The underlying practical issue is that very few people who give birth in the U.S. got a visa for that specific purpose. Most people already have visas and come in later,” according to Jeffrey Gorsky, former chief legal adviser in the State Department visa office.

This is but one step in the administration’s plans to make it harder for people from other countries to benefit from birthright citizenship.

  • “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” the senior official said. “Just the legal recognition that this is improper and wrong and not allowed is a significant step forward.”
  • The plans to address the use of B visas for birth tourism were included in the latest version of the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions.
  • Immigration experts expect there to be a similar rule for Customs and Border Protection to go along with the State Department’s regulation.

What to watch: Most of Trump’s major immigration moves have been met with lawsuits. If the regulation leaves it to officers’ discretion to ensure that B visas aren’t used for birth tourism, it would be difficult to challenge in court, according to Lynden Melmed, an attorney and former chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

  • “State Department officials have all the discretion in the world to deny people visas,” said Sarah Pierce of the Migration Policy Institute. Foreign nationals who are outside the U.S. and have not yet received visas “don’t have a lot of legal standing.”
  • But specific restrictions that could keep out non-birth tourism visitors — such as pregnant women coming to the U.S. for business, etc. — would be legally questionable, according to Melmed and Gorsky.

Source: Scoop: Trump to target “birth tourism” in new immigration fight

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From India to US, a citizenship crisis is burning across the world

2020/01/20 Leave a comment

Dispiriting reading:

Across the world, there are fires burning and they are not only climate-change induced or climate threatening. The concept of who is a citizen of a nation and what are their rights has become a burning topic.

Under President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilians who are Amazonian Indians are increasingly under threat. In Bolivia, the fall of leader Evo Morales has disenfranchised indigenous Bolivians. Many living under US President Donald Trump are worried about their lives and the well-being of their families, and fear deportation despite being an integral part of American socioeconomics.

As Brexit looms, there is trepidation among many Europeans who have made Britain their home. The Roma in many parts of Europe continue to face persecution from their governments.

There are upheavals in the middle economies of the world too, with millions in Hong Kong and tens of millions in India facing an uncertain future. The unfulfilled obligations in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Hong Kong government’s increasing coordination with Beijing has unsettled many citizens of the special administrative region.

In India, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has decided to implement a two-pronged strategy which threatens the country’s secular ethos. This government’s amendment of a 1955 citizenship act grants citizenship to refugees from neighbouring countries belonging to religions other than Islam. This legislation has been amended in the past to limit citizenship to those having at least one Indian parent and, later, to the parent not being an illegal immigrant.

Simultaneously, there is a plan to conduct a biblically inspired National Register of Citizens which will be the arbiter on the citizenship of each Indian. Though the implementation of both or either is perceived as targeting Muslims, the collateral damage will be in the millions because many people do not have, or have insufficient, documents to prove their citizenship.

Source: From India to US, a citizenship crisis is burning across the world

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ICYMI USA: Not on form, but brawl over citizenship question continues

2020/01/20 Leave a comment

We shall see the net result of these efforts on census participation once the Census is complete and analysed:

The U.S. Supreme Court decided a citizenship question won’t be on this spring’s census form, but that doesn’t mean the fight over it has ended in courtrooms across the country.

In Maryland, civil rights groups are trying to block an order from President Donald Trump to gather citizenship data through administrative records. In New York, other civil rights groups are seeking sanctions against Trump administration attorneys for not turning over documents related to the citizenship question’s origins. Democratic lawmakers in the District of Columbia are fighting for similar documents, and Alabama officials are suing the Census Bureau to keep immigrants living in the country illegally from being counted during the process that determines the number of congressional seats each state gets.

All of the lawsuits touch on whether the number of citizens, instead of the total population, will be used for redistricting or apportionment — the process of divvying up congressional seats among the states after the 2020 census. Opponents say doing so would dilute the influence of minorities and Democrats, which they argue was the true intent of the Trump administration’s desire to add a citizenship question in the first place.

The U.S. Constitution specifies that congressional districts should be based on how many people — not citizens — live there. But the legal requirements are murkier for state legislative districts.

Source: Not on form, but brawl over citizenship question continues

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USA: Why Hostility to Immigration Runs So Deep

2020/01/16 Leave a comment

Good commentary regarding some of the causes of the hostility of many Americans to immigration, largely based on misperceptions and not the actual evidence, and the contrast with Canadian support based on immigration that favours skilled workers.

Given US discussions of their H1-B visa program (workers for the tech industry), not convinced that this would change anti-immigration discourse much:

Public opinion about immigration is hard to understand. Americans express more favorable views toward immigration since Donald Trump was elected president:

But these poll numbers come with several caveats. First, the surge in support for immigration might simply be a reactionto the xenophobia of the Trump administration and could fade after he leaves office. Second, the polls say little about the salience of the issue to the two sides; opponents of immigration might be more motivated than advocates, and thus fight harder. Finally, it’s worth noting that even now, those who support decreasing immigration outnumber those who back increasing it. And this data is just for the U.S.; other countries may be going in the opposite direction.

Why does the public seem to have an anti-immigration bias? The bulk of the data shows that immigrants, at least in the U.S., are a healthy and positive force. They are highly upwardly mobile. They make outsized contributions to technology and industry. They don’t push down the wages of native-born workers and in the case of high-skilled immigrants they even raise them. They commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. They pay plenty of taxes that help support local and state governments. They revitalize dying small towns and blighted neighborhoods. Why are so many Americans wary of what seems on paper like an unadulterated good?

One possible reason is that Americans, though more positive toward diversity than those in many other countries, also worry that their culture will be diluted by newcomers. Racial prejudice toward immigrants from nonwhite countries plays a role as well. And politics may also be a factor; because children of immigrants tend to vote for the Democrats, Republicans may fear that immigration poses a threat to their electoral strength.

But on top of all this, anti-immigration sentiment may be intertwined with suspicion of the welfare state. People may overestimate the amount of public resources spent on immigrants. And they may be less willing to distribute government benefits to people from other countries.

That’s the upshot of a recent paper by economists Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano and Stefanie Stantcheva. The authors conducted detailed surveys with 24,000 native-born people in six developed Western countries — the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Sweden and Italy. What they discovered is a pervasive tangle of misperceptions.

First, native-born people in all the countries surveyed tend to substantially overestimate the number of immigrants. Across the entire demographic and political spectrum, people said that the share of immigrants in their countries was about 10 to 15 percentage points higher than it actually was. They also tended to make mistakes about the people coming in, overestimating the share of Muslim immigrants and underestimating the share of Christian ones (except in France). And they tended to underestimate immigrants’ share of the highly educated workforce. The researchers also found that people tended to assume that immigrants receive more welfare benefits than the native-born.

So many people in rich countries seem to think of immigration much the way it’s depicted on the famous poem on the Statue of Liberty — a tired, hungry, poor huddled mass. Even those who normally support the welfare state might be inclined to curb benefits if their country was faced with such a teeming horde of needy newcomers. That inclination will be even stronger among those who don’t like the idea of the welfare state in the first place, who blame the poor for their poverty, who simply don’t care about foreigners, or who buy into racist stereotypes. In a follow-up paper, Alesina and Stancheva show mathematically how all of these factors combine to reduce support for welfare.

Sure enough, Alesina and his colleagues found that when they ask people questions about immigration before asking them about redistribution (rather than afterward), their support for the welfare state goes down. Unsurprisingly, the effect is stronger among conservatives.

So immigration seems likely to reduce support for redistribution. But advanced countries all have big welfare states and are unlikely to abandon them up any time soon. Instead, it seems likely that many will try to shut the gates to foreigners instead.

Those who know the benefits of immigration will have trouble formulating a response. Information campaigns telling people that immigrants are a net fiscal positive seem unlikely to work (the Alesina study, for example, found that respondents weren’t very interested in learning actual facts after the survey was over). Campaigning against racism and negative stereotypes of the undeserving poor may help, but changing deep-seated attitudes is always an uphill battle.

One approach might be to admit more skilled immigrants. Studies show that educated immigrants contribute much more in tax revenue than they take out; most people instinctively know that engineers or doctors are not likely to claim welfare benefits.

Tilting the immigration system toward skilled workers, as Canada and other countries do, won’t just help keep government coffers flush — it might help preserve broad support for both immigration and the welfare state, even in the face of stubborn public misperceptions.

Source: Why Hostility to Immigration Runs So Deep

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USA: New Immigration Fees To Hit Businesses Hard

2020/01/09 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: New Immigration Fees To Hit Businesses Hard

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