Census Bureau Releases Preliminary Results Of 2019 Test Of Citizenship Question

2019/11/01 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see the detailed analysis and review by outside experts:

If the Trump administration had been allowed to add the now-blocked citizenship question to the 2020 census, it likely would not have had a significant effect on self-response rates, the Census Bureau said Thursday.

Preliminary analysis of a national experiment the Census Bureau conducted earlier this year with two versions of a test census form — one with a citizenship question and one without — suggests that question could lower self-response rates in some parts of the country and for some populations. In a blog postreleased Thursday, the bureau highlighted a 0.3% difference in the share of participants identifying as Hispanic.

Still, the differences overall were “small,” according to Victoria Velkoff, the bureau’s associate director for demographic programs who wrote the post.

The bureau’s early findings could temper some concerns that including the question would deter households, especially those with noncitizens, from taking part in the constitutionally mandated head count of every person living in the U.S.

The Census Bureau randomly selected approximately 480,000 households across the country, except in remote Alaska and Puerto Rico, to take part in what it has called the “2019 Census Test.” Half of those households were asked to complete test forms with the question, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”

The bureau scrambled to put together the test earlier this year in response to the administration’s push for the question. It’s not clear when the bureau plans to release a final report on the experiment.

Some critics of the citizenship question are holding their judgment of the bureau’s early findings. An earlier study by researchers at the bureau suggested the question would have deterred at least 9 million people from self-responding to the census.

“All other research to date by the Census Bureau has indicated that adding a citizenship question to the census would depress responses among noncitizens and Hispanics,” Dale Ho, an ACLU attorney who is helping to represent plaintiffs in lawsuits over the question, said in a written statement. “We look forward to seeing whether the full results of this latest study are consistent with the bureau’s previous findings in this regard.”

But in a statement, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross — who oversees the bureau and approved adding the question — called the preliminary results “gratifying news to those who supported its inclusion.”

Throughout the legal battle over the question, opponents raised concerns that adding a citizenship question would force the Census Bureau into spending more time and money to gather responses from reluctant households.

However, the bureau’s preliminary analysis of its field test suggests it would not have needed more door knockers to follow up with people in households who did not fill out a form themselves, Velkoff wrote in the blog post.

Velkoff added that it’s unclear from these test results how the question could have impacted the “completeness and accuracy” of the 2020 census overall.

The bureau’s early findings come more than a year and a half after Ross announced his decision in 2018 to add the hotly contested question. This summer, three federal courts permanently blocked the question from being added — in part because the bureau had not conducted required testing of public reaction to including a citizenship question on 2020 census forms.

The nine-week test took place in the midst of a heated legal battle over the question. By early July, it sparked confusion around the country about why the bureau was continuing to use census forms to ask about people’s U.S. citizenship status after a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to keep the question off.

The bureau has said the test results could be “valuable” to any officials considering adding such a question to future census forms.

After backing down from efforts to use the 2020 census to ask about citizenship status, the Trump administration is now moving forward with compiling government records to produce detailed citizenship data.

In an executive order released in July, President Trump said that he wants the data to be available for state redistricting officials to use when redrawing voting districts after the national head count. A prominent GOP redistricting strategist, Thomas Hofeller, has concluded that this kind of citizenship data could give Republicans and non-Hispanic white people a political advantage.

In his executive order, Trump also left open the possibility of a resurrected political fight over a census citizenship question. The president directed the commerce secretary, who oversees the Census Bureau, to “consider initiating any administrative process necessary to include a citizenship question on the 2030 decennial census.”

Source: Census Bureau Releases Preliminary Results Of 2019 Test Of Citizenship Question

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , , ,

Bipartisan bills proposed on Capitol Hill to help children of service members overseas acquire citizenship automatically

2019/10/26 Leave a comment

One of the even less explainable citizenship policy changes of the Trump administration:

A bipartisan effort on Capitol Hill is underway to make the children of service members stationed overseas automatically Americans, responding to a new federal policy that forces some parents to apply for their child’s U.S. citizenship.

In August, Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced a new policy addressing the definition of “residence” in the Immigration and Nationality Act. It affects children of service members and civilians living abroad who did not acquire citizenship at birth or while they were living in the United States.

Under section 320 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a child born outside the United States can automatically become a citizen if they are physically living in the United States with their parent who is a citizen. With the new policy that goes into effect Tuesday, these children will no longer be considered “residing in the United States” as they had been in the past and a parent will have to apply for their child’s citizenship before the child turns 18 years old.

When the policy was announced, President Donald Trump’s administration was criticized for its immigration policies and how the change would negatively impact military families. There was also widespread confusion about what the change actually meant and who was affected, with some initial reporting interpreting the policy to mean that military children were being denied citizenship.

On Wednesday, Sens. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., announced they have introduced a bill called the Citizenship for Children of Military Members & Civil Servants Act that would modify section 320 of the Immigration and Nationality Act so children of service members who are stationed overseas can automatically acquire U.S. citizenship.

“Children of Americans serving their nation abroad are just as worthy of automatic citizenship as any other children,” Duckworth said in a prepared statement. “Forcing military families to jump through bureaucratic hoops and spend hundreds of dollars applying for citizenship on behalf of their children is not right.”

The USCIS policy change would force families to pay an application fee of $1,170 per child, according to the senators’ statement.

The policy change was estimated to affect between 20 and 25 people annually, based on data compiled by the USCIS during the last five years from overseas applications with Army or Air Force Post Office and Fleet Post Office mailing addresses, according to a USCIS official in August who spoke about the issue on the condition of anonymity.

Isakson called the bill “commonsense legislation” to help military families that is overdue.

“We should be doing all we can to ease the lives of our all-volunteer force, not add needless hurdles for them and their families,” he said in the prepared statement.

A bipartisan companion bill was also introduced in the House by Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Doug Collins, R-Ga., according to the statement.

Source: Bipartisan bills proposed on Capitol Hill to help children of service members overseas acquire citizenship automatically

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Trump’s hard-line immigration rule could disproportionately hurt Asian immigrants

2019/10/23 Leave a comment

Not the first article examining the likely effects on particular groups and likely not the last:

A hard-line Trump administration immigration policy that would deny immigrants residency if they are deemed likely to become a “public charge,” or need public assistance, could significantly affect the Asian American community.

The Department of Homeland Security rule, which was published in August, greatly expanded the definition of who is considered a public charge. Given the community’s use of certain social services, high rates of limited English proficiency, and heavy reliance on the family reunification system to come to the United States, immigration advocates fear that the rule would create serious barriers for Asian immigrants or those who wish to change their status.

Research from the Migration Policy Institute reveals more than 941,000 recent green card holders would have fallen under the Trump administration rule had it been in effect when they applied. Of those, 300,000 are from Asian countries.

A federal judge temporarily blocked the rule earlier this month, allowing a total of 15 days — which ends Friday — for parties to submit filings. The policy is currently enjoined and cannot be implemented by the administration, but it has already impacted many in the community who fear their use of public benefits could compromise their immigration status.

“The policy itself, the mere suggestion that the administration was considering the policy, has resulted in Asian immigrants and other immigrants pulling out of public benefits,” John C. Yang, executive director of the civil rights nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC, told NBC News.

Yang added: “This [rule], to us, is just a made-up reason to exclude certain classes of immigrants.”

The current definition of public charge is rather specific. Those who would need cash assistance or institutionalized care would fall under the category. However the Trump administration’s expanded definition would include individuals who would need food stamps, Medicaid, and Section 8 housing. The administration rationalized the rule, claiming that “self-sufficiency has long been a basic principle of U.S. immigration law.”

Roughly 70 percent to 80 percent of Asian immigrants come to the U.S. through family-based immigration, which means they would be scrutinized under the Trump administration rule. Of the more than 420,000 green cards that were granted to Asian immigrants in Fiscal Year 2017, almost 40 percent were given to immediate family members, while more than 20 percent were given to family-sponsored waiting list registrants.

In some urban areas, the Asian American community experiences particularly high rates of poverty. In New York City, Asian Americans have the highest poverty rate compared to all other racial groups. The racial group has one of the fastest growing populations in poverty. Between 2007 and 2011, the number of Asian Americans in poverty grew by 37 percent and Pacific Islander poverty ballooned by 60 percent, higher compared to any other group. The national increase was significantly lower at 27 percent.

Almost 18 percent of those who participate in government assistance programs are Asian Americans. However those in the community already underuse social services, Jo-Ann Yoo, executive director of the New York City-based social services nonprofit Asian American Federation, said. Not only would underprivileged immigrants meet challenges in obtaining permanent residency, but Yoo said that the proposed rule would further intimidate them from utilizing public services.

According to the new public charge rule, immigrants would also be assessed on English proficiency. The Asian American population already has the highest proportion of residents who speak a language other than English at home. And more than one-third of Asian American and Pacific Islanders have limited English proficiency.

“The Trump administration has a very narrow view of what types of immigrants are so-called desirable in the United States and frankly it is a racist and xenophobic view,” Yang told NBC News. “That view is that only people who are desirable are already proficient in English, already have a certain level of wealth or high skills.”

Since the rule was proposed back in 2018, roughly 13 percent of immigrant adults are reported to have withdrawn their use of public benefits out of fear of risking their future green card status, according to a report by Urban Institute. Yang added that some individuals who would not be subject to the rule have actually pulled out of public services due to misinformation.

“It does not affect refugees. It does not affect existing citizens,” he said. “We don’t want people to be fearful of using public benefits when they are entitled to use them.”

Asian Americans have long confronted restrictive immigration policies tied to the potential use of social services. The first public charge rule in U.S. history coincided with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The two separate legal rules ultimately carried the same function.

“There’s an absolute linkage between the discrimination of Asians and public charge,” Yang said. “[The first public charge rule and the Chinese Exclusion Act] were rooted in the same thing: which was this notion that Chinese immigrants were coming into the country in numbers that were too large and that they were somehow deemed to be undesirable.”

Yang pointed out that since that time, public charge has been used to exclude other immigrant communities, including Mexican immigrants and those in the Jewish community.

Source: Trump’s hard-line immigration rule could disproportionately hurt Asian immigrants

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,

USA: Immigration Head Says No Amendment Needed To End Birthright Citizenship

2019/10/18 Leave a comment

Stating it doesn’t make is so:

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Wednesday that ending birthright citizenship does not need a Constitutional amendment.

“I do not think you need an amendment to the Constitution. I think the question is do you need congressional action or can the executive act on their own,” Cuccinelli said during a breakfast event hosted by Christian Science Monitor.

The discussion of birthright citizenship, which is citizenship conferred on those born in the United States regardless of the citizenship status of their parents, has been a topic of debate under the Trump administration.

In August 2019, President Donald Trump told reporters that his administration was “very seriously” looking at birthright citizenship “where you have a baby on our land, you walk over the border, have a baby,-congratulations, the baby is now a US citizen…It’s frankly ridiculous.”

In an interview with Axios in October 2018, Trump claimed that he intended to end birthright citizenship through an executive order, but received considerable push back on the legality of that approach.

Then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan responded to the comments saying that birthright citizenship could not be ended by executive order because “the 14thAmendment is pretty clear.”

Despite strong rhetoric from the White House on pursuing the agenda, experts in constitutional law assert that an amendment would be required.

“Yes, it would require a constitutional amendment, and almost everyone else working on this topic would agree,” Ian Bartrum, a law professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas told Newsweek.

Birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. ”

Bartrum mentioned that the 14th Amendment was created to overturn the Dred Scott case, which allowed states to deny citizenship to the descendants of former and freed slaves. He noted that overturning that amendment would be questionable.

A constitutional amendment can be proposed either by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress or by a call for a constitutional convention by two-thirds of the state. The proposed amendment would require ratification for three-quarters of state, making the possibility of such action quite low.

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Opinion: Applying for US Citizenship Should be Free

2019/10/03 Leave a comment

Ironically, just as the Liberal platform came out promising to eliminate citizenship fees, saw this US advocacy piece:

It shouldn’t cost a cent for an immigrant to apply for United States citizenship. Here’s why:

After residing in the United States with their green card for five years (or many more), having “good moral character” and maintaining limited travel, immigrants visit us so we can assist with preparing their application and prepping them for their interview. While the thousands of immigrants come to our Citizenship Department at CASA in Maryland, meet ALL of the requirements for citizenship, more than half of them cannot afford the exorbitant price tag that comes along with applying. It’s wrong.

Over the last 34 years, the fee for naturalization has risen exponentially from $35 in 1985 to an incredible $725 to apply today. With the fee on the rise, many eligible immigrants fear that they will never be able to apply for citizenship in their lifetime. The message that we are sending to our immigrants is clear: sure, you can become a citizen…if you can afford it. In alignment with President Trump’s recent attack on poor immigrants with the passing of the recent public charge ruling, the fee itself discriminates against low-income folks who should be able to naturalize easily.

It’s important to note that the $725 fee doesn’t come close to the total financial burden in actual costs that immigrants have invested in the process. Many applying are also paying hundreds of dollars for English classes, U.S. history and government classes, legal fees, transportation fees, and are already sacrificing chunks of their paychecks when taking off from work to complete the process.

Why do green card holders want to get their citizenship? Because it grants them a long list of benefits from voting in elections for candidates that represent their interests to having access to better jobs and overall better economic prosperity. Additionally, with the administration’s heinous language and policies on immigration, even immigrants who are residing in the U.S. legally fear for deportation more than ever, though they have a right to U.S. citizenship after meeting the requirements.

The bottom line is this: Money should not be a barrier to U.S. citizenship.

Many people argue that these immigration fees are necessary, since the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that processes citizenship applications, doesn’t get funding directly from the government. But perhaps, this is a signal that Congress should allocate taxpayer money to cover citizenship processing fees.

Applying for citizenship should cost nothing. As U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) mentioned in a recent interview in regard to his proposed bill to increase access to fee waivers, “Citizenship promotes integration, civic responsibility, and a sense of community, which ultimately benefits all Americans.”

There are currently fee waivers available for low-income immigrants that an applicant can apply for based on their income level, their receipt of means-tested benefits, or financial hardship. However, the income-based requirement, that requires applicants to prove their income was at or below 150 percent of the Federal Poverty Guideline, doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of those who are in need.

I personally know many families who take out personal loans to afford the fee. Keep in mind that nearly half of the US population doesn’t have just $300 to cover an unanticipated expense.

To make things worse, USCIS has recently proposed to stop granting waivers for applicants who currently receive means tested benefits like Medicaid. In other words, USCIS has basically decided that only their office can determine whether a person needs assistance or not – despite state benefit granting agencies assessing need-based eligibility for years.

To those who are eligible for citizenship, apply now if you want to have a chance at voting in the 2020 election. Many local and state governments and non-profit organizations have temporary solutions to assist green card holders with the fee. For example, Montgomery County has partnered with CASA to provide ascholarship for residents of the county applying for citizenship. Other organizations like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) and other members of the National Partnership for New Americans, are working hard to come up with solutions to make the fee more affordable for applicants. But this cannot be a permanent solution.

As a country, this cannot be how we treat people who have sacrificed everything to be here and who have contributed so deeply, both culturally and economically, to the core of our country. The physical and emotional cost of immigrating to a new country is high enough. When it comes to the brotherhood and sisterhood of our American family, a majority of immigrants, to us, are already United States citizens. Now it’s time for Congress to lift the financial hardship and make it possible for them to act as full citizens.

Source: Opinion: Applying for US Citizenship Should be Free

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , , ,

How White Liberals Became ‘Woke,’ Radically Changing Their Outlook On Race

2019/10/03 Leave a comment

Interesting history and analysis:

Jeromy Brown, a 46-year-old teacher in Iowa, considers President Trump a white supremacist.

“If the shoe fits, then say it, and the shoe fits him,” Brown said, while waiting in a photo line at an Elizabeth Warren rally in August. “Why should he be excused from that label?”

Brown, like many white liberal voters, appreciates that some Democratic presidential candidates have begun explicitly referring to Trump as a white supremacist. His top choice, Warren, told The NPR Politics Podcast in August that “when the white supremacists call Donald Trump one of their own, I tend to believe them.”

But she’s not alone in using such strong and direct language. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has repeatedly referred to Trump as a “racist” on the campaign trail. And former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke insists that tackling white supremacy should be the No. 1 law enforcement priority in the country.

Undoubtedly, race and racism have become more salient political issues because of how the president talks about immigrants and minorities.

But the shift in how white liberals think about race actually predates both the president’s victory and the response from 2020 Democratic candidates.

Beginning around 2012, polls show an increasing number of white liberals began adopting more progressive positions on a range of cultural issues. These days, white Democrats (and, in particular, white liberals) are more likely than in decades past to support more liberal immigration policies, embrace racial diversity and uphold affirmative action.

Researchers say this shift among white liberals indicates a seismic transformation in the last five to seven years and not just a blip on one or two survey questions.

“The white liberals of 2016 or even 2014 are very distinguishable from the white liberals of the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s,” said Zach Goldberg, doctoral student at Georgia State University who has been studying the change.

In poll after poll, on a range of racial issues, both Goldberg and another researcher, Andrew Engelhardt at Brown University, have independently discovered repeated evidence of a more left-leaning white Democratic electorate.

These days, a large majority of white liberals — nearly 3 in 4 — say discrimination is the main reason black people can’t get ahead.

Don’t see the graphic above? Click here.

For some context, in the early 2000s, white liberals were split on that question — about half said blacks who couldn’t get ahead were mostly responsible for their own condition.

Don’t see the graphic above? Click here.

An increasing number of white liberals now think the criminal justice is biased against black people. An increasing number of white liberals also say the police are more likely to use deadly force against black people.

And, more white Democrats say the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism, rather than Southern pride. The reverse was true in 2000.

Don’t see the graphic above? Click here.

Some metrics even seem to be suggesting that white Democrats express more woke attitudes than their fellow brown and black Democrats.

Goldberg cited the 2018 American National Election Studies pilot survey, which found that 78% of white Democrats thought having more races/ethnicity in the country make it a “better” place to live. Fifty-seven percent of black Democrats, and 63% of Hispanic Democrats said the same.

Don’t see the graphic above? Click here.

About two years ago, Engelhardt said he also noticed another major shift.

“Starting about 2016 … white liberals actually rate non-white groups more positively than they do whites,” explained Engelhardt. “Usually, it’s the opposite.”

Most racial groups feel more warmly about their own race than they do about other races. That’s true for every group, except white liberals, according to the American National Election Studies.

Engelhardt says these recent flips suggests there’s something about being white in America that white liberals are trying to distance themselves from — something that could be accelerated by the rhetoric and tone of Trump and some of his supporters.

When white liberals adopt some of these progressive positions, Goldberg said, they’re “virtue signaling” — they want to prove that they’re allies of minority groups and feel they need to do that more assertively and openly in the Trump era.

Although Trump did not create the current conditions, both Goldberg and Engelhardt agree the president has accelerated the change in white voter attitudes.

Brown, from the Warren rally, derided some of his fellow white people for being “white supremacists” who think they are the only people “with the real birthright claim on this land, even though that makes no sense whatsoever.”

Engelhardt also suggests white guilt could be a motivating factor.

At an O’Rourke rally in Iowa a few weeks ago, 64-year-old Polly Antonelli teared up as the former congressman recounted a story from the El Paso, Texas, shooting. The suspected shooter in that incident had told police he was targeting Mexicans.

Antonelli said it’s “highly appropriate” to refer to Trump as a white supremacist.

“He is the one dividing people, by saying the things that he says about Muslims, about Mexicans, about s******* countries,” she said. “Calling him out on his crap might sound divisive, but it’s a reaction to his divisiveness.”

Antonelli admits that her own opinions on race have evolved as she learned more about different cultures.

“I realize how little I know and how I need to be more careful about what I say and how I pigeonhole people because of how they look,” she said, indicating a sense of cultural awareness you hear more often voiced by white liberals in recent years.

The “moral buttons” are being pushed

One possible explanation for the dramatic shift in racial attitudes in the last decade is that white Democrats who disagreed with the party’s embrace of diversity have just abandoned the party altogether. But even though the makeup of the parties has fluctuated, that’s not the only explanation; Researchers point to a genuine shift among the white liberals who have remained in the party.

“Whites’ identification as Democrats and Republicans is motivating them to hold different attitudes about people of color in the United States,” said Engelhardt.

Goldberg says he noticed an abrupt change around the time mainstream news outlets started picking up on social media accounts of fatal police shootings of black men.

“[White liberals’] exposure to injustice inequality has been heightened because of the internet,” said Goldberg. “The moral buttons of white liberals are being more frequently pressed.”

Engelhardt agrees, and pointed to one specific incident as a potential catalyst — when a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

“This kind of renewed attention to discrimination is new and novel for white liberals,” he said, explaining why there has not been as large of a shift among people of color on these survey questions, in part because they didn’t need social media videos to know what was already happening in their communities.

Source: How White Liberals Became ‘Woke,’ Radically Changing Their Outlook On Race

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

USA: Federal judge’s ruling upends how ICE targets people for being in the country illegally

2019/09/30 Leave a comment

Hard to follow all the restrictive changes in US immigration and related policies and the various court challenges and their impact, so found this summary helpful:

In a third defeat in less than a day for the Trump administration, a federal judge blocked it from vastly extending the authority of immigration officers to deport people without first allowing them to appear before judges.

The decision late Friday came before the policy, which was announced in July, was even enforced. The move would have applied to anyone in the country less than two years.

For the record:
1:31 PM, Sep. 28, 2019 An earlier version of this article misspelled U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte Jr.’s last name as Birrote.

The decision came just after a federal judge barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement from relying solely on flawed databases to target people for being in the country illegally.

Early Friday, the administration suffered what would be its first defeat on the immigrant front in less than 24 hours when a federal judge blocked its plan to dismantle protections for immigrant youths and indefinitely hold families with children in detention.

Those protections are granted under the so-called Flores agreement, which was the result of a landmark class-action court settlement in 1997 that said the government must generally release children as quickly as possible and cannot detain them longer than 20 days, whether they have traveled to the U.S. alone or with family members.

In a statement Saturday, the White House responded angrily to the decision to halt its plans for expedited removal of immigrants.

“Once again, a single district judge has suspended application of Federal law nationwide — removing whole classes of illegal aliens from legal accountability,” the statement read in part. “For two and a half years, the Trump Administration has been trying to restore enforcement of the immigration laws passed by Congress. And for two and a half years, misguided lower court decisions have been preventing those laws from ever being enforced — at immense cost to the whole country.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which had sought the injunction granted just before midnight celebrated the result.

“The court rejected the Trump administration’s illegal attempt to remove hundreds of thousands of people from the U.S. without any legal recourse,” said ACLU attorney Anand Balakrishnan, who argued the case. “This ruling recognizes the irreparable harm of this policy.”

In the first setback Friday for the Trump administration, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee said new rules it planned to impose violated the terms of the Flores settlement. Gee issued a strongly worded order shortly after, slamming the changes as “Kafkaesque” and protecting the original conditions of the agreement.

Gee wrote that the administration cannot ignore the terms of the settlement — which, she pointed out, is a final, binding judgment that was never appealed — just because leaders don’t “agree with its approach as a matter of policy.”

Barring a change in the law through Congressional action, she said, “Defendants cannot simply impose their will by promulgating regulations that abrogate the consent decree’s most basic tenets. That violates the rule of law. And that this court cannot permit.”

The new regulations would have eliminated minors’ entitlement to bond hearings and the requirement that facilities holding children be licensed by states. They also would have removed legally binding language, changing the word “shall” to “may” throughout many of the core passages describing how the government would treat immigrant children.

The government is expected to appeal.

In the second decision Friday, U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte Jr. issued a permanent injunction barring ICE from relying solely on databases when issuing so-called detainers, which are requests made to police agencies to keep people who have been arrested in custody for up two days beyond the time they would otherwise be held.

ICE is also blocked from issuing detainers to state and local law enforcement in states where there isn’t an explicit statute authorizing civil immigration arrests on detainers, according to the judge’s decision.

The decision affects any detainers issued by an ICE officer in the federal court system’s Central District of California.

That designation is significant because the Pacific Enforcement Response Center, a facility in Orange County, is an ICE hub from which agents send out detainer requests to authorities in 43 states, Guam and Washington, D.C. It is covered by the Central District.

“ICE is currently reviewing the ruling and considering our legal options,” Richard Rocha, an agency spokesman, said in a statement. “Cooperation between ICE and local law enforcement agencies is critical to prevent criminal aliens from being released into our communities after being arrested for a crime.”

Tens of thousands of the requests are made each year to allow ICE agents additional time to take people suspected of being in the country illegally into federal custody for possible deportation. Approximately 70% of the arrests ICE makes happen after the agency is notified about someone being released from local jails or state prisons.

In fiscal year 2019, ICE has lodged more than 160,000 detainers with local law enforcement agencies, according to the agency.

Although police in California do not honor these ICE requests because of earlier court rulings that found them unconstitutional, agencies in other parts of the country continue to enforce them.

The civil case, which has wound its way through years of delays and legal wrangling, has broad implications for President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration as the ACLU and other groups sought to upend how immigration officers target people for being in the country illegally.

“I think the decision is a tremendous blow to ICE’s Secure Communities deportation program and to Trump’s effort to use police throughout the country to further his deportation programs,” said Jessica Bansal, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California.

The class-action lawsuit, which represents broad categories of people who have been or will be subjected to detainers, alleged the databases that agents consult are so badly flawed by incomplete and inaccurate information that ICE officers should not be allowed to rely on them as the sole basis for keeping someone in custody.

The judge agreed with that assessment, finding that the databases often contained “incomplete data, significant errors, or were not designed to provide information that would be used to determine a person’s removability.”

These errors, according to the decision, have led to arrests of U.S. citizens and lawfully present noncitizens. From May 2015 to February 2016, of the 12,797 detainers issued in that time frame, 771 were lifted, according to ICE data. Of those 771, 42 were lifted because the person was a U.S. citizen.

The detainer process begins when police arrest and fingerprint a person. The prints are sent electronically to the FBI and checked against the prints of millions of immigrants in Homeland Security databases. If there is a match — such as someone who applied for a visa or was apprehended by Border Patrol — it triggers a review process, which often culminates with an agent at the center deciding whether to issue a detainer.

Last year, the Pacific Enforcement Response Center issued 45,253 detainers and alerted agents at field offices to more than 28,000 additional people released from law enforcement custody before ICE could detain them.

Trump has singled out police in California and elsewhere for their refusal to honor detainers, using them to highlight what he says are problems with the country’s stance on immigration enforcement and the need to take a more hard-line approach.

In the years since the lawsuit was filed, ICE has amended its policies, saying the changes made the process for issuing detainers more rigorous.

Source: Federal judge’s ruling upends how ICE targets people for being in the country illegally

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

The Economist: Why American Muslims lean leftwards for 2020

2019/09/24 Leave a comment

Not surprising:

BEFORE THE presidential election in 2000, George W. Bush was urged by an adviser to go after a category of voters who would love a business-friendly, socially-conservative message: Muslims. Mr Bush took the tip and it worked. In 2001, a survey of American Muslims (including those who cast no ballot or gave no clear answer) found that 42% reported voting for Mr Bush against 31% for his Democratic rival Al Gore. Among upwardly mobile Muslim immigrants, many of them professionals or entrepreneurs, the proportion voting Republican was much higher.

Now, however, with anti-Muslim sentiment ablaze among supporters of Donald Trump, and the president hardly discouraging it, that love-in is a distant memory. American Muslims are gaining political visibility, but only on the far left of the spectrum. Symptomatic of this shift is the election to the House of Representatives of two Muslim women (Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar) who along with two female colleagues, also left-wing Democrats, have been taunted by Mr Trump and his supporters.

A huge change in Muslim sentiment was clear in the 2004 presidential race and confirmed by the 2008 contest won by Barack Obama. By 2007 some 63% of American Muslims at least “leaned towards” the Democrats, against only 11% for the Republicans. These figures have not changed very much since, according to Pew Research, a pollster. Among Muslims who voted in the 2016 presidential race, only 8% said they opted for Mr Trump (who had declared that “Islam hates us”) and 78% for Hillary Clinton.

Campaigners for Muslim political engagement reckoned that more than 1m were registered to vote in 2016, and that last year’s congressional elections saw an uptick in Muslims going to the polls. Pew estimates that about 3.5m Muslims live in America. At around 1% of the country’s population as of 2015, they were more numerous than Hindus (0.7%) or Buddhists (0.7%) though well outnumbered by Jews (1.8%). But that picture is projected to change fast with the Muslim share doubling by mid-century.

The main reasons for the transformation in Muslim attitudes have been much analysed. After the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, there was a spate of hate crimes against followers of Islam and open antipathy towards Muslims emerged in a growing segment of the electorate. That put Muslim voters into a defensive frame of mind, and Democrats, with their embrace of cultural diversity, offered the safest haven. Another factor, though its importance is disputed, is that younger American Muslims have grown more liberal over cultural questions like gay rights, so they are less amenable to Republican-style “family values” arguments. As for African-American Muslims, they (like black Christians) have always been well to the left in their voting choices.

Still, to say that American Muslims have lurched from one end of the ideological spectrum to another would be an over-simplification. According to Youssef Chouhoud, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University, Muslims are not so much confirmed leftists as nomads, in search of anyone who will listen to them, and the only respectful attention they are getting is on the left. Even in that quarter, they have been feeling a bit unloved recently. At the convention on August 31st of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which calls itself the country’s biggest Muslim organisation, only two candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination accepted invitations to speak: Senator Bernie Sanders and Julián Castro, a former housing secretary. Mr Sanders is also probably the most robust supporter of Palestinian rights in the primary field. As Mr Chouhoud puts it, this leaves Muslims “looking for a place they can feel wanted. Any politician who even talks to them will be appreciated.”

In this climate, Muslim Republicans are an endangered, though not extinct, species. One veteran of that cause is an Arizona-based doctor, Zuhdi Jasser. He has served as vice-chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan watchdog, as a Republican nominee. Although Mr Trump was not his preferred candidate, Dr Jasser declares himself “pleasantly surprised” by many of the Trump administration’s policies, and insists that “Muslim ban” is not an accurate way to describe the president’s drive to bar entry from five countries where Islam predominates.

Dr Jasser feels the “Muslim-equals-left” stereotype is partly the fault of his community’s self-appointed representatives, not so much the young firebrands as the community’s elderly godfathers. In his view, these veteran leaders have one big failing. They have never really distanced themselves from the global cause of Islamism, the notion that the only ideal form of governance is a Muslim one. (They are not, of course, proposing such a regime for America, but many have a record of endorsing political Islam elsewhere.) That soft spot for Islamism makes them particularly toxic in the eyes of mainstream American conservatives, leaving Muslims nowhere to go but left.

As he tours America addressing conservative groups, Dr Jasser finds them open to persuasion that the political doctrine of Islamism, which in his view can and must be separated from the spiritual teaching of Islam, is their real foe. He lays out the case that Islam as a set of metaphysical beliefs and ethical norms can flourish, in America and elswhere, under the principle of church-state separation which was dear to the Founding Fathers. Once that argument is made, his listeners are open to persuasion that decent American Muslims are allies against Islamism.

Whether or not they deserve to be dismissed as old-timers, America’s Muslim thought leaders, be they spiritual or political, are certainly divided. In ways that leave ordinary Muslim voters a bit baffled, they squabble among themselves, usually over events in distant lands. Arguments rage over the coup in Egypt in 2013, the failed coup in Turkey in 2016 and the civil war in Syria. At the core of many such disputes is a difference in attitudes to the global Muslim Brotherhood, as a standard-bearer of Islamism. In the words of H.A. Hellyer, an analyst for the Carnegie Endowment, “one of the fault-lines in the American Muslim intelligentsia is between those who see Islamism as the proper, basic norm of Muslim political life, and those who are philosophically opposed to it.”

Rank-and-file American Muslims may not have much time for philosophy but many will have felt some bewilderment in recent weeks as one of their most revered spiritual figures became embroiled in a row which has a domestic political dimension. Hamza Yusuf, a California-based greybeard, is often described as America’s most eminent scholar of Islam. In July he took a job, of sorts, with the Trump administration by joining a panel set up by the State Department to ponder the definition of human rights. Some said he was selling out to a Muslim-bashing administration; others that his warm relations with the United Arab Emirates, whose regime he calls tolerant, made him unqualified to pronounce on human rights. (The UAE is a declared foe of the Brotherhood, so views on that country are sensitive.) Mr Yusuf was already unpopular with left-wing co-religionists for saying after Mr Trump’s election that Muslims should accept his authority.

In recent days he has been much criticised for having spoken mockingly of the Syrian uprising that started in 2011. In a three-year-old video clip that suddenly went viral, he said the revolt had led to untold humiliation for Muslims. In a fresh video he apologised if his words had offended people who suffered under Syria’s regime.

Still, some advocates of a Muslim-Democratic coalition feel they can do fine without such prominent Muslims as Mr Yusuf. Despite the lack of interest shown by other Democrats, they took heart from Mr Sanders’s appearance at the ISNA convention and especially over one of his comments. He delighted Pakistani-Americans by saying he was “deeply concerned” about India’s “unacceptable” actions in Kashmir. That gave a hint of one foreign-policy issue which might loom rather large for south Asian voters in the 2020 race. Some Indian-Americans are impressed by Mr Trump’s friendship with Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister; many Pakistani-Americans hope a Democratic runner will take the other side.

Shadi Hamid, a fellow of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, says the deepening partnership between Muslims and Democrats was built not on foreign-policy questions but more on adversity: the alarm created by the white-nativist spirit which they see stalking the country. Certain tensions do exist, he says, between the social conservatism of some Muslims and the ever more secular ethos of the Democrats. But for now, such tensions are kept under control by a common feeling of being endangered. If the Trump era passes, the Democratic coalition’s internal strains might come to the fore, but until that happens, a sense of being under siege will keep it together. Generally, Muslim voters are saying: “however secular the Democrats might be, it is the Democrats who have our backs.”

Source: Why American Muslims lean leftwards for 2020

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

USA: Chinese woman pleads guilty in ‘birth tourism’ case

2019/09/20 Leave a comment

While the practice is legal, it was the fraud in visa applications that committed her.

Seems like there may be similar opportunities to examine the practices of birth tourism consultants in Richmond and elsewhere:

A Chinese woman has pleaded guilty in the US to federal charges of running a “birth tourism” scheme for Chinese nationals who paid so their children would be born American citizens.

Dongyuan Li admitted her company assisted wealthy Chinese nationals in getting to the US to give birth.

Ms Li would give clients training on how to bypass US immigration control and hide their pregnancies.

She amassed more than $3m (£2.4m) in wire transfers.

Ms Li, who is due to be sentenced in December, could face up to 15 years in jail.

What was the scheme?

Ms Li admitted that between 2013 and 2015, her company You Win USA Vacation Services would charge Chinese nationals – including government officials – between $40,000 and $80,000 for coaching in how to have a baby in the US.

With that came the benefits of American citizenship.

On its website, the company boasted more than 500 customers. It said that being American was the “most attractive nationality” and it would ensure “priority for jobs in US government”.

Ms Li told clients to initially fly from China to Hawaii due to the belief it would be easier to get past US customs. From there they could fly to Los Angeles where they would be housed in apartments.

She also admitted that the clients were coached on how to get through the US consulate interview in China, including by falsely stating that they were going to stay in the US for two weeks.

In reality, they planned to stay for up to three months to give birth.

What are the charges?

Ms Li pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit immigration fraud and one count of visa fraud.

As part of her plea deal with federal authorities, Ms Li gave up assets including $850,000, her house worth more than $500,000 and several Mercedes Benz cars.

Why was it illegal?

While it is not illegal to visit the US and give birth, making false visa claims is.

Authorities said Ms Li was promoting the benefits of having babies in the US, which would include helping to get family members immigration rights.

US President Donald Trump has talked of revoking birthright citizenship.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49746063

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

What immigrant entrepreneurs can do without a startup visa

2019/09/19 Leave a comment

A reminder of the resourcefulness of immigrants (but really, just simpler to immigrate to Canada):

When Nitin Pachisia wanted to start a company, he found himself in a bind. He was gainfully employed by a startup that had sponsored his H-1B visa, a temporary visa awarded to highly skilled foreign workers. But he was itching to build something of his own. “Obviously a lot of attorneys said you can’t and shouldn’t leave your job because your [own] company can’t hire you,” he said.

While working through his options, Pachisia says he inadvertently became a bona-fide expert on the immigration system. “The bigger personal discovery was that I ended up spending a lot of time learning immigration law myself, which is among the worst uses of an entrepreneur’s time. I could be spending that time building my business.”

If he lived in Canada, Pachisia would have had the option of applying for a startup visa, which allows foreign entrepreneurs to immigrate to the country if they have the backing of a designated organization. The tech industry has long lobbied for a startup visa in the U.S., and before President Obama left office, his administration introduced a rule that offered similar benefits (which also didn’t require approval by Congress).

The International Entrepreneur Rule was intended to give entrepreneurs the ability to build their companies in the U.S. for 30 months, assuming they had enough interest from investors. The rule was supposed to go into effect in July 2017 but has instead been in limbo for more than two years, kneecapped by President Trump and his administration. (Trump has also cracked down on work authorization for H-4 spouses.)

“A ton of work went into [the International Entrepreneur Rule], and it’s very straightforward,” says Todd Schulte, the president of immigrant advocacy group FWD.us, which helped conceive of the Rule alongside entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and government figures. “The economy would be growing faster. We would be creating more companies, creating more jobs, and pushing up wages faster if the Trump administration turned around tomorrow and said ‘Actually, we are now in support of this program.’” Schulte also points out that this isn’t a partisan issue. “There are tons of people on both sides of the aisle who support a startup visa and want to make it easier for entrepreneurs to come here,” he says.

The Department of Homeland Security had originally projected that almost 3,000 people a year would qualify to come to the U.S. under the International Entrepreneur Rule. But as of last year—after the Trump administration delayed implementing the rule with the eventual goal of rescinding it—there were reportedly no more than 10 entrepreneurs who had applied.

“I know people who just couldn’t figure out how to stay in the U.S., and they had to leave,” says Schulte. If President Trump is no longer in the White House come 2021, the rule might be revived—but Schulte believes that for some entrepreneurs, it could be too late. “They may have had a great idea that was ready to go in 2015, or 2016, or 2017,” he says. “And by 2020 and 2021, maybe it’s just not right.”

Without a functional startup visa, many foreign-born entrepreneurs feel like they have little recourse. Take Mike Galarza, founder and CEO of fintech startup Entryless. Galarza was working at a tech company that sponsored his work visa. But when Galarza started a company, he couldn’t automatically transfer his sponsorship. Instead, he had to build his business after hours, until he was eligible to apply for a green card. There should have been an easier way to get a new visa, Galarza says, especially as an immigrant who was already screened for a work visa. “People that come through work visas to big companies see a lot of problems and are very creative people,” he says. “There’s a natural selection when you’re coming from outside and are motivated to leave your friends and family.”

Fiona Lee, the founder of Pod Foods, a food tech startup, says she was lucky because her cofounder was a U.S. citizen. While Lee was back in Singapore figuring out her visa situation, her cofounder was able to incorporate their company. “I honestly think I couldn’t have done what I’m doing today without her,” Lee says. “The initial paperwork of setting up anything involved a Social Security number and credit score. Even when I was away, she was able to handle all of that.”

Even securing a work visa through her company—the H-1B1, an offshoot of the H-1B allocated to workers from Singapore—was easier, Lee says, because she had far less competition than someone in the regular pool of H-1B applicants. (This variant of the H-1B visa is the result of a free-trade agreement with Singapore signed into law in 2003.) “The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services did the routine scrutiny, but it was different than for someone from India or China,” she says.

Several founders Lee knows had wanted to come to the U.S. but opted to take their talents elsewhere in the face of an exacting immigration system. “On a global level, America has always been at the forefront of innovation and talent,” she says. “But because of the restrictions, we’re starting to see a lot of talent from other parts of the world go to other countries, whether it’s China or Israel, or [countries in] Europe.”

The workaround for a number of immigrant entrepreneurs has been an extraordinary ability visa like the O-1, which is defined as “for the individual who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics.” The visa wasn’t designed for entrepreneurs, but Pachisia says the pool of recipients has shifted over the years. “Historically, the O-1 was used a lot by entertainers, athletes, models, and artists,” he says. “It’s now increasingly being used by scientists and developers.”

The dearth of a pathway for immigrant entrepreneurs is exactly what Pachisia wanted to solve by creating Unshackled Ventures, an early-stage firm that invests in immigrant-led startups like Pod Foods. “We’re essentially the privatized version of a startup visa,” says Pachisia’s cofounder, Manan Mehta.

With its investment, Unshackled Ventures helps startups land a visa and build their businesses. “Sixty percent of our commitments were made before the company was even incorporated, largely because these are founders who are working other daytime jobs who are on visas. They can’t leave their jobs until they have sponsorship.” The firm has now helped founders apply for 11 different types of visas, including the O-1, and does not charge founders for legal fees.

When Unshackled makes an investment in a founder, they’re relieved of the burden of splitting their time between their own business and, say, a full-time job that has secured their work visa. “That’s the promise here,” Mehta says. “We’re a research and development lab, so we can deploy our investment capital by hiring the founders and allowing them to dedicate every waking hour [to their business] . . . we can meet all the legal requirements while also keeping that innovation in the country.”

Since the fund started in March 2015, Unshackled has made 38 investments, with more than 100 immigration filings for 39 portfolio companies and upwards of $8 million invested in its founders. (Unshackled’s first fund was $4.5 million; earlier this year, the firm secured a second fund worth $20 million.)

Half the battle, Pachisia says, is empowering entrepreneurs with the right information. Unshackled wants to help immigrant entrepreneurs make the system work for them, and the firm works individually with each entrepreneur to come up with an approach that makes sense for them. “The goal is to let the entrepreneurs do what they want to do without being limited by time or limited by what they think is not permitted,” Pachisia says. “So we’ve taken all that myth around immigration and made it very crystal clear.”

As someone eligible for the H-4 visa, he benefited from being able to stay in the U.S. without a work visa of his own—but he argues that some lawyers make blanket statements about immigration that might mislead aspiring entrepreneurs. “There’s a lot of misinformation,” he says. “Even lawyers make broad statements like, ‘You’re on an H-1B and can’t start a company,’ which, as I’ve found out, is wrong.” There are, of course, criteria specific to the H-1B, as there are with any visa—that you can’t be your own employer and have to work within the same speciality, for example—but those restrictions need not disqualify you from being a founder.

Pachisia himself was eventually able to secure an O-1 visa. The extraordinary ability visas are unlike other visas, he says, in that they’re subjective. The criteria for how the visa is awarded isn’t clear, so the key is to craft the right narrative. “My O-1 story is around financial innovation,” he says, “and figuring out innovative ways of structuring finance for startups.” He pointed to his early work finagling creative deals at Deloitte, when he first came to the U.S. on an H-1B, as well as his approach at Unshackled. “We’re applying an innovative way of financing companies, which also encloses immigration,” he says. “That was the story I could tell.”

But while the O-1 is a viable option for many immigrant entrepreneurs, Schulte adds that it’s not necessarily a long-term solution or replacement for a government-sponsored startup visa. Your immigration journey might start with the F-1 visa, when you come to the U.S. for school. From there, you may try to get an H-1B visa; if that doesn’t work, you’re still eligible for a year of temporary employment through your student visa. Eventually, you could apply for an O-1, and if that doesn’t work, try to naturalize when you’re eligible. “High-skilled immigration is kind of like a bridge,” Schulte says. “If you think of it as a bridge—if you take out parts of the bridge, or make it much more narrow, it puts extra strain on everything else.”

Still, Mehta believes Unshackled can grow to effectively take the place of a startup visa sanctioned by the government, or at least significantly mitigate the lack thereof. “I think we can scale this,” he says. “We’ve always done it with every consideration for the law in mind. What we’re showing is the private sector can innovate in any environment.”

Of course, it’s no small feat to get the O-1. Last year, just over 30,000 visas were granted in the O class (which includes the O-2 and O-3 visas extended to immediate family members). Since 2014, the number of O-1 visas issued has increased by nearly 8,000. “It is a high bar, but so is the bar for raising money in Silicon Valley,” Pachisia argues. “If an entrepreneur is able to secure cofounders and hire great talent—which means you’ve been able to sell your vision and raised money—chances are you are an exceptional individual.”

In other words, applying for an O-1 is a test of the very skill an entrepreneur most needs to hone: how to successfully pitch their vision to investors and consumers alike. Since the criteria is inherently subjective, the way you might meet it differs from person to person. Pachisia knows someone who became one of the most popular bloggers in the early days of blogging and got an O-1 visa because of it. “What you’re really striving to do is show that you have a certain capability, which is unusual,” he says. “You did or can do something that most others cannot.

Source: What immigrant entrepreneurs can do without a startup visa

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →