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Is President Obama Doing Enough to Move Immigration Reform?
This week, President Obama is scheduled to meet with two key congressional players in the movement for immigration reform—Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC)—who are working together behind the scenes to draft a bipartisan immigration bill. The President is expected to ask Sens. Graham and Schumer to produce a reform bill blueprint […]
Read MoreCourt of Appeals Finds USCIS Acted Outside the Law
Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a simple but clear reminder to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that it must act within the bounds of the law. The issue before the court was whether USCIS could properly deny an employment-based, “extraordinary ability” visa because the petitioner had not demonstrated “the […]
Read MoreProtecting Children in the Aftermath of Immigration Raids
Study Finds Significant Behavioral Changes in Children After Raids
Children of unauthorized immigrant parents are often forgotten in debates over immigration reform. There are roughly 5.5 million children living in the United States with unauthorized immigrant parents—three-quarters of whom are U.S. born citizens. These families live in constant fear of separation. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates that over the last 10 years, more than 100,000 immigrant parents of U.S. citizen children have been deported from the United States.
New ICE Numbers Reveal Need for Revised Definition of Criminal
A new report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released last week reveals that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is beginning to detain more criminal immigrants as opposed to non-criminal immigrants, which is in line with ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton’s stated goal. The numbers, however, aren’t so black and white when you examine […]
Read MoreReport Provides Solutions to Broken Asylum Employment Authorization Clock
Asylum applicants and their attorneys have long struggled to better understand how the employment authorization asylum clock (“EAD asylum clock”) functions. The clock, which measures the number of days after an applicant files an asylum application before the applicant is eligible for work authorization, affects potentially more than 50,000 asylum applicants each year. While the […]
Read MoreNew Study Confirms Positive Impact of Immigration on Wages of Native-Born Workers
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) yesterday released a new study, Immigration and Wages, which confirms what many other economists have found: “that immigration has a small but positive impact on the wages of native-born workers overall.” The report, by economist Heidi Shierholz, finds that the “effect of immigration from 1994 to 2007 was to raise […]
Read MoreBye-bye Butterstick
DC’s adorable panda Tai Shan returns to China today. Because of a current lack of native-born pandas, the U.S. turned to China for pandas to fill our zoos’ panda needs. Tai Shan’s parents, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, have been in the U.S. on a cultural exchange of sorts, entertaining zoo patrons and attempting to […]
Read MoreNapolitano Unveils Enforcement-Heavy Immigration Budget for DHS
The Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 budget request for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano unveiled yesterday, exemplifies the enforcement mentality which pervades the federal government’s approach to immigration. The two immigration-enforcement components of DHS—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—consume 30% of the department’s total […]
Read MoreSenator Graham Ready to Tackle Tough Issues, Immigration Included
In response to the election of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate—which many Republicans are spinning as a loss of political momentum for President Obama and as a victory over health care reform—South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham today expressed a willingness to tackle tough issues, including immigration. In a Congress Daily article […]
Read MoreDr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Intersection of Immigration and Civil Rights
Today, we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man whose dream of equality and human rights changed the course of history. His legacy will be remembered this week by people of all colors and creeds who still believe in the American dream and who continue to fight for equality, […]
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