US immigration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Low-income US immigrants feared seeking benefits during pandemic – report

      by

      Low-income immigrants in the US who struggled to afford basic needs during the coronavirus pandemic avoided seeking government benefits and other assistance because of immigration-related concerns, according to a new report by the Urban Institute.Immigrants, and especially immigrant women, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic-induced recession, enduring higher unemployment rates than workers born in the United States, the Migration Policy Institute reports.While the economy sputtered, more than a quarter of adults in low-income immigrant families said they or their partner lost a job, the Urban Institute found. Roughly half said the pandemic had negatively affected their family’s employment, whether through layoffs, furloughs, lost income or other threats to their livelihoods.For many, that sudden economic distress coincided with serious material hardship in 2020, as they forwent costly medical care and scrambled to make rent or mortgage payments.Over 41% of adults in low-income immigrant families suffered food insecurity, more than a quarter had trouble paying family medical bills, and almost 23% struggled to cover their utilities.By December, a majority said they were concerned about paying for housing and medical costs, picking up enough work hours and being able to pay debts in the next month.But, even as low-income immigrant families worried about meeting their needs, a sizable chunk – 27.5% – decided against using non-cash government benefits or other help because of immigration-related concerns. They didn’t apply for or stopped participating in nutrition, health and housing programs, which could have provided the life-sustaining basics they needed.Low-income families with nonpermanent residents – undocumented immigrants, temporary visa holders, etc – were especially vulnerable to those chilling effects. Nearly 44% avoided assistance because of fears over their immigration status or enforcement, including whether it would affect their ability to get a green card.Their hesitation came during a high-profile, years-long battle around the trumped up public charge rule, which made it harder for poorer immigrants to become legal permanent residents and has since been rescinded.Under the former Trump administration, the talking points around that policy underscored a hostility toward immigrants who live in poverty, even though many aren’t eligible for public benefits anyway.“Give me your tired and your poor,” said Ken Cuccinelli, then the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, “who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge”. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Revealed: Biden administration holding tens of thousands of migrant children

      by

      The Biden administration is holding tens of thousands of asylum-seeking children in an opaque network of some 200 facilities that the Associated Press has learned spans two dozen states and includes five shelters with more than 1,000 children packed inside.Confidential data obtained by the AP shows the number of migrant children in government custody more than doubled in the past two months, and this week the federal government was housing around 21,000 kids, from toddlers to teens.A facility at Fort Bliss, a US army post in El Paso, Texas, had more than 4,500 children as of Monday. Attorneys, advocates and mental health experts say that while some shelters are safe and provide adequate care, others are endangering children’s health and safety.“It’s almost like ‘Groundhog Day’,” said the Southern Poverty Law Center attorney Luz Lopez, referring to the 1993 film in which events appear to be continually repeating. A US Department of Health and Human Services spokesman, Mark Weber, said the department’s staff and contractors were working hard to keep children in their custody safe and healthy.A few of the current practices are the same as those that Joe Biden and others criticized under the Trump administration, including not vetting some caregivers with full FBI fingerprint background checks. At the same time, court records show the Biden administration is working to settle several multimillion-dollar lawsuits that claim migrant children were abused in shelters under Donald Trump’s presidency.Part of the government’s plan to manage thousands of children crossing the US-Mexico border involves about a dozen unlicensed emergency facilities inside military installations, stadiums and convention centers that skirt state regulations and do not require traditional legal oversight.Inside the facilities, called emergency intake sites, children are not guaranteed access to education, recreational opportunities or legal counsel.In a recent news release, the administration touted its “restoration of a child centered focus for unaccompanied children”, and it has been sharing daily totals of the number of children in government custody as well as a few photos of the facilities. This reflects a higher level of transparency than the Trump administration. In addition, the amount of time children spend, on average, inside the system has dropped from four months last fall to less than a month this spring, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.Nonetheless, the agency has received reports of abuse that resulted in a handful of contract staffers being dismissed from working at the emergency sites this year, according to an official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.Attorneys say sometimes, even parents cannot figure out where their children are.Jose, a father who fled El Salvador after his village was targeted in a massacre, requested asylum in the US four years ago. He had hoped to welcome his wife and eight-year-old daughter to southern California this year, but the pair were turned around at the border in March and expelled to Mexico. The little girl crossed again by herself and was placed in the government shelter in Brownsville, Texas, on 6 April. Jose called a government hotline set up for parents seeking their migrant children repeatedly but said no one would tell him where she was.“I was so upset because I kept calling and calling and no one would tell me any information about where she was,” said Jose, who asked to be identified only by his first name out of fear of endangering his immigration case. For nearly three weeks, his daughter was held inside the Brownsville facility before finally being released to him in late April after an advocacy organization intervened to get the government to foot the bill for her airfare, as is required by the agency.HHS declined to say whether there are any legally enforceable standards for caring for children housed at the emergency sites or how they are being monitored. The Biden administration has allowed very limited access to news media once children are brought into facilities, citing the coronavirus pandemic and privacy restrictions.“HHS has worked as swiftly as possible to increase bed capacity and to ensure potential sponsors can provide a safe home while the child goes through their immigration proceedings,” HHS spokesman Weber said in a statement. Weber confirmed a number of specific shelter populations from the data the AP obtained.Of particular concern to advocates are mass shelters, with hundreds of beds apiece. These facilities can leave children isolated, less supervised and without basic services.The AP found about half of all migrant children detained in the US are sleeping in shelters with more than 1,000 other children. More than 17,650 are in facilities with 100 or more children. Some shelters and foster programs are small, little more than a house with a handful of kids. A large Houston facility abruptly closed last month after it was revealed that children were being given plastic bags instead of access to restrooms.“The system has been very dysfunctional, and it’s getting worse,” said Amy Cohen, a child psychiatrist and executive director of the non-profit Every. Last. One., which works to help immigrant families fleeing violence in Central America. Although there have been large numbers of children arriving in the US for years, Cohen said she had never seen the situation as bad as it is today.Cohen described parents receiving calls from people refusing to identify themselves. They are told to be at an airport or bus station in the next two hours to pick up their children, who have been held for more than a month without notice, or they would not be released. Some parents are told to pay a travel agency thousands of dollars to have their child sent to them, she said.“The children are coming out sick, with Covid, infested with lice, and it will not surprise me to see children dying as a consequence, as we saw during the Trump years,” Cohen said. “The Biden administration is feverishly putting up these pop-up detention facilities, many of which have no experience working with children.”One reason so many children are now arriving without their parents dates back to a 2020 Trump administration emergency order that essentially closed the US-Mexico border to all migrants, citing public health concerns about spreading Covid-19.That emergency order still applies to adults, but the Biden administration has begun allowing children traveling without their parents to stay and seek asylum if they enter the country. As a result, some parents are sending their kids across the border by themselves.Most already have a parent or other adult relative or family friend, known as a sponsor, in the US waiting to receive them. But first they are typically detained by US Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, then turned over to a government shelter.Over the course of 2019, the federal government held nearly 70,000 children in a system of contracted shelters, mass detention camps and foster parents. This year those numbers are expected to be even higher.Some of the facilities holding children these days are run by contractors already facing lawsuits claiming that children were physically and sexually abused in their shelters under the Trump administration, while others are new companies with little or no experience working with migrant children. Collectively, the emergency facilities can accommodate nearly 18,000 children, according to data the agency provided earlier this month.“There are a lot of questions about are there standards and who is ensuring that they are meeting them, and what kind of transparency and accountability will there be,” said Jennifer Podkul, a vice-president at Kids in Need of Defense, which represents children in immigration court.Several organizations have filed legal claims against the federal government seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for parents who said their children were harmed while in government custody after being forcibly separated at the border under Trump administration policies. In some lawsuits, families claim children suffered physical and sexual abuse while in government custody, at both foster homes and private shelters.Biden’s justice department is defending the government against these claims, which were filed in 2019 under the Trump administration. But the federal response has been mixed since the change in leadership. Some cases continue to be argued, while others are in settlement discussions.In a recent filing in one case currently in litigation, federal attorneys agreed with the assertion that these policies indeed inflicted harm.As for the eight-year-old girl, her father, Jose, said she was adjusting to life in Los Angeles, enjoying playing with her older brother and, bit by bit, opening up.“She keeps asking me where her mom is, and I keep telling her not to worry, that she is in Mexico and she is OK,” he said. “Soon I hope she’ll tell me what it was like inside.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      A mother’s happy day: military spouse deported by Trump returns to family

      by

      Three years ago Alejandra Juarez fell victim to Donald Trump’s cruelty as the wife of a decorated US Marine Corps veteran and mother of two young US citizen daughters was deported to Mexico under the former president’s zero-tolerance immigration policies.On Saturday Juarez will rejoin her family in Florida as one of the first beneficiaries of a humanitarian program set up by Joe Biden’s administration to reunify parents Trump separated from their children.But while Juarez’s Mother’s Day weekend reunion with daughters Pamela, 19, Estela, 11, and husband Temo will close a lengthy, painful journey of isolation and depression, she sees it as a door opening for other families torn apart by deportation.“I’m happy this is behind me and my family, and hoping this will lead to a permanent solution not only for military spouses like myself, but for everyone,” she told the Guardian from Mérida, Mexico, where she has been living since being forced from her home in Davenport, Florida, in 2018.“I hope it will have a domino effect and bring many more people back.”The Biden administration’s family reunification taskforce was set up by the new president’s executive order in February and began returning some of those “unjustly separated at the US-Mexico border” during the Trump era this week by granting them “humanitarian parole”.The numbers, however, are uncertain. The homeland security department (DHS) taskforce has been working to identify cases, but admits finding them all will be a lengthy process. It is scheduled to deliver its first report on 2 June.Also unclear is how many military families were affected by what Biden has called the “human tragedy” of separations during the four years Trump was in office. Federal agencies do not record military service in immigration cases, but a 2018 report by the advocacy group American Families United estimated that up to 11,800 active service men and women, all US citizens or permanent residents, had a spouse vulnerable to deportation.Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary who is also the taskforce’s chair, said this week’s first wave of reunifications was “just the beginning”.“Many more will follow, and we recognize the importance of providing these families with the stability and resources they need to heal,” he said, noting the taskforce was “exploring options” for long-term legal stability for reunified families.Juarez, 41, and her 43-year-old husband Cuauhtemoc, known as Temo, were both born in Mexico. But while he came to the US legally as a child and was naturalized in 2002, shortly before a 16-month deployment in Iraq, she spent the 18 years of their marriage until her deportation undocumented.As a teenager she was caught crossing the border illegally and chose to sign a document in English she said she didn’t understand and return to Mexico voluntarily instead of being placed in detention. The document permanently forfeited her right to legal status, which she did not discover until after her marriage.She returned to the US and lived anonymously in Florida with her husband until a traffic stop in 2013 exposed her undocumented status. Even then, under the more relaxed policies of Barack Obama’s administration, she was allowed to stay with twice-yearly check-ins with immigration authorities.Juarez self-deported in 2018 after Trump implemented his no-tolerance approach, and before authorities could enforce a removal order issued against her. She rented an apartment in Mexico with Estela while her husband remained in Florida to run his roofing business and allow Pamela to finish high school, but with money running out and two households to run, visits to Mexico became less frequent.When the coronavirus pandemic struck, Juarez said, her jobs teaching English slowed up and Estela returned to Florida. The knowledge her daughters were growing up without their mother, she said, caused her depression for which she needed therapy.Darren Soto, a Florida Democratic US congressman, lobbied the White House for Juarez to be allowed to return, and has introduced the Protect Patriot Spouses Act to Congress to protect military families from deportations.“President Trump’s administration was an aberration in American history with regard to immigration. Now we have humanitarian considerations, which are American values, reincorporated into our federal government,” said Soto, who also backs the American Families United Act that would allow some undocumented immigrants with US citizen family members to stay.“It’s been a long time coming, but Alejandra never gave up on us and we never gave up on her. They’ve missed almost three years of cherished memories together and it’s been traumatic for all of them.”Juarez said she was grateful for the efforts of Soto, her immigration lawyers and daughter Estela, who was one of her mother’s biggest cheerleaders. The 11-year-old excoriated Trump at last year’s Democratic national convention, reading a letter in which she told him: “You tore our world apart.”In January, she appealed for Biden’s help in an emotional video in which she likened her father’s military service to that of the new president’s late son Beau. Estela, Juarez said, is documenting the family’s story in a forthcoming book titled Until Someone Listens.For now, Juarez said, her intention is making up for lost time.“They need my cooking and they already told me what they want for breakfast on Sunday, so I’ll go grocery shopping like I always did, make breakfast for all of them and go to church like we used to,” she said. “I just want to enjoy my house and my family again.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      Immigration Is the Solution for the Falling US Birth Rate

      by

      Germany faces a major crisis. The German birth rate is considerably below what’s needed to replace the population. German seniors, meanwhile, are living longer and drawing more on state resources for their pensions and health care. There are basically two ways out of this demographic crisis.

      First of all, Germany could boost its birth rate. The German state provides generous family leave and child-care policies — not to mention the famous Kindergelt, the direct monthly payments of child benefits — and the fertility rate has indeed edged up over the years from 1.24 children per woman in 1994 to 1.57 today. But the trend in industrialized countries suggests that it will be difficult to push the rate much higher. The closest to the replacement rate of 2.1 children that any European Union country gets is France at 1.88.

      The second way out of Germany’s crisis would be through immigration. The country could throw open its doors to people from all over the world to take unwanted and unfilled jobs, pay taxes and support the increasingly aging population.

      Germany’s Refugees Face a Future Without Angela Merkel

      READ MORE

      That is exactly what Germany did. The government of Angela Merkel, in 2015 and 2016, accepted over a million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Germany now has the fifth largest population of refugees in the world (after Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan and Uganda).

      This headline-grabbing decision, five years later, has been a remarkable success. The million refugees have prospered, reports the Center for Global Development:

      “Today, about half have found a job, paid training, or internship. On arrival, only about one percent declared having good or very good German language skills. By 2018, that figure had increased to 44 percent. … Such successful integration also has impacted the local German population. For example, between 2008 and 2015, the number of employees in companies founded by migrants grew by 50 percent (to 1.5 million). It has also mobilized civil society. A survey by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research suggests that 55 percent of Germans have contributed to the integration of refugees since 2015.”

      In 2015, nearly everyone in the media — German, European, international — referred to the millions of desperate people trying to get into Europe as an “immigration crisis.” They should have given it a different label: the immigration solution to Europe’s demographic crisis. Germany wisely chose to take advantage of this opportunity, while the countries of Eastern Europe, by and large, have embraced demographic suicide.

      The naysayers had a field day back in 2015 with their predictions of political failure for Merkel and social chaos for Germany. Today, Germany continues to be the strongest European economy. It has struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic but is now rapidly scaling up its vaccinations. And the anti-immigrant backlash, represented by the far-right Alternative for Germany, has ebbed, with the popularity of the party falling to 11% in recent polls. Meanwhile, with its liberal platform on immigration, the Green Party has surged to 25% and may well win the elections in September.

      It’s useful to bear the German experience in mind as the United States once again tackles its own “immigration crisis.”

      Immigrants Are a Gift

      The United States has been the exception to the demographic rule for industrialized countries. The US fertility rate, at 1.73, is also well below replacement. But because of a constant stream of immigrants, America has managed to grow at a healthy clip.

      Embed from Getty Images

      That began to change in the 2010s. According to the latest census numbers, the US grew at the second-slowest rate over the last decade since the founding of the country. The culprits were a declining fertility rate — the birthrate has declined 19% since peaking in 2007 — and a reduction in the number of immigrants. The impact of the pandemic — in terms of mortality, long-term disability and anxiety over economic insecurity — will only make matters worse.

      America has always depended on immigrants and undocumented workers. That dependency has only grown more acute over the years. Let’s take a look at four critical sectors.

      Between half and three-quarters of the farmworkers who ensure a supply of food to the American population are undocumented workers, and many of the rest are recent immigrants. The pandemic hit farmworkers and food manufacturing workers hard, and even the Trump administration had to acknowledge them as essential workers in reducing their risk of deportation (though not providing them additional protection against infection).

      Even before the pandemic hit, the food sector faced a shortage of workers. “In a 2017 survey of farmers by the California Farm Bureau, 55 percent reported labor shortages, and the figure was nearly 70 percent for those who depend on seasonal workers,” according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, Congress (read: Republicans in the Senate) has failed to provide a legal framework for what remains an essential workforce, pandemic or no pandemic, though the recent Farm Workforce Modernization Act has a shot of passing with bipartisan support to provide a million undocumented farmworkers with legal status.

      The health-care sector similarly depends on immigrants. Of the nearly 15 million people working in the health sector, about 18% are immigrants. COVID-19 is going to exact a heavy toll on this sector, though. According to a recent Washington Post poll, one in three health-care workers are thinking about exiting the profession: “Many talked about the betrayal and hypocrisy they feel from the public they have sacrificed so much to save—their clapping and hero-worship one day, then refusal to wear masks and take basic precautions the next, even if it would spare health workers the trauma of losing yet another patient.”

      Even without pandemic-related job changes, the United States has been looking at a major upcoming nursing shortage: over a million new registered nurses are needed by 2022. Nursing schools are just not keeping up with the demand created by retirement.

      Manufacturing, challenged by foreign competition and outsourcing, has infamously declined in the United States. Despite the spread of automation, this sector too needs more workers. There are currently 500,000 job openings, and one recent report estimates 2.1 million unfilled manufacturing jobs by 2030.

      Then there’s domestic work, one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy. Home health aides, child-care providers, housecleaners: the vast majority are women and more than one-third are foreign-born. “By 2026, care jobs will constitute one of the fastest growing professions in the country, and we will need more caregivers and nannies than we have ever needed before,” writes the National Domestic Workers Alliance. “Home-based elder care is already the single fastest growing occupation in our entire economy due to the rapidly growing aging population.”

      .custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
      .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
      .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
      -webkit-user-select: none;
      -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
      user-select: none;
      order: 1;
      color: #ffffff;
      font-weight: normal;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
      right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
      .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

      Home health aides directly take care of aging Americans. But the United States needs younger workers across all professions to keep alive federal programs like Social Security that support aging Americans. The cohort of people aged 55 to 64 grew by 70% between 2000 and 2016 while the working-age population expanded by only 15%. That’s bad news for people looking to retire in the future on their Social Security benefits.

      Fortunately, immigrants have come to the rescue. They are overwhelmingly working age and have a higher participation rate in the labor force than the native-born. Their contributions to Social Security help keep the system afloat. The undocumented have been even more generous, providing an estimated $12 billion to the Social Security system through payroll taxes in 2010 alone (without much hope of ever drawing from the system themselves).

      Even with these contributions, however, Social Security is still expected to face a major funding shortfall by 2035 under current projections. One answer: more immigrants. If this story were a fairy tale, the immigrant would be the goose that lays the golden egg. Immigrants didn’t just build America. They are essential to the health and prosperity of the country today. Immigrants are the gift that keeps on giving.

      Whenever a goose starts laying golden eggs, however, someone invariably starts talking about wringing the poor animal’s neck and impoverishing everyone involved.

      The Politics of Immigration

      The Republican Party remade itself into an anti-immigrant force before Donald Trump entered the political scene. Tea Party insurgents called for closing the border with Mexico. David Brat, an unknown economist, ousted House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 Virginia race by hammering at the immigration issue. Trump, however, took immigration and ran with it, promising to build a new wall along the southern border, shut down travel from predominantly Muslim countries and make it nearly impossible for refugees and asylum-seekers to find haven in the United States.

      Because of Trump’s success in turning his extreme positions into federal policy, immigration largely disappeared as an electoral issue in 2020. The Republican Party focused instead on economic attacks (Joe Biden as a “socialist”) and cultural broadsides (the perennial racist and misogynist dog whistles).

      But with the Democrats back in the White House and in control of Congress, immigration will likely become again a major campaign issue in the midterm elections. The economy is on an upswing, the pandemic is waning and the Biden administration has been competent and relatively scandal-free. Without an actual platform of their own since they decided to turn their party into a personality cult, the Republicans will inevitably characterize the influx of people over the border as a “crisis” and the president’s “biggest failure.”

      The numbers at the border have indeed increased, with the influx for April near a 20-year high. Despite the Republican Party criticisms, these numbers are not the result of Biden administration policies. The number of people apprehended at the border, for instance, spiked in 2018, under Trump, at more than 850,000, which obviously had nothing to do with President Biden.

      The surge so far this year is largely seasonal, a result of pent-up demand from the COVID-19 border closures and a function of all the applicants stranded south of the border by Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. The numbers already appear to be plateauing. And the number of unaccompanied minors being held in Border Patrol facilities dropped dramatically in the last week.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Biden administration has reversed many of Trump’s policies, canceling funding for the border wall, reversing the “Muslim travel ban” and dismantling the “Remain in Mexico” program. Without any fanfare, the president also allowed the ban on guest-worker visas to expire at the end of March. Pictures of joyful family reunifications at the border are now replacing Trump-era images of children separated from the parents.

      The administration has also pledged to address the root causes of migration by funding initiatives in Central America that will reduce violence and corruption, stabilize economies and address humanitarian crises. That, of course, is easier said than done given the authoritarian leadership in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Tasked with tackling this issue, Vice-President Kamala Harris is well aware of the folly of funneling aid into corrupt governments, and she is reportedly lining up civil society representatives to meet on upcoming visits to the region. A long-term strategy of fostering political and economic transformation in the region, however, won’t win any points with Republicans or most voters in the United States in the short term.

      The recent kerfuffle around refugee policy illustrates the political stakes. As a candidate, Biden promised to bring US policies on refugees and asylum in line with international standards and raise the annual ceiling to more or less the level of the Obama years. Because of a failure to file the necessary paperwork, however, the number of refugees admitted into the United States in the first months of the Biden administration remained extremely low. Because refugees are often conflated in the public mind with immigrants — and the administration’s immigration policy was getting poor marks in the polls — the president tried to get away with suppressing the number of incoming refugees. Challenged by members of his own party, Biden again reversed himself, returning to the previous promise of a cap for the remainder of this year of 62,500 and an annual ceiling of 125,000 for 2022.

      The back-and-forth on refugee policy is an unusual deviation from an otherwise consistent set of policies coming from the administration. It’s a sign that immigration will continue to be subject to finger-in-the-wind calculations rather than rational debate. It’s a shame that it will require enormous political courage to embrace policies that are in the best interest of the United States, whether from the point of view of the labor force, the sustainability of the social welfare system or the livelihoods of the newest residents of the country.

      Republicans, with their steadfast commitment to political divisiveness and firearms, love to shoot themselves in the foot. There’s no reason for the rest of the country to follow suit. Maybe a delegation of Syrian-Germans can come to America on a speaking tour to explain how a “crisis” is really an opportunity.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden raises US refugee admissions cap to 62,500 after delay sparks anger

      by

      Joe Biden has formally raised the US cap on refugee admissions to 62,500 this year, weeks after facing bipartisan blowback for his delay in replacing the record-low ceiling set by Donald Trump.Refugee resettlement agencies have waited for Biden to quadruple the number of refugees allowed into the United States this year since 12 February, when a presidential proposal was submitted to Congress saying he planned to do so.But the presidential determination went unsigned until Monday. Biden said he first needed to expand the narrow eligibility criteria put in place by Trump that had kept out most refugees. He did that last month in an emergency determination, which also stated that Trump’s cap of up to 15,000 refugees this year “remains justified by humanitarian concerns and is otherwise in the national interest”.That brought sharp pushback for not at least taking the symbolic step of authorizing more refugees to enter the US this year, and within hours the White House made a quick course correction. The administration vowed to increase the historically low cap by 15 May – but probably not all the way to the 62,500 Biden had previously outlined.In the end, Biden returned to that figure.“It is important to take this action today to remove any lingering doubt in the minds of refugees around the world who have suffered so much, and who are anxiously waiting for their new lives to begin,” Biden stated before signing the emergency presidential determination.Biden said Trump’s cap “did not reflect America’s values as a nation that welcomes and supports refugees”.But he acknowledged the “sad truth” that the US would not meet the 62,500 cap by the end of the fiscal year in September, given the pandemic and limitations on the country’s resettlement capabilities – some of which his administration has attributed to the Trump administration’s policies to restrict immigration.Biden said it was important to lift the number to show “America’s commitment to protect the most vulnerable, and to stand as a beacon of liberty and refuge to the world”.The move also paves the way for Biden to boost the cap to 125,000 for the 2022 fiscal year, which starts in October.Since the fiscal year began last 1 October, just over 2,000 refugees have been resettled in the US.Refugee resettlement agencies applauded Biden’s action.“We are absolutely thrilled and relieved for so many refugee families all across the world who look to the US for protection,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the head of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, one of nine resettlement agencies in the country. “It has a felt like a rollercoaster ride, but this is one critical step toward rebuilding the program and returning the US to our global humanitarian leadership role.”Biden has also added more slots for refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Central America and ended Trump’s restrictions on resettlements from Somalia, Syria and Yemen.“We are dealing with a refugee resettlement process that has been eviscerated by the previous administration and we are still in a pandemic,” said Mark Hetfield, president of Hias, a Maryland-based Jewish non-profit that resettles refugees. “It is a challenge, but it’s important he sends a message to the world that the US is back and prepared to welcome refugees again.” More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s border wall hits a wall as Pentagon cancels parts funded from its budget

      by

      The US Department of Defense said on Friday it was cancelling the construction of parts of former president Donald Trump’s border wall with Mexico that were being built using military funds.All unobligated money was being returned to military, the Pentagon said.Trump declared a national emergency in 2019, in an effort to redirect funding to build a wall along the southern border.Joe Biden issued a proclamation on 20 January, his first day in office, ordering a freeze on border wall projects and directing a review of the legality of funding and contracting methods.“The Department of Defense is proceeding with canceling all border barrier construction projects paid for with funds originally intended for other military missions and functions such as schools for military children, overseas military construction projects in partner nations, and the national guard and reserve equipment account,” said a Pentagon spokesperson, Jamal Brown.Brown said the returned funds would be used for deferred military construction projects.It was not immediately clear how much would be returned to the military, but it was likely to be several billion dollars.Trump’s diversion of funds from the Pentagon was heavily criticized by lawmakers, who said it put national security at risk and circumvented Congress.In 2019, the military said more than 120 construction projects would be adversely affected by Trump’s move.The Department of Homeland Security also announced on Friday that it would take steps to address “physical dangers resulting from the previous administration’s approach to border wall construction”.It said it would repair the Rio Grande Valley flood barrier system, into which it said wall construction under the Trump administration had blown large holes. The department also said it work to remediate soil erosion along a wall segment in San Diego. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Puente: binational, bilingual project aims to cover the border with nuance

      by

      Editor Bob Moore sits at his desk in El Paso, Texas, and turns up the volume on his Zoom meeting English-language channel, where a simultaneous interpreter helps him understand his Spanish-speaking counterpart, Rocío Gallegos, who also sits at her desk, across the border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.It’s Monday, time for another editorial meeting at the first binational, bilingual border journalism project in the US – or maybe anywhere.Called “Puente,” or “bridge”, the newsgathering collaboration consists of seven digital, TV and radio outlets from the area. “We have long talked about El Paso and Ciudad Juárez as being one region,” said Moore, one of the project’s directors. “But this has never been true with journalism.”That has had consequences. “National media covers the border badly, with a distorted view that comes from what it means in the context of current political views,” said Moore, who was an editor at the El Paso Times for 25 years before one too many corporate-driven budget cuts drove him out of newspapers in 2017 and toward non-profit, digital news.With most national and international coverage, Moore said: “We lose the richness and nuance of the border.”The Puente Media Collaborative hopes to change that, and the project, only several months old, may have come about at just the right time, as the subject of immigration has once again centered national and international attention on the region.The idea came about during the pandemic, said Gallegos, when she talked to Moore about Covid restrictions on crossing the border that were stopping her from sending reporters to El Paso. “You can’t cross the border; I can’t either,” she remembers telling him. They began discussing collaborating on reporting.Gallegos had also led Juárez’s main newspaper, El Diario de Juárez, until 2018. She then became director at La Verdad, or The Truth, a digital outlet – mirroring Moore, who launched the website, El Paso Matters, in 2019.Their ideas on joining forces got a boost in October when their project proposal received $300,000 in funding plus technical support from Microsoft, as part of an initiative focused on supporting local journalism that includes outlets in Mississippi’s Delta region, Yakima, Washington, and Fresno, California – and aimed at helping counteract the loss of 2,100 newspapers in the last 15 years.Puente’s journalists recently released their first stories on the impact of Covid on the region, a year into living with the pandemic – including how border restrictions have affected drug trafficking, and what it means to tighten border crossing in a region that normally sees 50,000 people go back and forth for work and other reasons. There was also a story on how the two countries squandered opportunities to face Covid together.Next, Moore said, “we will be looking at immigration – through a different lens than most of the national media”. The newsgathering itself has been different, since reporters have been collaborating on sources and ideas, and gathering information in both languages. While a final decision hasn’t been reached, Moore thinks the upcoming stories on immigration may be written in Spanish, and translated into English.The collaboration has also led to sharing perspectives on how to frame stories. Gallegos pointed to a recent editorial planning meeting on the upcoming immigration stories. Shoe-leather reporting had already been done in both cities. Discussion turned to sending cameras from Channel 26, the local Univision affiliate and Puente partner, to federal government shelters where children who had crossed the border are being kept.“We were sensitive to what they had been through,” Gallegos said, adding that many were indigenous people who spoke neither Spanish nor English. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t victimize or traumatize them once again” with a camera crew, she said. The Mexican journalists “had a better grasp of what their lives are like”, said Moore. The camera crew agreed to approach the assignment with care.Kathleen Staudt, former professor of political science at the University of Texas, El Paso, and author of nine books on the border, said that she hopes the Puente Media Collaborative provides a lens from the other side of the border, since “too often Mexico is portrayed as the ‘other’” in English-language media.”Brenda de Anda-Swann, news director and 22-year veteran at the El Paso ABC affiliate KVIA – and part of Puente – said “the people who are part of this collaborative have worked on the border for a long, long time … We trust each other. This doesn’t feel unfamiliar, while at the same time it is new.”She said that her news station’s participation in the project will give the outlet “some time to sit back, explore how things work, why they’re happening” – without turning attention away from the news of the day, such as a recent dust storm.Working in collaboration with La Verdad “reflects who we are as a community”, she added. “Having newsrooms on both sides of the border is a perfect reflection of the community, on a personal, business and political level.”She hopes to see the project “bridging the communities through storytelling and information”, and that it serves to “provide best practices for other parts of the world”. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Outcry as Biden breaks pledge to lift Trump-era cap on refugee admissions

      by

      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden was condemned on Friday for reversing a campaign pledge by leaving in place the historically low cap on refugee admissions set by his predecessor, Donald Trump.The number of refugees allowed to resettle in the US per year fell from 85,000 to 15,000 under Trump, whose hardline “America first” agenda frequently portrayed migrants as a security threat.Biden had considered raising the cap to 62,500 but instead opted for a policy that officials say will speed up the admissions process while keeping the 15,000 ceiling.The U-turn left Biden facing potentially his first major rebellion from the left of the Democratic party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive congresswoman from New York, tweeted: “Completely and utterly unacceptable. Biden promised to welcome immigrants, and people voted for him based on that promise.“Upholding the xenophobic and racist policies of the Trump admin, including the historically low and plummeted refugee cap, is flat out wrong. Keep your promise.”Her Washington state colleague Pramila Jayapal said: “It is simply unacceptable and unconscionable that the Biden administration is not immediately repealing Donald Trump’s harmful, xenophobic and racist refugee cap that cruelly restricts refugee admissions to a historically low level … President Biden has broken his promise to restore our humanity.”Biden’s order could allow for a wider group of refugees to be considered for resettlement. It adjusts allocation limits set by Trump, providing more spaces for refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Central America, and lifts restrictions on resettlements from Somalia, Syria and Yemen.Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, posted on Twitter: “America needs to rebuild our refugee resettlement program. We will use all 15,000 slots under the new Determination and work with Congress on increasing admissions and building back to the numbers to which we’ve committed.”But refugee advocacy groups expressed deep disappointment, noting that Biden’s campaign website promised he would “prioritize setting the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000”.Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, described the move as both “bad policy and bad politics”.“There is no valid policy reason to maintain the shockingly low refugee cap,” he said. “As a political matter, President Biden will alienate a lot of his supporters by failing to turn the page on President Trump’s racism, xenophobia and scapegoating of immigrants and refugees.”The International Rescue Committee called the order “a disturbing and unjustified retreat” and suggested that at the current rate of admissions, Biden’s administration is on track to resettle the lowest number of refugees of any president in US history.David Miliband, the IRC president and chief executive, said: “This is a time of unprecedented global need and the US is still far from returning to its historic role of safe haven for the world’s persecuted and most vulnerable.”Biden previously signed an executive order pledging to increase the number of refugees admitted in the 2022 fiscal year, which begins on 1 October, to 125,000. In the current fiscal year, just over 2,000 refugees have been resettled.The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters the delay was because “it took us some time to see and evaluate how ineffective, or how trashed in some ways the refugee processing system had become, and so we had to rebuild some of those muscles and put it back in place”.Another concern has been the record pace of unaccompanied migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, which has drawn in resources that would go to vetting, processing and resettling refugees.“It is a factor,” said Psaki, noting that the Office of Refugee Resettlement “has personnel working on both issues and so we have to ensure that there is capacity and ability to manage both”.Eleanor Acer, refugee protection director at Human Rights First, rejected this argument.“As the administration certainly knows, the United States has the ability to both increase resettlement and uphold its asylum commitments at the border; not doing so means that America’s beacon of safety for refugees and asylum seekers remains dark,” she said.“It’s also disingenuous for this administration to say it is pursuing ‘other legal pathways’ for Central American refugees to come to the United States while maintaining its shutdown of asylum at the border and leaving the limit for refugee admissions at the lowest level in history.”Apparently stung by the outcry, Psaki later released a statement that claimed there had been “some confusion” over the cap. The statement acknowledged that Biden’s initial goal of 62,500 “seems unlikely” but added: “We expect the President to set a final, increased refugee cap for the remainder of this fiscal year by 15 May”. More