Immigration Reform
Immigration Law Curbs Foreign Student Entrepreneurship
Nearly everyone agrees that the U.S. immigration system should provide visas for entrepreneurs who want to start businesses in the U.S. and employ American workers. However, convoluted immigration laws make it difficult for some entrepreneurs to launch their business while they’re in school and remain lawfully in the U.S. after they graduate in order to run them. A new report by the Kauffman Foundation entitled Reforming Immigration Law to Allow More Foreign Student Entrepreneurs to Launch Job-Creating Ventures in the United States describes the obstacles student entrepreneurs’ face. Read More
Alabama Ruling Yet Another Rebuke to State Immigration Laws
As with the Supreme Court’s recent opinion on Arizona SB 1070, initial media coverage portrayed the (technically) mixed rulings on the Alabama and Georgia immigration laws as a split decision. But do not be fooled: yesterday’s opinions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit represent a sweeping win for the immigrants’ rights movement and a crushing blow to the legal crusade led by Kris Kobach. While yesterday’s victory was not unqualified, the provisions struck down by the Eleventh Circuit were far more significant than those that were upheld. Read More
How Deportations Devastate Families and Communities
It goes without saying that unauthorized immigrants live in constant fear of deportation. After all, any chance encounter with U.S. immigration officials can leave an unauthorized immigrant behind bars and in removal proceedings. Less obvious, perhaps, is the impact that deportations have on families and communities. A mother can be left to provide for the family alone when the father is deported. U.S.-born children can wind up in foster care when their parents are deported. And the more frequently such deportations occur, the greater is the pall of fear which hangs over entire immigrant communities. Read More
Sore Loser, Jan Brewer, Continues Anti-Immigrant Crusade
Despite losing both the legal and public relations battles in the fight over SB 1070, Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer was anxious to put Arizona back in the spotlight this week. Although she can’t prevent people from requesting or receiving deferred action, she issued an executive order that attempts to prevent Arizona recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) from obtaining driver’s licenses in her state. The order, which also banned access to public benefits (something DACA recipients are ineligible for, anyway) has been characterized as mean-spirited and belligerent, but it is also just wrong on the facts Read More
Busting Myths About Deferred Action
Beginning today, undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children may officially submit requests for deferred action, a form of prosecutorial discretion that protects recipients from deportation and allows them to work legally in the United States for up to two years. As might be expected, numerous inaccuracies have surfaced in media coverage and other commentary about the initiative, known formally as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Below, we address common falsehoods about deferred action in general and the Obama administration’s initiative in particular. Read More
Courts Weigh Issuance of Law Licenses to Undocumented Attorneys
The highest courts of Florida and California are considering a legal question of great importance to many DREAMers: whether the lack of valid immigration status prevents states from issuing law licenses to applicants who are otherwise qualified to become attorneys. To some, the answer may seem obvious—that immigrants should not be permitted to practice law in a country where their presence violates the law. But as with most issues concerning immigration, the answer is more complex than may initially appear. Read More
Nativist Group Publishes a Distorted Portrait of the Foreign-Born Population
The latest report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), Immigrants in the United States, suffers from a bad case of selective statistics. While purporting to be a neutral and scholarly demographic profile of the foreign-born population in the United States, the report is actually an anti-immigrant treatise adorned with charts and bar graphs. On the one hand, the report lumps the native-born children of immigrants in with the immigrant population when tabulating rates of poverty, public-benefits usage, and lack of health insurance among the foreign-born. On the other hand, the report overlooks or minimizes the enormous economic contributions which immigrants make as consumers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. Reading the CIS report, you’d never know that immigrants pay taxes, create new jobs by opening businesses, or make scientific discoveries that transform entire industries. Read More
States Apply Brakes on Immigration Legislation in 2012
The National Conference on State Legislatures (NCSL) released its annual review of immigration legislation moving in statehouses around the country. NCSL found a significant, 40% decrease in the introduction of immigration legislation and a 20% decrease in states enacting immigration-related laws when compared to 2011. This decline is the first in years, and is reportedly due to two factors: lawmakers being too busy dealing with budget issues and redistricting, and waiting to see how the Supreme Court would rule in Arizona v. United States. Read More
What the Show Me State Shows Us About Immigration
According to data released by the Immigration Policy Center, there are approximately 6,500 young people in Missouri who may benefit from President Obama’s plan to grant deferred action to DREAM eligible youth. This isn’t a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, as Missouri ranks 31st in the country with respect to the number of youth eligible for this new program. And because these numbers roughly parallel distribution of undocumented people around the country, if you are going solely by the numbers, Missouri shouldn’t be a big player in the debate over immigration, especially unauthorized immigration. But the numbers don’t tell the full story when it comes to the importance of the issue to the people of a state, and the importance of a state to the way the immigration debate plays out nationally. Looking at it from other perspectives, Missouri matters a lot. Read More
Administration Releases Details on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
The Department of Homeland Security today released details on its plan to grant “deferred action” to immigrant youths who were brought to the country as children. The announcement, which was accompanied by an updated FAQ and other materials on how to apply, comes eight weeks after DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano revealed the initiative, which could immediately benefit more than 900,000 immigrants. The new guidance from DHS addresses many questions about the application process—the answers to which appear below—but leaves others unresolved. Read More
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