82% of Dreamers Won’t Benefit from House Bill’s Citizenship Path

2018/06/21 Leave a comment

Solid analysis:

House Republicans will vote on their “compromise” immigration bill this week. Moderate Republican supporters of the bill may argue that its many restrictionist features—including draconian asylum provisions, cancelling the applications of 3 million people waiting to immigrate legally, and permanent reductions in legal immigration—are a small price to pay to help the entire Dreamer population gain a “pathway to citizenship.” However, an analysis of the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act (BSIF) shows that even under the most generous assumptions, the bill would likely initially legalize only 821,906 people, provide permanent residence (i.e. a pathway to citizenship) to 628,758, and result in citizenship for 421,268.

As provided in Table 1, only a third of the Dreamer population would likely receive status under the House plan (H.R. 6136), and just 18 percent would likely make it onto the pathway to citizenship. Only 12 percent would likely apply for and receive citizenship. Moreover, even the pathway to citizenship is tenuous, since—for all Dreamers in DACA or without legal status today—it is contingent on a future Congress appropriating money for a quite expensive (at least $25 billion) wall and security system along the Southwest border of the United States.

Table 1: Dreamer Populations and Eligibility Under Border Security and Immigration Reform Act

Sources: Authors’ calculations (see below) based on population estimates from Migration Policy Institute (DACA eligible and total Dreamer Population based on American Hope Act); Border Security and Immigration Reform Act (H.R. 6136)
*As of December 31, 2016

If Congress wants to help a larger number of Dreamers, then it would need to establish clear legalization criteria with lower costs and fewer risks, while providing greater legal certainty for the parents of Dreamers to mitigate fears of coming forward. Members of Congress should not exaggerate the extent of the legalization of Dreamers as a way to justify politically questionable policy choices, including reducing the annual level of legal immigration and eliminating several current immigration categories.

Restrictive Criteria in the House Bill

Back in January, President Trump promised a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers—up to 1.8 million of them. That’s still just half of the 3.6 million Dreamers—unauthorized immigrants who entered the country as minors—estimated by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) to be in the United States as of January 1, 2017, but it’s still far more than the estimated number of Dreamers who will likely receive permanent residence under the House compromise legislation that will receive a vote this week.

The BSIF Act creates a four-part framework for potentially receiving permanent residence—a “path to citizenship”—and later citizenship (see Table 2 at the end). First, Dreamers would need to meet a set of basic criteria to receive conditional nonimmigrant status, a temporary renewable legal status. Second, after six years, most would need to apply for a renewal of this status. Third, they could apply for permanent residence over a 15-year period if they met a final set of requirements. Fourth, they could apply for citizenship five years after receiving permanent residence. Each stage will reduce the population that ultimately will become U.S. citizens.

The House immigration bill would use the same restrictive basic criteria as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Its authors argue that if the requirements were good enough for President Obama who created DACA in 2012, they should be good enough for Democrats today. But as an act of prosecutorial discretion, DACA was never meant to be permanent immigration law, and in any case, President Obama tried to update its eligibility requirements in 2015, only to be stopped by the courts. The bill wouldn’t stop there. The House plan imposes additional eligibility requirements that would exclude even more Dreamers from receiving permanent protection.

The House bill will exclude Dreamers who entered after June 15, 2007, who entered at any age over 15, or who were over the age of 31 on June 15, 2017 (or 37 today). By the time the bill is implemented, people who had been residing in the United States for 10 or 11 years would be excluded from receiving status under the bill. The bill also requires a high school degree or equivalent or high school enrollment if the applicant is younger than 18. These restrictions were also in DACA, but the new bill would go even further to restrict eligibility. An applicant would be disqualified for having more than a single non-traffic-related misdemeanor, including immigration-related offenses; ever having missed an immigration court appearance; or having ignored an order to leave the country.

The biggest new restriction would be the requirement that Dreamers who are not students, disabled, or primary caregivers demonstrate that they can maintain an income of at least 125 percent of the poverty line. Not only do many Dreamers have incomes beneath this threshold, but also, if they have already lost DACA or never applied, it will be impossible for them to receive a legal job offer or demonstrate legal employment for the purposes of their application. This creates a catch-22 for applicants: prove you can support yourself in order to get work authorization in order to support yourself. (This provision should also concern employers which could see their records become the focus of government attention.)

In addition, receiving status under this bill will be far more expensive than receiving status under DACA. The bill would impose a fine—what the bill refers to as a border security fee—of $1,000. In addition, applicants would need to pay a fee to cover the cost of their application. DACA also had an application fee of $495, but the fee under this new bill would likely be more than double that because it requires an in-person interview and a medical examination. This will make the legalization more like applying for permanent residence, which costs $1,225. All told, applicants would need to pay about $2,225—4.5 times as much as DACA. This comes on top of any attorney fees. Many DACA applicants cite the cost as a primary challenge. MPI’s analysis also points to income as “strongly affecting” Dreamers’ ability to apply.

Finally, the bill would impose a 1-year filing deadline. This means that applicants would have just one year to gather their information, find an attorney, and save $2,225 to apply. For comparison, only 64 percent of DACA applicants submitted applications in the first 13 months of the program. This time limit will needlessly suppress applications.

Why Relatively Few Dreamers Would Even Receive Temporary Relief

In January 2018, the Migration Policy Institute used the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to estimate that there were 1.3 million Dreamers eligible for DACA. Another 120,000 were too young to apply for DACA, but would be eligible under this legislation so long as they were enrolled in school. However, this eligible population must be reduced based on the new requirements. We estimate conservatively that the income threshold would exclude about 15 percent of the DACA eligible population. This figure is based on the share of Central American immigrants who entered between 1982 and 2007 who are below 125 percent of the poverty line, are not in school, and are not unable to work due to disability or being the primary caregiver, as recorded in the 2017 Current Population Survey.

The misdemeanor requirement is more difficult to place a precise number to, but the government says that 17,079 DACA recipients have at least two arrests, assuming that 75 percent of those arrests ended in conviction. That would reduce 12,809, or 2 percent of the DACA recipient population. Assuming that this rate would apply to the DACA eligible population as a whole (even though it is more likely that that population has more convictions that the DACA population itself), this would reduce the eligible population by another 26,000. Thus, the maximum number of Dreamers initially eligible for status under the House bill is 1.17 million. Even this is likely an overestimate because we cannot estimate how much the noncriminal restrictions (e.g. prior removal orders, false claims of U.S. citizenship, etc.) could further reduce the eligible population.

Even fewer will actually apply. Even after six years of DACA, only 61.4 percent of the eligible population applied for and received DACA. While the promise of a pathway to citizenship could result in a higher participation rate, other elements in this bill will suppress application rates, neutralizing the greater incentives to apply. Furthermore, the initial status is temporary, and the pathway to citizenship is not guaranteed. In fact, unless Congress funds the border wall repeatedly in future years, the path to citizenship would never materialize at all. Moreover, the fact that the cost will be about 450 percent higher will prevent many Dreamers from applying (as noted above).

Many Dreamers failed to apply for DACA because they didn’t realize that they were eligible, believing that they had to have finished high school or that those who had been ordered to leave the country could not sign up. This bill’s new and more complex eligibility requirements will only introduce more confusion. The risk of a denial may keep some from taking the risk to apply. Nearly 8 percent of applicants for DACA were rejected.

The uncertainty and distrust associated with the Trump administration’s enforcement actions would only add to the concern about handing over information. As we’ve noted before, many Dreamers expressed concern that their application could be used to target their families. The House bill attempts to address this fear by limiting how their application information can be used, but it amplifies the fear in other areas by providing enforcement resources and new legal authorities to the administration to speed up deportations. A future Congress could change this privacy protection at any time, and at this point, few immigrants may trust the administration to follow this type of technical “firewall.”

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the last major legalization—the 1986 amnesty—had only a two-thirds participation rate, despite the less strict criteria than the ones contained in BSIF. Ultimately, we conservatively chose to use the CBO’s higher rate of 67 percent, rounding it up to 70 percent—10 percentage points higher than DACA’s initial enrollment rate. Based on this analysis, we can conclude that at most 820,000 Dreamers would receive initial legal status under the House GOP proposal.

Why Relatively Few Dreamers Would Receive Permanent Residence & Citizenship

Under DACA, which had no additional requirements at all to extend status other than maintaining residence in the United States for another two years, just 85 percent of initial enrollees maintained status through the end of the program. Some of this drop-off can be explained by people failing to graduate high school for a variety of reasons, but the additional cost is important as well. Under the House bill, applicants for extension of their temporary status would be required to pay a fee of another $1,225 fee (2.5 times more than DACA) and have stayed in the United States for another 6 years. Assuming this rate remains roughly the same, only 698,620 would likely end up receiving an extension under the House bill.

After receiving the extension, Dreamers—as well as some legal immigrant Dreamers*—would be able to apply for a pathway to permanent residence. The bill creates a complex points system that will prioritize applications from those with more education, longer work histories, or better language skills. But the minimum threshold for points is low enough that anyone who qualified for the initial status would be eligible to apply. Of course, there is not a strong incentive even to apply for this status, and the cost of applying for permanent residence is another $1,225. They would have to apply over the course of a 15-year period, starting five years after the initially received status. We assume that about 90 percent would apply for permanent residence. Thus, only 628,758 Dreamers would likely receive permanent residence—a path to citizenship—under the House proposal.

Finally, only about two thirds of those who receive permanent residence are likely to apply for citizenship. While Dreamers are probably more likely to apply for citizenship than other immigrants, immigrants from Mexico and Central America are much less likely to apply for citizenship than immigrants from other countries—all have naturalization rates below 50 percent—and 89 percent of DACA recipients are from Central America or Mexico. These two facts work in opposite directions, leading us to assume that Dreamers will naturalize at the average rate for all immigrants—67 percent. Based on this assumption, just 421,268 immigrants are likely to become U.S. citizens under the House compromise bill.

Conclusion

In the best case scenario, the House GOP plan would likely provide a pathway to citizenship to fewer than 630,000 Dreamers—barely a third of the president’s promise in January and just 18 percent of the entire Dreamer population. Moreover, only an estimated 421,000 immigrants are likely to become citizens.

If Congress wants to fulfill the president’s promise of a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers, it would need to institute a broader legalization program for Dreamers with as few risks and costs, and as little confusion, as possible. Congress would also need to provide legal certainty in some form for their parents to mitigate fear of coming forward. Members of Congress should also not exaggerate the extent of the legalization of Dreamers as part of a strategy to justify questionable policy choices, including reducing legal immigration and eliminating several immigration categories.

Table 2 compares the eligibility criteria and requirements under the BSIF Act to those under DACA and the Securing America’s Future (SAF) Act, which is the other bill under consideration this week.

Table 2: Comparison of Pathways to Status & Citizenship Under House Bills and DACA

*The legal immigrant Dreamers would slightly increase the eligible population, but there are so few who would meet the requirements (10 years of continuous residency before the bill passes plus 5 or 6 more after it is implemented) that it would not substantially alter these numbers. In any case, the estimates of the Dreamer population from MPI could include people in temporary statuses that have characteristics similar to those without status (inability to access welfare or receive certifications for legal employment).

Source: 82% of Dreamers Won’t Benefit from House Bill’s Citizenship Path

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USA – Miller Time: Family Separation Policy is Just the Beginning

2018/06/20 Leave a comment

Unclear whether the current pushback will make a difference :

No matter how the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border enforcement initiative plays out – and at the moment the optics are looking mighty bad – it’s just the beginning. According to Politico, domestic policy advisor and speechwriter Stephen Miller, the principal keeper of the nativist flame for Trump, has been heading up an effort to plan a whole series of steps to keep “the base” assured that the 45th president is going to restrict legal and illegal immigration alike by hook or by crook:

“Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and a team of officials from the Justice Department, Department of Labor, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of Management and Budget have been quietly meeting for months to find ways to use executive authority and under-the-radar rule changes to strengthen hard-line U.S. immigration policies, according to interviews with half a dozen current and former administration officials and Republicans close to the White House.”

The big idea is to ensure that Trump doesn’t have to depend on any immigration legislation, or any big policy goal like the border wall, to claim he’s kept his promises to the base. The offensive Miller is planning involves things the administration can do on its own.

“Among the fresh ideas being circulated: tightening rules on student visas and exchange programs; limiting visas for temporary agricultural workers; making it harder for legal immigrants who have applied for any welfare programs to obtain residency; and collecting biometric data from visitors from certain countries.”

And yes, the midterm base-stimulus plan included “zero tolerance,” and a pending DHS rule that would lead to the rescinding of the 1997 court settlement placing a limit on how migrant children can be locked up, which the administration thinks is the real source of its current troubles. So if Team Trump moves ahead on this front, they do have some additional plans beyond defending the indefensible.

The main thing to understand is that the White House did not blunder into the current furor over “zero tolerance” and family separation; the president’s people really, really want to send signals that Trump has turned immigration policy on its head even without congressional cooperation.

“Miller, who was instrumental to Trump’s early travel ban — which, like the border separations, triggered widespread public outrage and was put into effect without sufficient logistical planning — is among those who see the border crisis as a winning campaign issue.

“That is the fundamental political contrast and political debate that is unfolding right now,” he said in an interview with Breitbart News published on May 24. “The Democratic Party is at grave risk of completely marginalizing itself from the American voters by continuing to lean into its absolutist anti-enforcement positions.””

So don’t be surprised to learn that no matter what Trump decides to do on “zero tolerance,” he’s by no means going to shy away from the impression that he believes undocumented immigrants are enemies of America who must be repelled.”

Source: Miller Time: Family Separation Policy is Just the Beginning

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Trump Administration Has No Idea Whether It Backs Family Separation at the Border

2018/06/19 Leave a comment

Deliberate or accidental chaos. Hard to know but the impact is real:

The United States has no policy of separating migrant families at the border. There is such a policy, but it’s all the Democrats’ fault. The policy was a “simple decision,” but one “nobody likes.” The policy is good, legal, and Jesus would approve.

The Trump administration, confronted with increasing public criticism over its immensely unpopular policy of separating migrant children from their families when they cross the U.S. border, has responded to the crisis by taking taking wildly different positions on both the policy itself and the motivation behind it.

Ranging from full-throated endorsement of the decision to separate minor children from their asylum-seeking parents to flat insistence that the decision doesn’t exist, “period,” the public-relations pileup is just a facet of the botched rollout of a policy that separated nearly 2,000 children from their families in its first six weeks.

For nearly a week, President Donald Trump has pointed to congressional Democrats as the root behind his administration’s policy. “I hate the children being taken away,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn on Friday. “The Democrats have to change their law—that’s their law.”

The president reiterated that (incorrect) statement with a Saturday morning tweet: “Democrats can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change!”

But the president’s public insistence that his hands are tied on the matter of family separation at the border isn’t just undermined by the fact that no law requiring family separation exists—it has also been undermined by the head of the government department in charge of its execution.

“We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted as part of a defensive thread on the matter on Sunday evening. “For those seeking asylum at ports of entry, we have continued the policy from previous Administrations and will only separate if the child is in danger, there is no custodial relationship between ‘family’ members, or if the adult has broken a law.”

The Department of Homeland Security has been treating people seeking asylum as illegal border crossers, regardless of whether they are entering a port of entry or not.

Nielsen—who reportedly has been deeply conflicted about the policy in private—clearly missed a fiery press conference held by Attorney Jeff Sessions on Monday, in which the longtime immigration hawk said that people who didn’t want to fall victim to the policy shouldn’t try to enter the country.

“If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” Sessions said at a law enforcement conference. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”

Later, Sessions would point to a Bible passage once popular with the Nazis as evidence that the policy was not only good for national security, but in keeping with Christian teachings.

“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” Sessions said in a speech on Thursday. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

Sessions’ endorsement of family separation as both biblically sound and legally necessary stands in contrast to the position taken by White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Sunday, when she told NBC’s Meet the Press that “nobody likes seeing babies ripped from their mothers’ arms” and that she found flaws with the policy as a Catholic.

“As a mother, as a Catholic, as somebody who has got a conscience,” Conway said, “I will tell you that nobody likes this policy.”

Except, of course, for its likely architect. Stephen Miller, the White House speechwriter and adviser infamous for crafting the hastily written and legally disastrous ban on travel to the United States from citizens of seven (later six) primarily Muslim nations, was reportedly the driving force behind the family separation policy and has defended it like it was his own, non-migrant child.

“No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” Miller told The New York Times. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

Whatever the Trump administration’s views of the policy, the American people are in agreement on the matter. According to a new Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for The Daily Beast, only 27 percent of respondents agree that it is “appropriate to separate undocumented immigrant parents from their children when they cross the border in order to discourage others from crossing the border illegally.”

Among the 56 percent of those who disagree with the policy? First lady Melania Trump.

According to Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s spokesperson, Trump “hates to see children separated from their families.”

via Trump Administration Has No Idea Whether It Backs Family Separation at the Border

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Bishops to supplement rather than revise Faithful Citizenship voter guide

2018/06/18 Leave a comment

Good debate and discussion. But if seems a bit ingenuous not to undertake a more fundamental revision given the times:

After nearly 90 minutes of fraternal debate about the future of their voter guide, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, the U.S. bishops opted to supplement rather than revise or issue a new document, resisting a push from a group of bishops who believed the current version is outdated in light of “a radically different moment” brought by the presidency of Donald Trump.

The bishops voted 144 to 41, with one abstention, to complement the current version of Faithful Citizenship with a short letter and videos aimed at inspiring prayer and action in public life; an amendment added to the proposal also holds the efforts to apply the teaching of Pope Francis to present times.

The U.S. bishops have been issuing Faithful Citizenship documents, reflecting on election issues, every four years since 1976. The current document was crafted in 2007; a new introduction for it was written in 2011 and some revisions made in 2015.

The proposed supplemental elements were put forth by a working group of chairs of a dozen bishop committees, led by Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In introducing their proposal, Gomez said their goal was to increase the document’s influence and reach more Catholics through it. He said the working group viewed the document as having “lasting value” as a resource for state Catholic conferences, priests and fellow bishops, but that it was “too long and not particularly accessible or practical in helping the ordinary faithful individuals.”

“In the process of learn, pray, act, Faithful Citizenship does a good job of helping our people to learn,” he said. “So the task for us is to motivate the faithful to pray and to act.”

Once the proposal opened to debate, disagreement broke out about whether the document, as it stood, still held relevance absent revisions in light of the teachings of Francis and the country’s political climate.

While his name was never said, the agenda of Trump was acutely in the mind of bishops pushing for a new or heavily modified Faithful Citizenship document.

One by one, they took to the microphone to make their case why simply reissuing Faithful Citizenship would miss the mark.

“I think it would be a missed opportunity and a big mistake not to move forward with an entirely new document,” said Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, who led off the floor discussion saying he would vote against the proposal.

A new document is necessary, he said, in order to integrate the body of teachings from Francis — highlighting the issues of climate change, poverty and immigration — into the bishops’ own teachings and guidance. Cupich also said a new document would allow an opportunity for bishops to model how public discourse over issues of disagreement should play out during this time of political polarization.

“Even if it means that we have to stand up, and discuss, and yes, disagree with each other, we can do our people and our nation a great favor to model how that should take place,” Cupich said.

Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky, argued there is a “different context that we find ourselves in after the last national election.”

“Even though our teachings don’t change, the context changes and the priority of issues change,” he said.

Stowe referenced the U.S. withdrawals from the Paris Agreement on climate change and Iran nuclear deal, and the increased focus on issues of gun control and immigration. The latter two issues he noted are important to young people.

“Even if it means that we have to stand up, and discuss, and yes, disagree with each other, we can do our people and our nation a great favor to model how that should take place.”

— Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich

“I think if the church doesn’t have something to say about those issues, we’re missing a very important opportunity, especially if we want to reach out to youth and incorporate them more fully in the life of the church,” Stowe said.

“There’s not much in the document about Pope Francis,” said Bishop Michael Warful, adding that in his Diocese of Great Falls-Billings, Montana, Faithful Citizenship is viewed as stale.

San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy pressed his fellow bishops that the “radically different moment” the country finds itself in requires from them a comprehensive statement “from the whole of the body, reflecting upon the signs of the times that we’re in.”

“We are living in a moment in which we witness the greatest assault upon the rights of immigrant people of the past 50 years. We live in a nation with racial and geographic and regional divides in which people of color feel victimized by institutional prejudice and violence and many white, working-class men and women feel dispossessed. We live in a time in which children are afraid to go to school because they may be killed. We live in a time in which we have the great challenge of bringing to the millennial generation an understanding that the instrumentalization of human life, at the beginning of life and at the end, is unacceptable and why laws should touch upon that,” he said.

“And yet, we see our institutions, legal and political, being distorted and atrophy. We need to speak to these questions and we need to speak as a collective body of bishops.”

McElroy said that Faithful Citizenship in its current form does not reflect Francis’ recent apostolic exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (“Rejoice and Be Glad”) and that stated issues such as poverty, migration and the environment are not secondary but among “primary issues of claim upon the conscience of believers in public policy.”

More fundamentally, he said, the document has nothing to say about present moments “that traumatize us as a country.”

“Regarding the recision of DACA, it is silent. Regarding Charlottesville, silent. Parkland, silent. Faithful Citizenship of 2015 cannot be our response to the moment we are living in. It cannot engage with the signs of the times, it can only engage with the signs of the past and we should not move it forward,” McElroy said.

In response to calls for updating the document, Gomez and other members of the working group argued the document would only become longer and take more time to produce. Issuing videos from the current text, they said, could reach a new segment of Catholics who haven’t read Faithful Citizenship.

“We very much want to reflect this great Franciscan shift in emphasis,” said Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron. “Our fear is that we have to retain a lot of the things in Faithful Citizenship, which are very well presented, well argued, we’d just be making a much longer document.”

Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, suggested that perhaps a new process was necessary, since the current one delays the conference’s ability to make “prompt and thorough and reflective responses” to what’s happening in the public square.

“Here, we’re a year and a half out from the elections, and we’re saying we don’t have enough time. I think that the process at least has to be questioned. And if this is the best process, we’ll stick with it. But maybe there’s a better way of doing things,” Tobin said.

A number of bishops took to the floor to voice support for packaging the same Faithful Citizenship in new, more accessible forms. Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, noted on his flight to the conference he saw few fellow passengers, if any, reading; rather, most were staring at some type of screen.

Still, other bishops pushed back, saying that reissuing the same message, regardless of medium, would fall short of its stated goals of articulating to Catholics that faith comes prior to political leanings, they’re called to be faithful citizens at all times and not just during elections, and the need for respectful, civil discourse.

“Faithful Citizenship of 2015 cannot be our response to the moment we are living in. It cannot engage with the signs of the times, it can only engage with the signs of the past and we should not move it forward.”

— San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy

Bishop John Michael Botean, head of the Romanian Catholic Eparchy of St. George in Canton, Ohio, said the bishops have developed a reputation of taking too long to address issues facing the country.

“I think we are running the risk of it appearing that we don’t care or aren’t paying attention,” he said.

At one point, amendments were proposed to allow for revisions, to scrap Faithful Citizenship entirely from the vote they were considering and to table the motion until their November meeting.

The latter two failed. The motion to table was defeated in a vote, but the text was edited from stating “rather than revise or replace” to simply “rather than to replace,” apparently leaving an opening for revisions at some point. A clause was also added stating the new elements for Faithful Citizenship would “apply the teachings of Pope Francis to our day.”

Source: Bishops to supplement rather than revise Faithful Citizenship voter guide

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Trump Refuses to Release Data on Immigration Crackdown – Bloomberg

2018/06/16 Leave a comment

Never a good sign when governments use press releases rather than regular data releases but in keeping with the Trump administration’s overall approach:

Five days into his presidency, Donald Trump took aim at illegal immigration with executive orders signaling a new era of heavy enforcement. Not only did he threaten to go after undocumented immigrants, many of whom he labeled violent criminals, he also vowed to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities that thwart the federal government’s attempts to round up people who are in the U.S. illegally. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security promised to put out weekly updates that would include information on localities that release immigration violators and the criminal records of those released.

The first reports were filled with inaccuracies and in several instances called out counties for not cooperating with detainer, or detention, requests that were actually sent to other places with similar names. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had to issue a list of corrections, and soon it simply stopped putting out the reports. For the past 18 months, ICE has also refused to release other key data about its enforcement activity that had been routinely available.

This disappearing data is at the heart of two lawsuits brought against ICE by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a small research group at Syracuse University. As of January 2017, ICE stopped handing over records it had provided under the Freedom of Information Act for years, including any details about how effective Trump’s crackdown has been. If ICE prevails in court, it could give other agencies a legal rationale to deny public access to the vast cache of government data now kept in electronic databases.

At a time when U.S. authorities are separating children from their parents at the border—and then losing track of them—and the president continues to assert that many immigrants are violent criminals, the lack of basic data on government enforcement has created a fog of uncertainty over an already charged issue. TRAC was founded in 1989 by co-directors Susan Long, a statistician, and David Burnham, an investigative journalist, specifically to cut through this sort of political rhetoric by amassing data on federal policy. It uses FOIA requests to pull in 250 million records from various agencies each month, and its website offers tools to help analyze the data. TRAC had long requested and received information on detainers, as well as deportations aimed at removing undocumented immigrants with criminal records. After ICE abruptly stopped providing the information last year, Long and Burnham sued it in federal court in New York to regain access to the detainer data, and then in the District of Columbia over the missing deportation records.

“We have this huge political debate going on in the country over secure communities and sanctuary cities and all the claims that the government is making about how essential this is, and the very data that would allow you to evaluate the program, they’re withholding,” Long says. ICE argues that many of the records TRAC has asked for don’t exist in the form requested and says producing responses would require searching its database, a process the agency claims amounts to creating new records, which isn’t required under FOIA. ICE didn’t reply to a list of questions and a request for comment.

“If they’re going to court to try to keep information hidden about the detainer policy, they’re probably hiding something,” says Peter Boogaard, a former DHS press secretary in the Obama administration. More broadly, transparency has become a function of political convenience, Boogaard says. “They’re happy to say that immigration is causing huge problems, but at the same point, they are not sharing information.”

It’s still possible to track the overall number of detainers ICE issues—about 14,000 a month on average through November 2017. That’s up from the last months under Obama, but much lower than the peak of close to 28,000 in 2011. Left out are details on whether ICE takes custody—or the criminal records of those targeted. Under Obama, TRAC found that even when local law enforcement held an individual under a detainer, more than half the time ICE agents didn’t show up to take custody—and that few ICE detainers targeted serious criminals. That sort of analysis is now impossible to do. “It’s really frustrating to not be able to get a holistic picture of what’s happening,” says Emily Ryo, an associate professor of law and sociology at the University of Southern California, who’s tried with TRAC to get data on detentions. “It really is an important moment for the public to understand what’s happening and for researchers to be able to document what is going on.”

In place of detailed reports, ICE issues press releases describing raids and arrests, citing criminal records of detainees, and complaining about the lack of cooperation from sanctuary cities. “I don’t want bullet-pointed press releases that say some large numbers of people were apprehended over the weekend and here are five examples of how dangerous these individuals were,” says César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an associate professor of law at the University of Denver. “I want to know details about the large number of people. I want percentages. I want actual numbers about what kinds of crimes.”

The data García Hernández has been able to cobble together show a reality at least partly at odds with Trump’s rhetoric. In fiscal 2017, a period that covers the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the current one, the average daily population held in immigration detention centers rose by 3,730 people, an 11 percent increase from fiscal 2016. The average length of stay has also risen, to 43.7 days, up from fewer than 35 the previous year.

The number of prosecutions for immigration crimes fell by more than 10,000, or 15 percent, over the same period. That’s striking given the emphasis the Trump administration has put on prosecuting undocumented immigrants. It’s an incredibly complex system that’s shifting all the time, making accurate data more important than ever. Data from this year that TRAC got using another FOIA request show a jump in prosecutions of border crossers. And the detention system may be nearing its limit: This month, authorities are transferring 1,600 detainees to federal prisons while they await civil court hearings.

The inaccuracies in ICE’s statements about enforcement actions have caused a furor within the agency in recent months. James Schwab, a spokesman for ICE in San Francisco, resigned in March over misleading statements from agency leaders about an ICE raid in Oakland. The bigger implication is how agencies are allowed to draw the line when it comes to producing electronic records, and the distinction between creating a record and just extracting one from a database, according to Sean Sherman, a lawyer at Public Citizen Litigation Group who’s representing TRAC in Washington. “ICE is saying that by basically searching for these electronic records, that constitutes creating new records,” he says. “That just can’t be right, because that’s basically true of all government records right now.” Meanwhile, ICE is withholding data in many more of TRAC’s FOIA requests. Says Long: “We could file a new suit every week, if we were going to aggressively litigate this.”

via Trump Refuses to Release Data on Immigration Crackdown – Bloomberg

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Canadian Immigrants in the United States: Migration Policy Institute study

2018/06/15 Leave a comment

Good overview of Canadians abroad, with detailed numbers:

Canadian migration has generally been a small share of immigration to the United States, historically fluctuating according to economic factors in the two countries. In 1960, Canadian immigrants made up about 10 percent of the total U.S. foreign-born population. Though the number of Canadians in the United States has decreased and levelled off since then, this population has grown more diverse, and today includes students, family migrants, skilled professionals, and retirees. As of 2016, about 783,000 Canadians lived in the United States, accounting for less than 2 percent of the roughly 44 million U.S. immigrants.

The motives of Canadian migrants have changed over time. Beginning in 1867, migrants from Eastern Canada came to the United States to work in the burgeoning manufacturing sector. In 1900, the U.S. Census recorded 747,000 English-speaking and 440,000 French-speaking Canadian immigrants. The two groups settled in different regions: Most Anglophone Canadians took up residence near the border, in states such as Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Rhode Island, allowing them to easily move between the two countries, while Francophone Canadians largely moved to New England and California. French Canadian migration increased between 1900 and 1930, driven by discrimination as well as poor economic conditions in Quebec. After 1930, increased political autonomy for Quebec and the growth of the Canadian economy following World War II led to a steady decline in Canadian arrivals.

In the second half of the 20th century, Canadian migration shifted and diversified significantly, especially after enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Canadian immigrants now include highly educated professionals, students, those seeking family reunification, and “snowbirds,” people in or near retirement attracted by warmer southern climates. Canadian students are the fifth-largest group of foreign students enrolled in U.S. higher education, and high-skilled Canadians receive the third-largest number of employer-sponsored H-1B temporary visas. Many Canadians also come to the United States on NAFTA Professional (TN) visas to work in a variety of professional occupations, although the exact number is unknown.

Click here to view an interactive chart showing trends in the size of U.S. immigrant populations by country of birth, from 1960 to the present.

The United States is by far the top destination for most Canadian emigrants, with others settling primarily in the United Kingdom (92,000), Australia (57,000), France (26,000), and Italy (26,000), according to mid-2017 estimates by the United Nations Population Division. Click here to view an interactive map showing where migrants from Canada and other countries have settled worldwide.

Most Canadians in the United States who obtain lawful permanent residence—also known as receiving a green card—do so either as immediate relatives of U.S. citizens or as employer-sponsored immigrants. Compared to the overall foreign-born population, Canadians have a higher median income, are less likely to live in poverty, and are more likely to have health insurance and to be college educated. They are significantly older, on average, than the overall immigrant and U.S.-born populations.

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau (the most recent 2016 American Community Survey [ACS] as well as pooled 2012–16 ACS data) and the Department of Homeland Security’s Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, this Spotlight provides information on the Canadian population in the United States, focusing on its size, geographic distribution, and socioeconomic characteristics.

Note: Data from ACS and DHS represent persons born in Canada; they do not include immigrants born outside of Canada who then gained Canadian citizenship via naturalization and later moved to the United States.

via Canadian Immigrants in the United States | migrationpolicy.org

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Impact of Trump’s immigration vision comes into focus in Washington

2018/06/15 Leave a comment

Good overview. Most interesting point is possible role evangelicals may play in opposing some of the Trump administration measures (after having been silent on so many other issues) as well as how this will play in the mid-terms:

America is heading for a moment of reckoning as the results of more than a year’s worth of hardline Trump administration immigration measures pile up, raising questions fundamental to the character of the nation itself.

A shock-and-awe sequence of policy moves and legal gambits, many by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, may elevate immigration past the Russia investigation and the accelerating economy into an issue with the capacity to shape the midterm elections. It also is spurring congressional leaders from the President’s party — who did not want another immigration fight this year — to vote and go on the record on what is often a politically perilous subject.
The moves in many cases are the logical culmination of a presidential campaign rooted in Donald Trump’s willingness to demagogue immigration controversies in order to inflame his conservative voting base. They are the product of 17 months of work by Sessions, and White House immigration czar Stephen Miller, that is starting to fundamentally change the immigration system and America’s treatment of many people who come from abroad, with or without authorization.
House DACA deal in final stages as GOP leaders link compromise bill to Trump
To many Trump voters, the rapid pace of change will be seen as a validation of the vote they cast for the President back in 2016. Trump made a case that previous Republican and Democratic leaders had failed to enforce immigration laws and made an implicit argument that the nature of American culture and society were under threat from an influx of newcomers.
But news coverage of children being taken from parents who had crossed the border illegally and the increasing human and economic implications of the administration’s assault on legal immigration are beginning to merge into political arguments about tough Trump stances.
“I just go back to week one of the Trump administration — those first two-three executive orders that the President signed — they were the foundation on which everything that we are seeing being executed right now is built,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a nonprofit advocacy organization for immigrants and immigration. “All those things are coming to a head right now.”
Increasingly there is debate not just about the policy implications of the administration’s actions, but also whether they square with the humanitarian and moral standards that America has historically set for itself — even among some evangelicals who strongly back the President.

Crackdown

In recent days, the administration has acted aggressively to enact its tough immigration agenda and the human consequences of Trump’s earlier executive orders become increasingly clear.
Sessions has cracked down on rules on asylum, potentially reducing claims by the thousands by deciding that victims of domestic and gang violence are not eligible for protection.
The Justice Department said late last Friday that it would not defend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in a Texas lawsuit, potentially opening an eventual path to a Supreme Court ruling on the fate of young undocumented immigrants brought to the US as kids.
Sessions has also pressured judges to increase their workloads to accelerate the pace of deportations.
The Department of Health and Human Services has said that some military bases in Texas are being assessed as possible holding centers for unaccompanied migrant children.
At the southern border, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras sobbed as she said federal officials had taken her infant daughter as she breastfed her, highlighting the administration’s policy mandating the separation of families who cross the border illegally.
The Department of Homeland Security is vigorously cutting the numbers of people from 10 nations, including El Salvador and Haiti, who live and work in the United States under the Temporary Protected Status covering nations hit by famine, war or national disasters. In May, nearly 90,000 Hondurans lost their status, meaning they could be forced to go back home.
Then there are multiple, but less visible, ways that the Trump administration is trying to curb legal immigration: lowering refugee admissions, targeting H1-B visas for skilled foreign workers and introducing more restrictions and red tape for other classes of entry permits.
All in all, the flurry of activity adds up to another set of promises kept for Trump that he can lay before his most loyal voters as he pleads with them to go to the polls in November to stave off a Democratic wave that could crimp his room to maneuver as President.

Capitol Hill imbroglio

But there are growing signs that the emotive immigration debate and the questions it raises about American values do not automatically add up to a big win for the President.
An imbroglio in the House of Representatives over an attempt by moderate Republicans to force a vote on securing protections for DACA recipients shows how some GOP lawmakers fear the hardline administration positions could damage them as they fight for re-election.
A Republican leadership compromise could allow conservatives to vote on a tough immigration bill but also proposes a compromise measure that Trump could support if it honors his four policy pillars: a solution for DACA recipients, border security financing and changes to border protocol, and ending parts of family based migration and the visa lottery.
The President’s demands probably mean the bill still will not be able to pass the Senate and is most likely to end up underlining Congress’s failure to act meaningfully on immigration.
But the fact that the Republican leadership is willing to hold votes on such a toxic issue months before Election Day is a testament to how immigration is barging its way up the political agenda.
The one thing that could break the logjam is a concentrated intervention by the President. And Miller was on Capitol Hill Wednesday and told Republicans the White House is open to the compromise package. Still, the President has vowed to fix the DACA issue and to throw his weight behind legislation before only to fail to live up to his promise.
Democrats, meanwhile, are emboldened, viewing the increasingly visible humanitarian consequences of the Trump administration’s policies as an opening to broaden an assault on the President and enliven their own base voters.
“
Our moral compass has gone astray and I will continue to speak out against this injustice until the administration realizes this is not who we should be as Americans,” said Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas, referring to the asylum rules and treatment of children crossing the border.
At a weekly Democratic leadership meeting, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley of New York painted a picture of children being ripped from their mothers’ arms at the border.
“If that is not psychological torture, I don’t know what is,” Crowley said, branding the policy an “abomination” and an “indelible mark on the soul of our nation.”

Dissent from evangelicals

There was also rising criticism for the implications of the administration’s immigration push from unusual quarters.
Evangelist Franklin Graham, who is close to Trump, slammed the separation of parents and children who had crossed the border illegally.
“It’s disgraceful, it’s terrible to see families ripped apart, and I don’t support that one bit,” said Graham on CBN News on Wednesday, blaming politicians over 30 years for failing to act.
Hours earlier another key evangelical voice, the Southern Baptist Convention, passed a resolution calling on the government to implement a “just and compassionate path” to legal status for undocumented immigrants once borders had been secured.
It also declared that any form of “nativism, mistreatment, or exploitation is inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ” in a statement that could be seen as criticism of some of the sentiments that have helped Trump’s immigration policies prosper.
All this is a long way from a backlash against the administration’s approach, and it is not clear if it will open a seam of opposition in the evangelical bloc, which was a vital component of Trump’s winning coalition in 2016.
But Noorani argued that in the end, shifting sentiments of more moderate Trump voters and independents could be as important in molding the politics surrounding the administration’s immigration policies as the strong mobilization they whip up on the left.
“We surmised and we predicted that over time it would be the Trump voters at the end of the day who were going to start asking the most important questions,” he said.

Source: Impact of Trump’s immigration vision comes into focus in Washington

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After decades of tribes aggressively kicking members out, the disenrolled are kicking back.

2018/06/14 Leave a comment

Interesting account of Indigenous identity and membership from the US:

It was an early morning in May 2012 when Eddie Crandell got the call that his ex-wife’s parents were getting evicted from their home on the Robinson Rancheria, where they had lived for 25 years as members of the Pomo Indian tribe on the federal reservation in Northern California.

When he reached the scene, family members, who had not been prepared to move, were already scurrying through the house, packing their belongings into boxes and loading them into vehicles under the watchful eye of four tribal police officers.

Crandell’s 5-year-old son didn’t understand. “Why are you kicking out my grandparents,” he asked an officer, who didn’t respond. But Crandell knew his extended family was being targeted for disenrollment, the process by which Native Americans lose citizenship within the tribe. Just over the hill, six other families were being evicted in a large-scale action by the tribal council to remove all members not viewed as “real Indians.”

“It was very contentious,” Crandell said. “People worried that they would be targeted if they talked to [opponents of the tribal council]. Nobody wanted to approach anyone. Everyone was afraid.”

Thousands of Native Americans across the country have had their Indian citizenship terminated in disenrollment proceedings that have stripped them of their identity, acceptance in the tribe, and access to tribal resources like health care and educational grants. The once-rare practice has accelerated rapidly, experts said, but some ex-members and their advocates are pushing back, and there have been signs in recent years that the tide has turned against tribal disenrollment. Crandell, for example, has successfully restored membership to about 60 people, and disenrollees throughout Indian Country have also won a series of significant victories.

Since the earliest recorded instances of tribal disenrollment in the late 19thcentury, researchers believe nearly 80 tribes across 20 states have engaged in the practice that has affected up to 10,000 people, said David Wilkins, who co-wrote the book Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights. Although disenrollment is a relatively modern phenomenon among the 567 federally recognized tribes, its causes—greed and government corruption—are familiar.

The success of the gambling industry brought newfound prosperity to tribes as they looked for ways to alleviate poverty and improve living conditions on reservations. According to the most recent data from the National Indian Gaming Commission, gaming revenue increased more than 4 percent in 2016 to $31 billion, spurring economic development and supplementing federal funds with “per capita” payments to tribal members. It was the seventh-consecutive year of growth in gross gaming revenues for the tribal market as a whole. Critics say that wealth is exactly what caused disenrollment to reach epidemic levels. The logic is simple: Reducing the number of tribal members means more money for those who remain.

Such was the case for the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians, whose membership of 1,800 people was cut in half after the opening of the Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino in 2003, according to a This American Life program from 2013. In the segment, the remaining tribal members told reporter David Ferry that they saw increases in their payout checks after people were kicked out.

Disenrollment proceedings continued through 2016, when council Chairwoman Claudia Gonzales confirmed that she had sent about a dozen disenrollment letters to some of the tribe’s founding families. The dispute was never settled, but in October 2017, the tribe permitted open enrollment for the first time that many could remember. Many viewed the move as a hollow gesture from incumbent council members to drum up support just days before an election, and it was unclear whether previously disenrolled people could reapply.

Disenrollment is occurring even among tribes that do not have significant gaming wealth. Take, for example, California’s Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians, whose tribal council sought to consolidate power by targeting political opponents through disenrollment. “It was simply a political issue,” said Rick Cuevas, who was dismissed from the tribe, along with nearly 100 extended family members, after the council posthumously disenrolled his ancestor in 2006. “There were votes they couldn’t control. It’s not just about the money. It’s about power and control.”

Unlike Crandell, Cuevas’ relatives were allowed to remain on the reservation—in the house that his father built in 1957—albeit without access to tribal resources, such as health care, housing grants, and other benefits provided by the federal government, which were annulled in the disenrollment proceedings. “They’re basically living under an apartheid system,” he said.
“They can’t go to the park without a tribal member. They can’t drink out of the water fountains. They can’t go to the pool. That’s segregation.”

For many Native American communities, the ability to determine who is and who isn’t a member is the single greatest indicator of tribal sovereignty. Once a tribe has disenrolled its members, they are left with few legal options for reinstatement. They can appeal the disenrollment ruling, as Cuevas did, but tribal courts seldom overturn a council’s membership decision. And the U.S. government washed its hands of Indian affairs long ago.

“You are placed in a legal Wonderland,” said Wilkins, a professor of Native American policy and federal Indian law at the University of Minnesota. “You are in between worlds. Federal courts have basically closed the door to you, and tribal councils don’t want their own courts hearing disenrollment cases. You are left without any recourse whatsoever, which is the status of many of the disenrollees today.”

Traditionally, pre-Columbian tribes viewed belonging in terms of extended kinship groups, defined broadly to emphasize the need for interdependence among everyone in the tribe, Cherokee scholar Eva Marie Garroutte said. Kin groups administered justice, assembled leadership groups, organized local farming and other aspects of daily life. But as the United States expanded into Indian territory, it sought to impose more legalistic blood quantum requirements that measured the amount of “Indian blood” a person had to determine membership. For example, the Navajo require its members to possess a minimum of 25 percent Navajo blood. American politicians of the 19th century hoped that, over time, Native Americans would breed themselves out by intermarrying with non-natives, reducing their percentage of Indian blood and thereby releasing the government from its obligations to the tribes.

The United States essentially removed itself from the contentious issue in 1934 by passing the Indian Reorganization Act, which imposed constitutional governance on tribes with membership criteria that caused blood quantum laws to be widely accepted throughout Indian Country. Since then, the United States has largely deferred to tribal sovereignty in internal Indian disputes. In 1978, the Supreme Court’s Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez decision, written by Thurgood Marshall, said Native Americans do not have the right to use federal courts as a way to correct civil rights violations committed by individual tribes. Wilkins said the ruling disappointed many Native Americans, who wanted more protection against tribal governments, and sparked debate about the role of the federal government in Indian affairs.

“The U.S. has a moral trust obligation to ensure tribes persist and sustain,” said Gabe Galanda, a Native American attorney whose firm represents many disenrolled members. “That responsibility gets looked at in a narrow, legal way that sounds only monetary. For example, if the government allowed a tribal facility to fall into disrepair, now it’s liable for the financial repercussions. What’s been lost is the moral trust responsibility. The U.S. has a legal duty to prevent a tribe from annihilating itself.”

Without help from the judiciary, disenrolled members are turning to firms like Galanda’s for assistance. Still, there is little lawyers can do to change their clients’ fates.

“For those who have been disenrolled, I continue to advise them to act, however and whenever they can, as if they still belong,” Galanda said. “The rule of law is not what it once was in this country, but that cuts both ways. Why should any legal Indian who belongs cower to a corrupt tribal politician and adhere to the so-called legal result of a corrupt leader?”

Disenrollees may have lost in the courts, but they are winning the battle in the court of public opinion. In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, tribal leaders did not take stances on disenrollment because they did not want to speak ill of other tribes. There was also a misconception among members that their silence would prevent disenrollment from happening within their own tribe. But all that is changing thanks to an active network of social media groups, from Galanda’s Stop Disenrollment to Emilio Reyes’ Stop Tribal Genocide, that has helped kindle discussion among tribes about this formerly taboo topic.

“It was kept in the dark for so long, it spread like a cancer,” Galanda said. “It’s been brought into the light through mainstream media attention, legal advocacy, social media, and interpersonal communication, all of which has caused the ebb of the practice we’re witnessing now. In the process, the taboo associated with disenrollment has waned in favor of shame upon tribes that engage in the practice.”

Throughout Indian Country, there are encouraging signs that disenrollment is waning. There have been no new mass disenrollments since 2016, two years after the numbers peaked, and some tribes have reversed course and reinstated disenrolled members, Galanda said. In August 2016, a tribal appeals court in Oregon overturned a decision by the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde to disenroll 66 members after a three-year battle. In March 2017, Robinson Rancheria became the first tribe to voluntarily reinstate 60 members after Crandell helped lead a successful recall election of corrupt officials. Now, as council chairman, he is working to pass legislation that will prevent unjustified disenrollment in the future.

“We were able to do it with the support of the membership,” Crandell said. “It was a well-orchestrated plan that we did together. We were all on the same page, and it was a really impactful time.”

Also in March 2017, the Elem Indian Colony in California reversed a motionfiled by members living off the colony to disenroll all 132 people who lived on the reservation. In August, a federal judge ruled that the Cherokee Nation, based in Oklahoma, must reinstate 2,800 descendants of enslaved people owned by the tribe after the tribe stripped the descendants of their rights in a 2007 vote. (The descendants, who are well-connected with the Congressional Black Caucus, cited a specific treaty obligation, spurring the federal government—which has the power to intervene depending upon the tribe and situation—to step in.)

But the battle isn’t over for reinstated members. Although some tribes have had success with integrating the disenrolled in leadership positions, they still face discrimination within the tribe. At a Grand Ronde council meeting in February, a tribal elder said members who had been targeted for disenrollment should not be serving on the enrollment board, the tribal newspaper Smoke Signals reported. “We know they’re zero Grand Ronde, and now they’re on our enrollment committee,” elder Brenda Gray said. “To me, they’re still not tribal members. Courts made them, but they’re not.”

The lingering animosity is concerning for activists, but they remain cautiously optimistic about the future.

“I feel like we’ve turned a corner,” Wilkins said. “I’m very cautiously optimistic, but I’m not sure we’re out of the woods yet because the forces that led to disenrollment—increasing revenues, the blood quantum problems—they are still at play. We have to keep an eye on this. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

Source: After decades of tribes aggressively kicking members out, the disenrolled are kicking back.

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USA: Border protection commissioner talks ‘zero tolerance,’ family separations and how to discourage immigration

2018/06/13 Leave a comment

Good insights into the operationalizing of the various policies at play by U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan:

…How are you handling the family separations?

We still have children in the same place where we had unaccompanied children.

It’s really important for your readers to understand the difference between the concept of family separation and prosecuting adults who cross the border illegally, even if they are bringing in children with them.

We do not have a policy of administrative separation. We are not doing that. Families or people that come across as a group, as a family-unit group, are being separated only if the adults are being prosecuted or if there’s a determination made by the agent that there’s not actually a family relationship, which has happened several hundred times just in the sector this year.

We do see the attempt by smugglers and those crossing to try to exploit the loopholes created by court decisions which don’t allow for ICE to detain family units through the completion of their immigration process. So they have to release them within 20 days. That means it’s incentivizing people to pretend to be families even if they’re not. That’s [happened] 600 times just in Rio Grande Valley sector this fiscal year.

We’re prosecuting the parents; they’re temporarily separated for prosecutors. So they go to the U.S. marshals; they will be prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office. Then they’re detained by ICE while the child is sent to Health and Human Services, in the custody of HHS.

So that’s incentivizing people to come fraudulently with kids?

That’s the catch-and-release loophole due to the interpretation of the Flores [2015 class-action lawsuit] settlement by the 9th Circuit District Court that says that ICE cannot detain families more than 20 days. So instead of being allowed to keep that family together through their immigration process, ICE is forced to release the family. So that’s the loophole that incentivizes people to present as a family even if they’re not.

Is there anything you can say about the U.S. potentially classifying Mexico as a “safe third country” for asylum seekers, which would force them to seek asylum there?

I’ve traveled to a refugee camp in Turkey, the Norway border with Russia, the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala — all to understand migration phenomena. And from those experiences, it’s very clear that the best way to manage migration flows and to assist populations that are struggling in their home country is for destination countries and transit countries to be aligned, and for efforts to aid the populations in their country of origin.

U.S. policy very clearly, for this administration, is to support Central American security and prosperity. We need to invest in their governance efforts and their economic development and in their security against gangs, smugglers, drug cartels and so forth to help prevent the push factors from existing in those countries and to help support their economic development.

But migration flows respond to incentives and success. If they believe that they will be allowed to stay in the destination country, they will try to make it. If they believe that they will be slowed down or turned around by a transit country, that will change the process.

All you have to do is look at the Arctic route in Norway. In 2015, in three months,. 5,500 people from 38 countries arrived from Russia. The Norwegians worked with Russia to recognize the Russian asylum system and that shut down overnight — those 5,500 stopped coming.

With [German] Chancellor Angela Merkel and [Turkish] President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, they reached an agreement in 2015 on the flow of Syrian nationals through Turkey to Greece and said that they would support refugee camps in Turkey. Those flows stopped overnight from Turkey to Greece.

You need to collaborate on regional migration. Mexico has been a leader in the region. They’ve gathered Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Panama and the U.S. together to talk about ways we can all get better at managing our policies in this area. Continued dialogue would be outstanding — to partner with all countries in the region on migration flows….

Source: Border protection commissioner talks ‘zero tolerance,’ family separations and how to discourage immigration

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US launches campaign to strip immigration cheaters of citizenship, once a rare process

2018/06/13 Leave a comment

No issue with cracking down on fraud and misrepresentation, unlike some of the other Trump administration policies, although legitimate concern over how it may be done:

The US government agency that oversees immigration applications is launching an office that will focus on identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and seek to strip them of it.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna said his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalisation.

Cissna said the cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, whose attorneys could then seek to remove the immigrants’ citizenship in civil court proceedings. In some cases, government attorneys could bring criminal charges related to fraud.

Until now, the agency has pursued cases as they arose but not through a coordinated effort, Cissna said. He said he hopes the agency’s new office in Los Angeles will be running by next year but added that investigating and referring cases for prosecution will likely take longer.

“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalising people who should not have been naturalised in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”

He declined to say how much the effort would cost but said it would be covered by the agency’s existing budget, which is funded by immigration application fees.

The push comes as the Trump administration has been cracking down on illegal immigration and taking steps to reduce legal immigration to the US.

Denaturalisation – the process of removing citizenship – is very rare.

The US government began looking at potentially fraudulent naturalisation cases a decade ago when a border officer detected about 200 people had used different identities to get green cards and citizenship after they were previously issued deportation orders.

In September 2016, an internal watchdog reported that 315,000 old fingerprint records for immigrants who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security database that is used to check immigrants’ identities. The same report found more than 800 immigrants had been ordered deported under one identity but became US citizens under another.

Since then, the government has been uploading these older fingerprint records dating back to the 1990s and investigators have been evaluating cases for denaturalisation.

Earlier this year, a judge revoked the citizenship of an Indian-born New Jersey man named Baljinder Singh after federal authorities accused him of using an alias to avoid deportation.

Authorities said Singh used a different name when he arrived in the United States in 1991. He was ordered deported the next year and a month later applied for asylum using the name Baljinder Singh before marrying an American, getting a green card and naturalising.

Authorities said Singh did not mention his earlier deportation order when he applied for citizenship.

For many years, most US efforts to strip immigrants of their citizenship focused largely on suspected war criminals who lied on their immigration paperwork, most notably former Nazis.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, officials began reviewing cases stemming from the fingerprints probe but prioritised those of naturalised citizens who had obtained security clearances, for example, to work at the Transportation Security Administration, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University law school.

The Trump administration has made these investigations a bigger priority, he said. He said he expects cases will focus on deliberate fraud but some naturalised Americans may feel uneasy with the change.

“It is clearly true that we have entered a new chapter when a much larger number of people could feel vulnerable that their naturalisation could be reopened,” Chishti said.

Since 1990, the Department of Justice has filed 305 civil denaturalisation cases, according to statistics obtained by an immigration attorney in Kansas who has defended immigrants in these cases.

The attorney, Matthew Hoppock, agrees that deportees who lied to get citizenship should face consequences but worries other immigrants who might have made mistakes on their paperwork could get targeted and might not have the money to fight back in court.

Cissna said there are valid reasons why immigrants might be listed under multiple names, noting many Latin American immigrants have more than one surname. He said the US government is not interested in that kind of minor discrepancy but wants to target people who deliberately changed their identities to dupe officials into granting immigration benefits.

“The people who are going to be targeted by this – they know full well who they are because they were ordered removed under a different identity and they intentionally lied about it when they applied for citizenship later on,” Cissna said. “It may be some time before we get to their case, but we’ll get to them.”

Source: US launches campaign to strip immigration cheaters of citizenship, once a rare process

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