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Latest Numbers Show Record-Breaking Deportations in 2013
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released its immigration enforcement statistics for the 2013 fiscal year, which ended September 30. The Obama administration set another record for deportations, removing 438,421 individuals from the United States—up nearly 5 percent from the 418,397 removals in 2012. As MPI’s Marc Rosenblum told the New York Times, […]
Read MoreProposed Refugee Program Limited in Central American Impact
Earlier this week, President Obama issued a memo that set the refugee cap at 70,000 refugees for the 2015 fiscal year. This is the same cap as Fiscal Year 2014, but the 2015 regional allotment for Latin America and the Caribbean decreased to 4,000 from 5,000. This region includes Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the […]
Read More10 Reasons Farmers Won’t Be Able to Feed You without Immigration Reform
72% of farm workers are foreign-born. According to a 2010 survey, 47% of agricultural employers are not satisfied with the H-2A visa program, the only visa program in the US designed to bring in temporary agricultural workers, and 42% will not use it because it is “too administratively burdensome or costly.” In 2010, administrative challenges […]
Read MoreNew Report Highlights Innovative Integration Initiatives in the Midwest
Last week, the Detroit City Council unanimously passed a resolution for Detroit to become a “welcoming city.” As Global Detroit notes, “The designation,” part of the Welcoming Cities and Counties initiative, “recognizes places that support locally-driven efforts to create more welcoming, immigrant-friendly environments that maximize opportunities for economic growth and cultural vitality.” As Detroit exemplifies, […]
Read MoreInspector General Falls Short in Documenting Border Detention Conditions
The deplorable conditions in U.S. Border Patrol—an agency within U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—detention facilities have been widely documented in numerous media accounts and NGO reports and challenged in federal lawsuits. Immigrant children and other immigrants detained in these facilities—often called “hieleras” or “iceboxes” because of their cold temperatures—consistently describe extremely crowded holding cells […]
Read MoreDeploying National Guard to Border Hurt Texas Economy
The thousands of Central American children and families fleeing violence and arriving at the southern U.S. border became national front-page news over the summer. Congress responded by saying a lot but doing nothing, while many states and cities welcomed them into their communities and provided humanitarian support. Texas Gov. Rick Perry took a different approach […]
Read MoreNew Study Shows Deportations Don’t Reduce Crime
In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) introduced “Secure Communities,” which for the first time allowed DHS to check the fingerprints of any individual arrested by a local jurisdiction. Secure Communities piggybacked on prior DHS initiatives to use local police as “force multipliers” including the Criminal Alien Program, which establishes voluntary screening partnerships with […]
Read MoreAnti-Immigrant Group Reduces Lives of Refugee Children to Costs of Education
The nativist Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has long blamed children for the costs of their own educations. Whether focusing its ire on immigrant children or the U.S.-born children of immigrants, FAIR is routinely outraged at how many taxpayer dollars are devoted to teaching these children to read, write, and count. So it should […]
Read MoreHope for the unfinished business of immigration reform
Conventional wisdom has it that immigration reform is dead. I couldn’t disagree more. Though action on reform this year is unlikely, the political calculus is shifting, creating a window of opportunity in 2015. Even so, stubborn myths persist about immigration reform, namely, that Republicans don’t support it, that it’s bad public policy and that political […]
Read MoreForeign Students Contribute Billions to Metro Areas
International students enrich U.S. colleges and universities, but “only recently, however, have local leaders begun to appreciate that students from fast-growing foreign economies can also be important anchors in building global connections between their hometowns abroad and their U.S. metropolitan destinations,” said Neil Ruiz, author of a new report released today by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy […]
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