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Obama, Romney: Immigration Reform Needed for Growth
Washington Post June 24, 2012 President Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney spoke a day apart at a conference for Latino elected officials last week, both framing immigration reform as an necessity to spur economic growth. For Romney, the speech before the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) in Orlando marked […]
Read MoreDHS Creates Obstacles for Small Businesses Seeking High-Skilled Immigrants
Politicians love small businesses. They also love high-skilled workers. One might assume, then, that entrepreneurs and start-up companies would have a relatively easy time hiring immigrant professionals through the H-1B program. Not so. In fact, a recently released memo confirms that far from receiving preferential treatment, small businesses are singled out for heightened fraud investigations […]
Read MoreHow Skilled Immigrants Create Jobs
Wall Street Journal June 20, 2012 President Obama thrust immigration back into the spotlight last week with his executive order halting deportations for certain young illegal immigrants. In the context of America’s jobs crisis, however, this is the wrong immigration issue to focus on. Our most pressing immigration problem marched across platforms at American colleges […]
Read MoreNew Data Reveals Immigrants’ Voting Potential at the Local Level
Newly obtained data from the DHS Office of Immigration Statistics provide another indication that immigrants in the United States hold untapped electoral power. There are 8.1 million legal immigrants who arrived in this country between 1985 and 2005 and who are likely eligible to become naturalized U.S. citizens with the power to vote. If these […]
Read MoreJob-Stealing Immigrants?
Wall Street Journal June 18, 2012 Thanks to the endless television replays this weekend, just about everyone now knows that a reporter interrupted President Obama’s Rose Garden remarks Friday on his new immigration policy. Less discussed has been what the reporter said. Why do you favor foreigners over American workers?” shouted Neil Munro of the […]
Read MorePresident Obama Issued a Directive, Not an “Executive Order” or “New Law”
Immigration hardliners were predictably quick to criticize President Obama’s recent announcement that DHS will use discretion to halt the deportations of eligible immigrant youth. They wasted no time hurling some base-stirring claims—“administrative amnesty,” “end-runs around Congress,” “executive fiat.” However, while folks are free to criticize the President, they should at least strive for accuracy. The […]
Read MoreA Breakdown of DHS’s Deferred Action for DREAMers
While today’s headlines assess the significance of President Obama’s deferred action announcement on Friday, many are still sorting through the news to get answers to basic questions about who is covered under the new program. Prior to President Obama’s statement that DHS would halt the deportation of immigrant youth who met criteria similar to the […]
Read MoreDream Come True: Obama Administration Announces Relief for DREAMers
Washington. D.C. – The American Immigration Council applauds today’s announcement by the Obama administration that it will grant deferred action to undocumented youth who were brought to the United States as small children and who have been raised and educated in communities around the country. Today’s announcement builds on the prosecutorial discretion initiatives already undertaken […]
Read MoreMigrants Keep Small-Business Faith
Wall Street Journal June 13, 2012 Immigrants are more inclined to own small businesses than native-born Americans and are increasingly opening shop in areas beyond the major cities in which they have traditionally settled, a trend that is energizing local economies and reshaping communities. Immigrants accounted for 18% of the country’s 4.9 million small-business owners […]
Read MoreProsecutorial Discretion: A Statistical Analysis
In August 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that it would review more than 300,000 pending removal proceedings to identify low-priority cases meriting favorable exercises of prosecutorial discretion. The initiative was officially launched in November 2011 and is expected to continue for much of 2012. To date, DHS has released statistics on three occasions measuring the progress of the initiative. This fact sheet provides background information about the case-by-case review process and a statistical assessment of those figures.
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