How Toronto Is Wooing Tech Immigrants Away From Silicon Valley

2019/03/07 Leave a comment

More on a Canadian advantage:

“Nobody calls it Maple Valley,” says Yung Wu. What about Silicon Valley North? No, that nickname hasn’t caught on either, he replies amiably: “We’re not Silicon Valley.”

Toronto’s understated technology community has politely defied outsiders’ attempts to define its rapid growth in relation to California’s unmatched innovation engine. Yet veteran entrepreneurs such as Wu admit to taking some pride in last year’s discovery that Canada’s largest city had created more tech jobs than San Francisco — or any other U.S. metropolis — in the preceding five years.

Its population of software developers, engineers and programmers grew by more than half between 2012 and 2017, according to CBRE, the commercial real estate firm. The 82,100 technology jobs it added over that period made it North America’s fastest-growing tech center, CBRE calculated, to the surprise of many south of the border. Wu, who runs a hub for startups called MaRS Discovery District on the site of Toronto General Hospital, where the use of insulin was pioneered, sees several reasons for this “brain gain,” from the city’s relative affordability to the work being done on artificial intelligence at the University of Toronto.

But he and many of the entrepreneurs on his bustling 1.5-million-square-foot campus credit one new factor with helping Toronto attract ambitious foreign tech workers who would once have headed for Silicon Valley by default: Since the elections of Justin Trudeau in 2015 and Donald Trump in 2016, attitudes to immigration in Ottawa and Washington have diverged markedly.

“There’s a chill going on south of the border,” says Toby Lennox, CEO of Toronto Global, the group tasked with attracting foreign investment to North America’s fourth-largest city. “Right now we’re positioning ourselves to be a lot more welcoming.”

America’s president has not threatened to build a wall along its northern border, but he has made it harder for even skilled foreigners to enter the U.S., where they could undercut the country’s homegrown workforce. In particular, his administration has tightened the requirements for granting H-1B visas and threatened to ban spouses of people on such permits from working.

Up to 85,000 people enter the U.S. each year under the H-1B program, which was introduced to help bring in highly skilled talent but has often been accused of being misused by employers more interested in replacing U.S. workers with cheaper foreigners.

Some U.S. executives concede that reforms are needed but say Trump’s actions and rhetoric have left white-collar employees, who once assumed a U.S. visa was almost a formality, feeling insecure and facing unexplained delays. In a tight labor market, corporate America has stepped up its lobbying for a more open regime.

The Business Roundtable (BRT), a group of CEOs from U.S. companies including Apple and Cisco, warned last summer that the Trump administration’s “buy American and hire American” policies were resulting in “arbitrary and inconsistent” visa adjudications. Since then the BRT has called for an increase in the number of H-1Bs granted, more predictability in the way skilled workers’ visas are assessed and greater efforts to retain international students with top science, technology, engineering and mathematics degrees from U.S. universities.

***

The prescription has a distinctly Canadian ring to it. Canada already grants foreign students work permits for up to three years after graduation, and in June 2017 the country’s immigration and employment authorities launched what they called their Global Skills Strategy, with the goal of making it easier for employers to bring in highly skilled foreign workers.

Among its promises was that work permits for such individuals (and their families) would be processed within two weeks, subject to police and medical checks. Within little more than a year, more than 12,000 people had applied, of whom 95 percent had been accepted.

Some had applied for H-1Bs and been turned down, says Irfhan Rawji, a Canadian venture capitalist who launched a nearshoring company called MobSquad last October to help U.S. tech companies fill vacancies with people based in Canada. “We cannot build this country without skilled workers, and we do not have enough of them,” he says. More than 200,000 people apply each year for the 85,000 H-1B visas the U.S. offers, he notes. “So we knew there were 115,000 people who didn’t win the lottery who were willing to come to North America.”

There is nothing new about Canada being receptive to immigration: Some 51 percent of Toronto’s residents were born in another country — more than New York’s 40 percent. But the strategy has given a new tech focus to Canada’s immigration policy: The most common professions among those admitted were developers, computer analysts, university professors and software engineers.

This is already having a tangible impact, according to Elissa Strome, executive director of the $125 million Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy at CIFAR, a research institute based in the MaRS building.

“I think where Canada has really benefited on immigration is the change in our own policy, not the change in U.S. policy,” she says. “When I talk to CEOs, that speed of decision-making is what’s made the difference.”

Toronto’s entrepreneurs say a tech-friendly immigration system is essential because there are some skills they simply cannot find locally. “It is hard to find enough people with experience of large-scale consumer tech companies anywhere other than Silicon Valley,” says Ray Reddy, CEO of Ritual, a food-ordering app for office workers picking up lunch from local restaurants. “We have to import them.”

Ben Zifkin, CEO of Hubba, is among the entrepreneurs to have taken advantage of the Global Skills Strategy. His online marketplace for small retailers is starting a recruitment program in Tel Aviv to bring soldiers leaving the army to Toronto for a year. “If you want to come up here, I will have you a visa in two weeks. The ability to say that was a pretty impactful thing,” he says.

Among Toronto’s recent arrivals is Protik Das. He moved to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 2012 to study aerospace engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, but the defense companies he met made clear that they were not interested in hiring non-Americans.

He tried his own startup but discovered that he could not apply for an H-1B visa while working for himself and would have to leave the U.S. within a year of graduation unless he could find an employer in the field he had studied to sponsor him. So in September 2017 he moved to Canada, where he is now an engineer with a company applying digital technology to wound care.

Bangladeshi friends who opted for Canadian universities were “way more relaxed about the situation,” he says, adding that he now advises younger Bangladeshis to choose Canada over the U.S. “because you have more guarantees in Canada.”

Das struggles to understand why the U.S. accepts bright foreigners to its universities, trains them and then lets them slip away. “Very talented people are spending a lot of money to come and study in the U.S.,” he says. But the stress the country’s visa process induces means U.S. companies “end up losing talent,” he argues.

***

Canada’s more welcoming approach has not only helped pull in people from the other side of the world such as Das, Hubba’s Zifkin observes — it has also made it easier to attract Americans and coax back Canadians working in the U.S.

“When 2016 happened, everybody thought that every tech worker would be walking across the border from Buffalo,” he says. “It wasn’t going to happen, but we now have the ability to go to New York and the Valley and wiggle people out.”

Canada has long worried about a “brain drain,” and a recent study found that a quarter of the 2015 and 2016 STEM graduates from the Universities of Toronto, British Columbia and Waterloo were working outside the country, most of them in higher-paying U.S. tech clusters. But a growing domestic tech industry is persuading more Canadians to stay or to return.

Ian Logan is among those who have come back. He grew up in Toronto but moved to the U.S. after he graduated in 2008 because the biggest Canadian name he knew in technology was RIM, the company that brought the world the BlackBerry. He ended up working for Airbnb in San Francisco but wanted a more family-friendly city when he and his wife had a child.

He returned to Toronto in 2017 to “a dramatically different tech scene” from the one he left and a job as vice president of engineering at Drop, a 60-person company with a loyalty points app. Several former colleagues are now considering following him north, he says, “because they have real visa challenges” or because they are attracted by Toronto’s lower cost of living.

“There was always good tech talent across Canada, but it was largely going south. Now that’s changed,” says Gord Kurtenbach, senior director of research at design software group Autodesk, who worked at Apple and Xerox Parc a generation ago.

“I never believed in my lifetime I’d be back working in Toronto,” he says, sitting in his AI-designed office on the MaRS campus. A decade ago, he says, his computer science lab was the only one of its kind in Toronto. Now, there are more than a dozen: Uber set up a Toronto lab in 2017 to research self-driving cars, Samsung has an AI center in the MaRS building and Nvidia and Microsoft are among the U.S. companies that have hired researchers in the city.

Such companies once used Toronto only as “a holding pen” for international employees waiting for U.S. visas, says Ritual’s Reddy. “Now it’s starting to be the end destination.”

***

Mary Louise Cohen, a Washington lawyer who set up a company with her husband to connect skilled refugees with employers around the world, recalls a meeting on immigration they attended in Ottawa in 2017.

“It really struck us how Canada saw that they were in a global talent competition and how they intended to win. Canada, I think, recognizes that they are a country of immigrants, that their strength is because of their diversity and that to grow and expand they have to bring in the best and brightest around the world,” she says. “I’m hoping in the coming years there will be much greater recognition that skilled immigration is valuable to the United States.”

Trump surprised many in the U.S. business community with a tweet in January in which he promised reforms to the H-1B program “to encourage talented and highly skilled people to pursue career options in the U.S.” But CEOs have seen little action since, and their hopes for bipartisan immigration reform are ebbing as 2020 election campaigning kicks off.

The prospect of a change in Washington is one challenge Toronto Global’s Lennox sees on the horizon for his city. “At some point, Trump is no longer going to be president,” he says, and his successor could make it easier for those with tech skills to choose the U.S. Before that moment, he says, “the trick is for us to translate the momentum we’re seeing now into something that’s abiding and resilient.”

To do that, Toronto’s tech companies will have to show that they can compete with the best of Silicon Valley, says Hubba’s Zifkin. “The people we’re trying to attract to Toronto are world-class folks. All they care about is working for winning companies.”

Wu of MaRS insists that Toronto can create enough winners. “We have the opportunity to see our entrepreneurs like we see our hockey players,” he says. “We can always apologize after we’ve won.”

Source: How Toronto Is Wooing Tech Immigrants Away From Silicon Valley

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President Trump’s Threats to Remove Birthright Citizenship Could Impact Surrogacies

2019/03/06 Leave a comment

As always, surrogacy creates some interesting citizenship policy challenges (see theglobeandmail.com/…/article-how-canada-became-an-international-surrogacy-destination). This perspective from a legal service provider, yet another element of the supporting birth tourism industry:

With Donald Trump’s recent threat to remove birthright citizenship rights, many international families may wonder how this could affect the nationality of a child born to immigrants. Below, family law Attorney Evie Jeang, founder of Ideal Legal Group, Inc., explains that without birthright citizenship, children born to immigrants and non-citizens will not be recognized as citizens of any country, and that by eliminating these laws, citizenship grants for children of international families will become unnecessarily complex, and the surrogacy market could take a hit.

Under the current laws, when a baby is born in the US to a gestational mother who is an American citizen, the baby is automatically extended American citizenship. The 14th Amendment of the United States provides that, “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.”

In other words, children of international intended parents obtain US citizenship upon birth by a gestational parent in the US Among many legal, medical and ethical factors, birthright citizenship offers an appeal to international families without US citizenship looking to conceive through surrogacy. Thus, the popular commercial surrogacy market could take a hit without birthright citizenship attracting wealthy foreigners.

International family and divorce law firm, Ideal Legal Group Inc., frequently encounters the issue of birthright citizenship for foreign couples looking to conceive, particularly among their clientele base from mainland China.

Ideal Legal Group’s Chinese clientele face legal and cultural opposition to surrogacy in their country, and accordingly, many Chinese nationals come to the United States, where it is legal and ethical to employ a gestational surrogate to carry their baby. Through birthright citizenship, the child is eligible to receive US citizenship benefits, including education, social welfare and treatment in American medical facilities. A child with US citizenship is also eligible for dual residency in countries that recognize this concept.

Ideal Legal Group helps intended parents secure their birthright by ensuring parentage over their child in which they choose to be delivered by an American surrogate. Through their work with Surrogacy Concierge, Ideal Legal Group locates surrogates of specificity for international clientele, ranging in a variety of education and socioeconomic status.

Once a surrogate is selected, the legal process begins. The legal team drafts agreements on behalf of the intended parents to ensure that once the baby is born, the parental rights are transferred from the surrogate parent(s) to the intended parents. In the State of California, this is executed through the Family Code in which a parentage action confirms the birthrights of the intended parents.

The legal team drafts agreements between the intended parents and a gestational surrogate (and their spouse if applicable), memorializing through a legal agreement the medical stages of surrogacy. The intended parents are represented by one attorney and the gestational surrogate is represented by another attorney.

California surrogacy laws provide that a surrogacy contract must contain the date that the contract was entered into; the persons from which the gametes originated; the identity of the intended parent(s); and the process for any necessary pre-birth or parentage orders. Ideal Legal Group incorporates provisions that protect the intended parents’ birthrights.

Further, the legal team focuses on identifying the risks and responsibilities that each party is assuming, including but not limited to, surrogate compensation, what happens in the event of an unfortunate miscarriage, and protocol if the surrogate has multiple children rather than the one child which was contracted. The surrogacy contract is a map for the process.

Ideal Legal Group also handles the courtroom work. Pre-birth parentage orders are needed to finalize the intended parents’ legal parental rights. No actual court hearing is needed; however, pre-birth parentage orders are filed in advance of when the baby is born, and the Judge signs off on the transfer of parental rights from the surrogate to the intended parents.

Source: President Trump’s Threats to Remove Birthright Citizenship Could Impact Surrogacies

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , ,

USA: Wait Times for Citizenship Have Doubled in the Last Two Years

2019/02/22 Leave a comment

Another illustration of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies:

After working through the Las Vegas summer lugging boxes and heavy furniture to raise money to apply for United States citizenship, Jose Silva plunked down the $725 fee in the fall of 2017, just days after he turned 18. “I hoped to vote in the midterm elections,” he said.

But it took until last week, more than a year and a half after he applied, for the college student to be scheduled for a citizenship interview, which he will have on March 20. If approved, Mr. Silva will take the oath later this year.

The time that aspiring Americans must wait to be naturalized is now almost twice as long, 10 months, as it was two years ago. In Las Vegas, where the office has a particularly large backlog, applicants could wait 31 months.

The delays come as the Trump administration tightens scrutiny of applications, diverts staff from reviewing them and introduces proposals likely to make it more difficult, and cumbersome, for green-card holders to qualify and complete the process.

Nearly nine million immigrants are eligible for citizenship. The steep application fee and the civics and English tests have historically deterred many from naturalizing. Instead, they renewed their legal residence every decade.

But the administration’s move to tighten restrictions on immigration have awakened many longtime permanent residents to the fact that a green card does not shield them from deportation. It has also compelled many to seek citizenship in order to cast a ballot, with hundreds of thousands of immigrants poised to become potential voters ahead of the 2020 election.

After supporting legislation that would cut overall immigration, President Trump recently championed the economic benefits of attracting foreign talent. In his State of the Union address, the president said he wanted “people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.”

Yet the lengthening backlog in applications is making it more difficult for immigrants to become civically engaged and to solidify ties to their adopted country, critics of the administration’s policies say. “Far from the public eye, the Trump administration is strangling the naturalization process,” said Steven Choi, a chair of the National Partnership for New Americans, a coalition of advocacy groups that is pushing to offer naturalization workshops and legal services to would-be citizens.

Coalition members filed a federal lawsuit in Los Angeles in September against the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that reviews the applications, challenging the processing delays.

The federal agency has blamed the delays on a sharp rise in applications.

“U.S.C.I.S. continues to adjudicate the pending naturalization caseload, which skyrocketed under the Obama administration, more than doubling from 291,800 in September 2010 to nearly 700,000 by the beginning of 2017. Now, despite a record and unprecedented application surge workload, U.S.C.I.S. is completing more citizenship applications, more efficiently and effectively — outperforming itself,” Michael Bars, an agency spokesman, said in response to emailed questions.

There have been bigger application spikes in the past, such as in 2007, when the caseload swelled to 1.4 million and the agency was able to work through the backlog by the following year. That has not happened with the current pileup.

A total of 750,793 applications were pending at the end of June, the latest period available. But the rate at which they are being processed is at the lowest in a decade, according to an analysis released this month by Boundless Immigration, a technology company in Seattle that helps immigrants obtain green cards and citizenship. The agency was able to work through only about half its applications in 2017, compared to about 60 percent in 2016. (Data for 2018 is not available.)

“Applications for citizenship have surged many times in the past and U.S.C.I.S. was able to bring enough resources to bear to tame them. Wait times have doubled and the agency is barely processing half of their backlog,” said Doug Rand, a founder of Boundless Immigration.

A Feb. 12 letter to the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services that was signed by 86 members of Congress raised concerns about the “alarming growth in processing delays” for naturalization and other services like green cards and visas.

It noted that the agency’s proposed budget for the 2019 fiscal year included a request that more than $200 million of its fee revenue be transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that rounds up people for deportation.

“This appears to represent part of U.S.C.I.S.’s larger shift toward prioritizing immigration enforcement over the service-oriented adjudications at the core of the agency’s mandate,” said the letter, which sought details about efforts to reduce and eliminate backlogs.

Processing times vary across the country, depending on caseloads and staffing at regional offices. Applicants in Houston could wait almost two years; in Atlanta, the wait could be even longer. In contrast, those seeking citizenship in Louisville, Ky., have been completing the process in up to 10 months. In Buffalo, the wait is just over a year.

Citizenship applications are receiving additional scrutiny — and that is likely to intensify. The Trump administration says that it is placing a premium on integrity. But immigration lawyers and other experts report that officers are digging up information going back years to raise questions that are delaying, and jeopardizing, citizenship for many applicants.

“The Trump administration has infused the entire legal immigration system with skepticism, but naturalization should be different: These people are already here legally; they want to be citizens to better assimilate,” said Mr. Rand, who served in the Obama administration.

The government has also been taking a harder look at some immigrants who have already become citizens. Last year, the agency launched a denaturalization task force with the aim of stripping citizenship from people found to have committed fraud to obtain it.

Some applicants have shown up for their interview only to learn they could be deported.

“This past year, for the first time we have started to see people who apply for naturalization not only have it denied but also be placed in removal proceedings to take away their permanent residence,” said Ted Farrell, an immigration lawyer in Louisville.

Ahmed Bafagih, 31, a permanent resident since 2010, was denied citizenship after he told an officer during his interview last month in Houston that he was born in Kenya, not Yemen, as appeared in his file. He is appealing the decision.

“Acting in good faith, I tried to correct the error that would have gone unnoticed,” said the lab technician, who moved to Sana from Mombasa, his birthplace, when he was about 30 days old.

The denial, reviewed by The New York Times, stated that, “Your record reflects that there was fraud in procurement of your Legal Permanent Resident status,” referring to the erroneous birth certificate.

Mr. Bafagih’s Yemen-born parents and three sisters are American citizens.

His father, Jamal Bafagih, who won awards during 25 years of service with American government missions in the Middle East, including with the Pentagon and the Commerce Department, said: “I raised my kids to love this country. Suddenly when my son reports an error, it bounces back to hurt him; that leaves a very bad taste.”

Slated for implementation are a series of regulatory changes that are likely to make the process even more onerous.

One proposal would require many citizenship applicants to produce a decade of international travel history, rather than the current five; more documentation, like children’s birth certificates, which many refugees lack; as well as more information to ascertain “good moral character.”

The agency has also proposed narrowing the eligibility criteria for a waiver of the full $725 filing fee, which would reduce the number of low-income immigrants who could afford to naturalize.

Meanwhile, many agency officers who conduct citizenship interviews have been reassigned to the southern border to interview asylum seekers, whose cases the administration wishes to expedite, according to an agency official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak to the media.

For many of those waiting their turn, more is at stake than the simple pride of citizenship. Holding an American passport opens access to certain jobs, such as in law-enforcement agencies, and scholarships that are not available to noncitizens. Mr. Silva the applicant in Las Vegas, is studying Arabic, a language in high demand by government agencies, which often only hire citizens.

He’s studying at a community college, but hopes to transfer to a four-year university next year — and that’s another issue.

“My passion is languages,” said Mr. Silva, “and for scholarships I have found, you have to be a U.S. citizen.”

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Maybe We Should Build A Wall To Keep Immigrants In

2019/02/05 Leave a comment

Nice reverse argument, with some numbers to back it up:

In the midst of overheated debates about immigration and an ugly upsurge in nativism, it’s worth reminding ourselves that entrepreneurial immigrants make an outsized contribution to new business creation. And new and young companies are the primary source of job creation in the American economy.

The contributions of entrepreneurial immigrants have been well documented:

  • Immigrants are twice as likely to become entrepreneurs as native-born Americans.
  • As of 2016, first generation immigrant entrepreneurs represented 30% of all new entrepreneurs in 2016, up substantially from 13% in 1996.
  • Forty-three percent of founders of the 2017 Fortune 500 are immigrants or the children of immigrants.
  • Immigrants constitute 15% of the general U.S. workforce, but they account for around a quarter of U.S. entrepreneurs (defined as the top three initial earners in a new business) and account for a about a quarter of U.S. inventors.
  • Immigrants account for more than 90% of the growth in self-employment since 2000, with particularly significant contributions since the Great Recession.
  • Firms founded by immigrants close at a faster rate than firms founded by natives, but those that survive grow at a faster rate in terms of employment, payroll, and establishments, a phenomenon called “up or out,” which is how young firms create more jobs.
  • Half of America’s startup companies valued at $1 billion or more (as of January 1, 2016) were started by immigrants.

Despite those contributions, our inadequate HB-1 visa system coupled with anti-immigration rhetoric and attempts to further limit legal immigration are driving many foreign students to return home when they’ve completed their education, driven away many other skilled immigrants who have tired of the interminable and uncertain wait for a green card and discouraged talented people abroad to seek more hospitable countries like Canada.

But the real flashpoint in the immigration debate has been around Latin American immigrants, fueled by baseless claims of an “invasion” on our southern border. (From the end of the Great Recession, more Mexican immigrants returned to Mexico from the U.S. than migrated here, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center study.) Meanwhile, Hispanics have made significant contributions to the entrepreneurial economy:

  • The five areas with the highest startup activity in the 2017 Kauffman Startup Activity Index were, in order, the metropolitan areas centered on the cities of Miami, Austin, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas—all cities with heavy concentrations of Latinos.
  • Among minority ethnic and racial groups, Latinos have the highest rate of new entrepreneurs.
  • The Latino share of all new entrepreneurs rose from 10% in 1996 to 24% in 2016.

Far from the hothouse of Silicon Valley and its venture capital-backed startups, the vast majority of Latino entrepreneurs, like 99% of all entrepreneurs, are what I call bedrock entrepreneurs. Typically, they start modest businesses (sometimes with themselves as the only employee), largely fund those businesses out of their own pockets and the pockets of their family and friends. They start small; they try to minimize losses and avoid failure, and methodically grow their businesses over the long haul.

Although there are no definitive studies, many observers ascribe higher rates of entrepreneurship among immigrants to personal characteristics like a willingness to take risks (as they did when they moved to an unfamiliar country), a strong sense of identity and intrinsic motivation. Many Latino immigrants, facing discrimination and lacking good English skills, have little choice but to be entrepreneurial. As a result, they are likely to perceive opportunities that other people miss, possess an ability to persist through the myriad difficulties of entrepreneurship and draw on deep reserves of motivation to succeed.

In addition, as politicians debate the ultimate fate of people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, they might want to remember this: Immigrants that came to the U.S. as children are more likely to start larger firms than immigrants who arrived as adults and have lower closure rates. Moreover, a 2017 survey conducted by the Center for American Progress found that among the DREAMers under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) some 5% of respondents started their own business after receiving DACA. Among respondents 25 years and older, that figure rises to 8%. Meanwhile, among the American public as a whole the rate of starting a business is only about 3.1%. According to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which represents the interests of more than 4.37 million Hispanic-owned businesses, if both the DREAMers and recipients of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) were forced to leave the United States, the U.S. economy would experience a $597 billion reduction in gross domestic product (GDP) over the next decade.

With entrepreneurship in long-term decline, we need all the entrepreneurs we can get. Thirty years ago, about 800,000 new companies in the US were being formed per year, and in some years there have been as many as 13 million people aspiring to start their own businesses. Today only about 600,000 businesses are being formed per year and the number of aspiring entrepreneurs has dropped to about 10 million. Immigrants, with their strong propensity for new business creation, can help reverse that decline, create jobs, help lift our economy and contribute to the general well-being of the country—but not if we drive them away.

Source: Maybe We Should Build A Wall To Keep Immigrants In

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US charges 20 people over Chinese birth tourism schemes

2019/02/01 Leave a comment

Provides an example of regulatory and legal approaches to reducing the extent of birth tourism. While the national security rationale given is overblown (“ridiculous” in the words of others), the fraud and misrepresentation of purpose of visit is not, although may be hard to prove in court.
Of course, in the Canadian context, if a women openly stated the purpose of her visit was to give birth with the intent to obtain Canadian citizenship for her child, and met the security, medical and financial requirements, there would be no grounds for visa refusal and no fraud or misrepresentation.
Will be interesting to see how this case is decided:
Dongyuan Li’s business was called “You Win USA,” and authorities say she coached pregnant Chinese women on how to get into the United States to deliver babies who would automatically enjoy all the benefits of American citizenship.

Over two years, the now-41-year-old raked in millions through her business, where mothers-to-be paid between US$40,000 and US$80,000 each to come to California, stay in an upscale flat and give birth, authorities said.

Li, who was arrested on Thursday, is one of 20 people charged in the first federal crackdown on birth tourism businesses that prosecutors said brought hundreds of pregnant women to the United States.

Jing Dong, 42, and Michael Wei Yueh Liu, 53, who allegedly operated “USA Happy Baby,” also were arrested. More than a dozen others, including the operator of a third such business, also face charges but are believed to have returned to China, the US Attorney’s office in Los Angeles said.

While it is not illegal to visit the United States while pregnant, authorities said the businesses – which were raided by federal agents in 2015 – touted the benefits of having US citizen babies, who could get free public education and years later help their parents immigrate.

They also allegedly had women hide their pregnancies while seeking travel visas and lie about their plans, with one You Win USA customer telling consular officials she was going to visit a Trump hotel in Hawaii.

The charges include conspiracy, visa fraud and money laundering. But US authorities said the businesses also posed a national security risk since their customers, some who worked for the Chinese government, secured American citizenship for children who can move back to the United States and once they’re 21 and then sponsor their parents for green cards.

“I see this as a grave national security concern and vulnerability,” said Mark Zito, assistant special agent-in-charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s homeland security investigations. “Are some of them doing it for security because the United States is more stable? Absolutely. But will those governments take advantage of this? Yes, they will.”

Messages left for Li and Dong’s lawyers were not immediately returned. Derek Tung, Liu’s lawyer, said the growing interest among Chinese women to give birth to American babies drew attention to a phenomenon long employed by citizens of other countries.

His client had nothing to do with getting women visas from China but worked almost as a subcontractor to provide housing once they arrived, he said. “My client is merely the provider. The people who are in China are the ones in charge of everything,” he said.

Birth tourism businesses have long operated in California and other states and cater to couples from China, Russia, Nigeria and elsewhere.

In the past, operators sometimes ran into trouble with local code enforcement officials when neighbours in residential areas complained about crowding or excess trash, but they did not face federal scrutiny.

In 2015, federal agents in California raided roughly three dozen sites connected with the three businesses. More than 20 people were designated as material witnesses but some later fled to China and were charged with violating federal court orders, and a lawyer who helped them leave the country was convicted of obstruction of justice.

This week, a federal grand jury indicted four people who allegedly ran the birth tourism businesses until the 2015 raids, including Wen Rui Deng, 65, who is believed to be in China and accused of operating “Star Baby Care.”

That business dated to at least 2010 but advertised having brought 8,000 women to the United States – half of them from China – and claimed to have been running since 1999, prosecutors said.

Each business brought hundreds of customers to give birth in the United States and some didn’t pay all of the medical costs tied to their care, prosecutors said. One couple paid the indigent rate for their hospital bills – a total of US$4,080 – even though they had more than US$225,000 in a US bank account they had used to shop at luxury stores including Louis Vuitton, according to court papers.

Li, who operated You Win USA, told an undercover federal agent who was posing as a pregnant Chinese citizen that her company would train her to interview for a visa and pass customs, according to court filings.

At one point, the papers said, she also sent a text message to her husband about the business, saying “After all, this is not legal!”

Source: US charges 20 people over Chinese birth tourism schemes

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Majority of Americans continue to say immigrants strengthen the U.S.

2019/02/01 Leave a comment

More data from Pew, confirming the highly partisan nature of views:

The American public’s views of the impact immigrants have on the country remain largely positive – and deeply partisan.

Partisan gap in views of immigrants as wide as at any point in at least 25 yearsAs in recent years, a majority (62%) say immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents. Just 28% say immigrants are a burden on the country because they take jobs, housing and health care, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center.

These attitudes have changed little in the past few years, but they are very different from a quarter-century ago. In 1994, attitudes were nearly the reverse of what they are today: 63% of Americans said immigrants burdened the country and 31% said they strengthened it.

An estimated 45.1 million immigrants were living in the U.S. in 2016, accounting for 13.9% of the nation’s population. Most (76%) are in the country legally.

Republicans and Democrats have never been further apart in their views of immigrants than they are currently. Democrats and those who lean to the Democratic Party overwhelmingly say immigrants are a strength to the nation (83% say this); just 11% say immigrants burden the United States. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 38% say immigrants strengthen the country, while nearly half (49%) say they burden it.

Generational differences in views of immigrantsThere also are sizable generational differences in opinions about immigrants. Three-quarters of Millennials (75%) say immigrants strengthen rather than burden the U.S. That compares with 63% of Gen Xers, 52% of Baby Boomers and 44% in the Silent Generation. In 1994, roughly comparable shares of Gen Xers, Boomers and Silents expressed positive views of immigrants.

Generational differences are evident in both parties but are particularly stark among Republicans. More than half of Millennial Republicans (58%) say immigrants strengthen the country, compared with just 36% of Gen Xer Republicans and even smaller shares among older GOP generations. Among Democrats, there are only modest generational differences in these views, with no fewer than seven-in-ten of those in all generations saying this, including nearly nine-in-ten Millennial (88%) and Gen Xer (87%) Democrats.

Note: See full topline results and methodology. 

Source: Majority of Americans continue to say immigrants strengthen the U.S.

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Immigrant share in U.S. nears record high but remains below that of many other countries

2019/01/31 Leave a comment

Good recap of comparative statistics:

Nearly 14% of the U.S. population was born in another country, numbering more than 44 million people in 2017, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Immigrant share of U.S. population approaches historic highThis was the highest share of foreign-born people in the United States since 1910, when immigrants accounted for 14.7% of the American population. The record share was 14.8% in 1890, when 9.2 million immigrants lived in the United States.

The foreign-born population in the U.S. grew substantially during the late 1800s, when immigration from Europe and elsewhere brought millions of new residents to the nation’s shores. In the 1920s, the U.S. adopted a series of more restrictive immigration laws, eventually leading to the establishment of a national-origin quota system in 1924 and a subsequent decline in the foreign-born share of the nation’s population. That immigration system was not changed until 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act created the same overarching immigration laws that the U.S. still uses today. Since 1965, at least 59 million immigrants have come to the United States.

Immigrant share in U.S. is lower than in many other countriesEven though the U.S. has more immigrants than any other country, the foreign-born share of its population is far from the highest in the world. In 2017, 25 countries and territories had higher shares of foreign-born people than the U.S., according to United Nations data.

In 2017, large majorities of populations in some Persian Gulf nations, such as the United Arab Emirates (88%) and Kuwait (76%), were born in other countries. (Most foreign-born persons living in Persian Gulf nations are labor migrants and live in the region temporarily.)

Foreign-born people also accounted for a substantial share of the population in Australia (29%), New Zealand (23%) and Canada (21%), as well as in several European countries, such as Switzerland (30%), Austria (19%) and Sweden (18%).

Explore detailed tables on the number and share of immigrants and emigrants by country.

The share of foreign-born people has changed over time in many nations, just as it has in the U.S. Several European countries, as well as other immigrant destinations (Canada and Australia, for example), have seen steady increases in recent decades. But some nations have seen their immigrant shares drop. In several Central and Eastern European countries – such as Latvia and Estonia – more people are leaving than entering, and remaining immigrants are getting older and dying, all leading to a decreasing share of foreign-born people.

In several immigrant destination countries, larger shares of publics want fewer or no immigrants to move to their country, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the spring of 2018. However, support for taking in high-skilled immigrants and refugees fleeing war remains high in some destination countries.

Worldwide, most people do not move across international borders. In all, only 3.4% of the world’s population lives in a country they were not born in, according to data from the UN. This share has ticked up over time, but marginally so: In 1990, 2.9% of the world’s population did not live in their country of birth.

Source: Immigrant share in U.S. nears record high but remains below that of many other countries

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Yes, you can buy your way into U.S. citizenship

2019/01/19 Leave a comment

Not sure how this program is being affected by the Trump administration (85 percent of applications are from China and, like other investment immigration programs, has been dogged by questions of fraud and questionable value):

Yes, you can buy your way into U.S. citizenship The Globe and Mail It’s known as the ‘million dollar

It’s known as the “million dollar green card,” a visa program that gives wealthy people the ability to move to the United States by creating economic opportunities and employment there.

The EB-5 investor visa offers permanent U.S. residency and eventually citizenship when a person invests between US$500,000 and US$1-million in a new commercial enterprise that produces at least 10 full-time jobs.

The program is becoming popular among Canadians with financial means, experts say, from retirees who want to live for extended periods south of the border to families that eventually want their children to be able to study and work there.

But it’s important to understand the program’s rules, costs and timing, they warn, as well as to seek qualified advice about issues such as health care, estate and tax planning as well as payments associated with the Canadian exit and U.S. entry.

“You need to ask questions,” says Joe Kirkwood, a dual Canadian-U.S. citizen who is an immigration attorney and partner at Leibl & Kirkwood, a private law firm in San Diego that specializes in U.S. immigration law. Three-quarters of the firm’s clients are Canadian, he says, and about 10 per cent are getting EB-5 visas, an overall number that is “increasing for sure,” especially as retiring baby boomers often don’t have other ways to become U.S. residents. “You’re buying green card status.”

The U.S. Congress created the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program in 1990 to help stimulate the country’s economy by attracting new business investment from abroad. It is administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

Up to 10,000 EB-5 visas are issued each year. Chinese nationals typically account for three-quarters of them, but Canada consistently ranks among the top 20 source countries. In 2017, according to U.S. State Department statistics, 55 EB-5 visas were issued to Canadian investors and family members.

Applicants can “fly solo,” Mr. Kirkwood says, making a direct investment of US$1-million in an eligible small business that creates at least 10 jobs and then actively managing it. Or they can passively invest US$500,000 in one of about 900 EB-5 regional centres, approved organizations designed to manage EB-5 investor funds and the immigration approval process. These centres finance or buy equity in job-creating capital projects in certain areas, typically smaller communities with high jobless rates.

For the first two years, EB-5 visa holders are granted conditional permanent-resident status in the United States. After 24 months of compliance with the program, they can apply to have the conditions removed. Dependent children under 21 and spouses get the same visa status as the primary EB-5 investor and receive their own green cards. All are eligible for U.S. citizenship five years after initial approval.

EB-5 funds have been used to build office towers, shopping malls, ski resorts, hospitals and film studios.

One of the bigger downsides for participants in the program is that their cash is locked up for perhaps five years, says Terry Ritchie, director of cross-border wealth services for Cardinal Point Capital Management Inc., a firm with offices in Canada and the United States that specializes in wealth management for people in both countries.

Mr. Ritchie says it’s critical for would-be EB-5 investors to look at their tax and estate planning structures, their other investments and the tax implications of leaving Canada.

He cautions that the program comes with a “a nuisance factor because you’re dealing with government.” For example there’s a lot of poking and prodding through your personal information and tax returns. “You’re laying bare your financials,” he says.

The visa applicant must also show evidence that the investment is being made with capital acquired lawfully, for example earnings from employment, private businesses, real estate, stocks and bonds, an inheritance or a gift.

It typically takes 18 to 20 months for applications to be processed, and the filing fee is US$3,675. Plans to update the program and increase the minimum investments required have been reported but not implemented. There have also been warnings that the program might be cancelled altogether.

Mr. Kirkwood suggests that Canadians exhaust other options for U.S. residency, such as family sponsorship or sponsorship by an employer, as it can take a significant amount of time and money to go the EB-5 route. Administrative fees for the EB-5 program can range from $30,000 to $50,000, with legal costs of around $25,000, he says, plus the cost of other professional and financial planning advice.

Entrepreneurs looking to live full-time in the United States, he notes, have other options, such as the E-2 investor visa, which requires a smaller investment in a business – say an outlay of US$150,000 to start a yogurt shop in Florida, for instance – but does not come with a green card and must be renewed periodically.

The principal residence of EB-5 visa holders must be in the United States, Mr. Kirkwood notes. Direct investors are expected to live in the same area as their project, in order to develop and manage the business, while passive investors can live anywhere in the country.

Another motivation for EB-5 investors is attendance at elite universities. For example, it may be easier for the children of EB-5 visa holders to ultimately get into an Ivy League school as a green card holder or dual citizen rather than an international student, and they might qualify for in-state tuition at universities. But Mr. Kirkwood warns that dependent children must be younger than 21 upon the initial program approval to qualify for green cards.

Source: Yes, you can buy your way into U.S. citizenship

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USA: A Judge Blocked the Census From Asking About Citizenship. Here’s Why It Matters

2019/01/17 Leave a comment

One of the better analysis that I have seen:

A federal judge in New York has blocked the Trump Administration from adding a question about citizenship status to the 2020 Census, marking a victory for critics who have said the question is unnecessary and is intended to decrease the number of immigrants and minorities counted in the decennial survey.

The ruling is just the first in a series of cases on the issue, which has significant implications for future elections, political representation at every level and federal funding decisions for the next decade. The Trump Administration is also facing five other lawsuits over the Census question, and the battle is expected to end up at the Supreme Court.

But U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman’s decision on Tuesday was an important moment. The suit’s plaintiffs — a collection of immigrant advocacy groups, states and local officials — argued that the Trump Administration tried to add the citizenship question to intentionally dissuade immigrants from responding to the survey. The U.S. Census, which is conducted every 10 years, has not included a question about citizenship since 1950. More detailed sampling surveys have done so, but those go out to far fewer households.

Furman ruled that the way Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross added the question was “arbitrary and capricious” and violated administrative procedures.

“He failed to consider several important aspects of the problem; alternately ignored, cherry-picked, or badly misconstrued the evidence in the record before him; acted irrationally both in light of that evidence and his own stated decisional criteria; and failed to justify significant departures from past policies and practices,” Furman wrote in his 227-page decision.

The judge also ruled that Ross’s explanation for the citizenship change — that the Justice Department said it was needed to help enforce the Voting Rights Act — was “pretextual.”

Ross initially offered voting rights enforcement as his official explanation, but documents released as part of the ongoing lawsuits revealed that he began pushing the issue on his own soon after becoming Commerce Secretary.

The Justice Department said it was disappointed in the ruling, while advocacy groups like the ACLU cheered the decision.

“This ruling is a forceful rebuke of the Trump administration’s attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities,” Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement. “The evidence at trial, including from the government’s own witness, exposed how adding a citizenship question would wreck the once-in-a-decade count of the nation’s population. The inevitable result would have been — and the administration’s clear intent was — to strip federal resources and political representation from those needing it most.”

As this was the first ruling in the cases against the citizenship question, evidence that came out during the trial could encourage those pursuing similar lawsuits, said William H. Frey, a demographer and expert on the Census at the Brookings Institution.

“This is good news for people who want to have a Census that represents America,” Frey told TIME. “You want to make sure that all groups are represented and it helps the proper apportionment of Congress, it helps federal spending that is allocated to different groups around the country.”

If immigrants and other minorities avoid responding to the census because of a question about citizenship, experts, including the Census Bureau itself, say it would likely result in a survey that significantly undercounts those populations.

The Census provides crucial data that is used for a wide variety of decisions, including how many representatives each state sends to Congress and how much federal money different areas receive for everything from highway funds to Medicaid. The data can also affect state representation and even the Electoral College, which is based on Congressional delegations.

The private sector often relies on Census numbers as well for decisions about where to open stores or where to base factories and other employment opportunities, Frey notes.

“The Constitution says that we need to count everyone in the United States and I think that as a scientist, as a demographer, as someone who has been doing this for a long time, the research is pretty unequivocal that that’s going to not be done if the citizenship question is on there,” he said.

Source: A Judge Blocked the Census From Asking About Citizenship. Here’s Why It Matters

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Trump Claims There Is a Crisis at the Border. What’s the Reality?

2019/01/14 Leave a comment

Good analysis of the numbers:

President Trump has frequently called the situation at the southern border with Mexico a crisis and insists that building his long-promised border wall will fix it. Here are some of Mr. Trump’s most common assertions of a crisis, and the reality of what we know about immigrants and the border.

“We can’t have people pouring into our country like they have over the last 10 years.”

THE REALITY Illegal border crossings have been declining for nearly two decades. In 2017, border-crossing apprehensions were at their lowest point since 1971.

Total number of arrests for illegally crossing the Mexican border

Undetected illegal border crossings have dropped at an even faster rate, from 851,000 in 2006 to approximately 62,000 in 2016, according to estimates by the Department of Homeland Security.

However, there is one group of migrants that is on the rise: families. A record number of families have tried to cross the border in recent months, overwhelming officials at the border and creating a new kind of humanitarian crisis.

Number of arrests for illegally crossing the Mexican border

Asylum claims have also jumped, with many migrant families telling officials that they fear returning to their home countries. Seeking asylum is one way to legally migrate to the United States, but only 21 percent of asylum claims were granted in 2018, and many cases can take years to be resolved.

“Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border.”

THE REALITY It is true that the majority of heroin enters the United States through the southern border, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. But the D.E.A. also saysthat most heroin is brought into the country in vehicles entering through legal border crossings, not through the areas where walls are proposed or already exist.

Most drugs are seized at ports of entry, not along the open border

There are more than two dozen ports of entry along the southern border. Barriers are already present in Border Patrol sectors with the highest volumes of heroin seizures.

“Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country, and thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now.”

THE REALITY It is difficult to assess the president’s claims that illegal immigration leads to more crime because few law enforcement agencies release crime data that includes immigration status. However, several studies have found no link between immigration and crime, and some have found lower crime rates among immigrants.

Texas, which has the longest border with Mexico and has one of the largest populations of undocumented immigrants of any state, keeps track of immigration status as part of its crime data. The Cato Institute, a libertarian research center, analyzed the Texas data in a 2015 study and found that the rate of crime among undocumented immigrants was generally lower than among native-born Americans.

Conviction rates are lower for immigrant populations in Texas

Some critics of the study argued that the reason undocumented immigrant conviction rates were low was because immigrants were deported after they served their sentences, which prevented them from committing another crime in the United States, reducing their rate of crime relative to native-born Americans.

Alex Nowrasteh, senior immigration policy analyst at the institute, addressed the complaint by comparing first-time criminal conviction rates among undocumented immigrants in Texas and native-born Americans in Texas. He found that undocumented immigrants still committed crimes at a rate “32 percent below that of native-born Americans.”

President Trump frequently tells the stories of Americans who have been killed by undocumented immigrants as examples of criminal behavior. These terrible crimes have happened, but there is no comprehensive data that shows whether these killings are happening at crisis levels.

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