Center for Immigration Studies

Center for Immigration Studies

Immigration Policy Needs to Keep Families Together, Says Ohio Lawyer

Immigration Policy Needs to Keep Families Together, Says Ohio Lawyer

Eugenio Mollo says that growing up as the child of Italian immigrants profoundly affected him and his career path. “My parents lacked a formal education, but they are the smartest and most hardworking people that I know,” he says. “And so I grew up seeing immigrants who wanted to work… Read More

Louisiana Crawfish Industry Needs Foreign-Born Workers, Says Local Mayor

Louisiana Crawfish Industry Needs Foreign-Born Workers, Says Local Mayor

Sherbin Collette is the mayor of the Henderson, Louisiana, a small town in the heart of Louisiana crawfish country. He is a commercial fisherman who also serves on the Louisiana Seafood Marketing and Promotion Board. And he has deep concerns about the sustainability of the crawfish… Read More

Washington Post: Despite Trump’s ‘Hire American’ pledge, budget bill would dramatically expand the number of foreign workers

Washington Post: Despite Trump’s ‘Hire American’ pledge, budget bill would dramatically expand the number of foreign workers

So much for President Trump’s “Hire American” promise. Just two weeks after Trump signed an executive order vowing to crack down on a program designed to import high-skilled foreign labor, a provision slipped into the budget compromise with Democrats this week could double the number of visas for low-wage, seasonal… Read More

New Americans in Birmingham

New Americans in Birmingham

Immigrants Birmingham, Alabama are making big economic contributions, despite making up a small fraction of the city’s population. Accounting for just 3.5 percent of the overall population in 2014, the foreign-born of the Birmingham metro area made up an outsize 5.2 percent of the employed workforce – contributing to the… Read More

Grad Aims for Cop Job to Build Trust With Immigrant Communities

Grad Aims for Cop Job to Build Trust With Immigrant Communities

After an impressive series of educational successes, Mexican immigrant Elizabeth Becerra is now applying for a job in law enforcement and hopes to work with either the FBI, the Secret Service or the U.S. Probation and Parole Office. Though the application process is long and difficult, she says, “I know… Read More

One Refugee Couple, Dozens of Entrepreneurial Stories

One Refugee Couple, Dozens of Entrepreneurial Stories

Nadia Kasvin came to the United States under the terms of the Lautenberg Amendment, a 1989 policy that allowed Jews and other religious minorities facing persecution in the former Soviet Union to seek asylum in America. Three years after applying, and after numerous background checks and interviews, Kasvin and her… Read More

New Americans in Birmingham Contribute $3 billion to GDP, New Study Shows

New Americans in Birmingham Contribute $3 billion to GDP, New Study Shows

Birmingham, AL– Today, the City of Birmingham and New American Economy released a report documenting the economic impact of immigrants in Birmingham, Alabama. Accounting for just 3.5 percent of the overall population in 2014, the foreign-born of the Birmingham metro area made up an outsize 5.2 percent of the employed workforce… Read More

Immigration Key to Future of Rural Appalachia

Immigration Key to Future of Rural Appalachia

Jenny Williams, an English professor at Hazard Community and Technical College, knows that immigration has been crucial to rural Perry County. Her father was a doctor in the 1970s, when the region lacked qualified medical professionals. Then Appalachian Regional Healthcare began recruiting foreign-born doctors, primarily from India, to practice at… Read More

May Day 2017: Why immigrant labor is more important now than ever

May Day 2017: Why immigrant labor is more important now than ever

On Monday, tens of thousands were expected to walk out of their jobs and take to the streets for a national Day Without Immigrants strike. The strike was predicted by organizers to be the largest single-day labor strike in over a decade. The message of Monday’s protest was… Read More

A sudden paucity of waitstaff, hosts, and housekeepers has Maine’s hospitality industry feeling the heat this year.

A sudden paucity of waitstaff, hosts, and housekeepers has Maine’s hospitality industry feeling the heat this year.

It felt like a bad omen that, at the Maine Office of Tourism’s annual industry conference, a late-season snowstorm forced labor commissioner Jeanne Paquette to drop out of a discussion on the conference’s main theme, workforce development. An innocuous-sounding topic, but just the thought of “workforce development” can give innkeepers… Read More

Make a contribution

Make a direct impact on the lives of immigrants.

logoimg