Immigration Reform
The last time Congress updated our legal immigration system was November 1990, one month before the World Wide Web went online. We are long overdue for comprehensive immigration reform.
Through immigration reform, we can provide noncitizens with a system of justice that provides due process of law and a meaningful opportunity to be heard. Because it can be a contentious and wide-ranging issue, we aim to provide advocates with facts and work to move bipartisan solutions forward. Read more about topics like legalization for undocumented immigrants and border security below.
Report Highlights Need for Appointed Counsel for Detainees Facing Removal
A report issued this week by the City Bar Justice Center highlights one of the most serious flaws of the removal process: noncitizens are not appointed a lawyer to represent them. The report focuses on the efforts of the City Bar Justice Center and other nonprofit organizations to increase access to legal counsel at the Varick Federal Detention Facility in Manhattan. According to the report, a significant portion of the detainees housed at Varick had possible meritorious claims to relief from removal, such as asylum or an avenue for obtaining a green card. Read More
Focusing on the Solutions: Key Principles of Comprehensive Immigration Reform
Nearly everyone agrees that our immigration system is badly broken and in urgent need of reform. Under the existing system people are dying at the border, immigrants are living and working in abject conditions, families trying to reunite legally are separated for many years, employers are unable to hire the workers that they need, U.S. workers suffer from the unlevel playing field shared with exploited immigrant workers, and law‐abiding U.S. employers are in unfair competition with unscrupulous employers who increase profits by hiring cheap and vulnerable labor. Meanwhile, the United States continues to spend billions of dollars on enforcing these broken laws. Read More
Help Wanted: Broken Immigration Policies Equal Broken Government Responses
This past week, ImmigrationImpact highlighted aspects of a recent Immigration Policy Center (IPC) report, Breaking Down the Problems, What’s Wrong With our Immigration System?. The report highlights the problems faced by American families, businesses, and workers, all caught in a broken immigration system. But the report also addresses the long-term effect of our broken immigration laws on government. Put simply, broken laws equal broken government. Read More
Labor Pains: How Our Broken Immigration System Hurts All Workers
While most employers are law-abiding, some unscrupulous employers have a secret weapon for keeping down wages and working conditions—our broken immigration system. Bad apple employers hire undocumented immigrants, subject them to unsafe working conditions, pay them less than the market wage, or don’t pay them at all. If undocumented workers file a labor complaint or try to form a union, the employer will threaten them with deportation or even call DHS to have the workers deported. Then the workers are whisked into detention or out of the country before they can seek remedies for the labor violations. Most employers don’t get punished for their misconduct, which puts unscrupulous employers at a competitive advantage over law-abiding employers. Read More
Risky Business: Our Broken Employment–Based Immigration System Jeopardizes the American Economy
BY CHARLES H. KUCK* Does Congress's continued failure to fix our broken employment-based immigration system jeopardize our economy, now and in the future? Yes, it does. If we don't have enough employment-based immigrant visas, the best and brightest from around the world will start going somewhere else. We are not only a nation of immigrants; we are a nation of successful immigrants. We attract those who are willing to work hard, better themselves, and strive for success. However, our legal immigration system has made the process of immigration to the United States so difficult, so full of uncertainty, and so lengthy, that folks are now choosing not to come. Read More
Family Ties: A Closer Look at the Problem with Our Family-Based Immigration System
The U.S. immigration system has always promoted family unity by awarding the majority of visas to the families of current U.S. residents, which ensures that close family members are not kept apart. The principle of family unity has long been a central tenet of our immigration laws and has contributed to the economic and social prosperity of our country and immigrant populations. Read More
Immigration Gumbo in the Pelican State
The Pelican State is slowly stepping out as one of the most dynamic immigrant states in the nation. With a New American governor, an immigrant congressman and growing numbers of immigrants calling Louisiana home, the state is emerging as a model for what immigration can do for a state. One of Louisiana’s most famous faces is the state’s Governor Piyush “Bobby” Jindal who was born in Baton Rouge after his parents immigrated to the U.S. for graduate school and distinguished careers. He is the first American governor of Indian descent to serve in the U.S. Read More
Well-Intentioned Brookings Report Falls Short on Solutions
Following a series of roundtable meetings that brought together persons with very diverse opinions on immigration policy, Brookings Institute and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University recently released Breaking the Immigration Stalemate: From Deep Disagreements to Constructive Proposals. After witnessing the national immigration debates of the past few years, the lead authors—William Galston of Brookings, Noah Pickus of Duke, and Peter Skerry of Boston College—explained that they wanted to “address the problem rather than exploit the politics of the problem” and bring together academics and other experts with divergent perspectives to work through the differences in the room and reach a consensus. Furthermore, the group aimed to start its policy discussion in a different place than Congress has started, and hone in on the problems of past proposals as well as fill in the gaps and make linkages between policy issues. The results are mixed. Read More
Latinos in America, CNN and Refocusing the Immigration Issue
Much has been made of CNN’s seemingly conflicted programming on immigration—on one hand is CNN host Lou Dobbs, unofficial Director of Demagoguery who broadcasts misinformed anti-immigrant rhetoric on a nightly basis; and on the other hand is CNN’s latest documentary, Latinos in America, a two-part series hosted by Soledad O'Brien which takes a closer look at “how Latinos are changing America and how America is changing Latinos.” While many immigration advocates argue CNN “can’t have it both ways,” senior executive producer and vice president of CNN’s documentary unit, Mark Nelson, is angry. He argues that his documentary, Latinos in America, is about Latinos, not Dobbs: Read More
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