Decennial Census

What Are the Risks of Adding a Citizenship Question to the Decennial Census?

The U.S. Department of Commerce announced Monday night that a question on citizenship status will be added to the 2020 decennial census questionnaire. This decision, which was adopted in response to a request from the Department of Justice, has raised deep concern within both the immigrant rights and academic research communities.

Having an accurate count of U.S. residents, as well as information on their demographic characteristics, is important for a number of reasons. Census information affects the distribution of Congressional seats among states, informs how federal funding is spent on infrastructure and services, and serves as the basis for many decisions that affect the country’s residents. Moreover, the decennial census is mandated by the U.S. Constitution.

According to the memorandum issued by the Secretary of Commerce, the main reason for including a citizenship question is to “permit more effective enforcement of the [Voting Rights] Act.” In particular, the memorandum states the citizenship data will permit a more effective enforcement of Section 2, which “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups.”

However, it is totally unclear how exactly this information would serve the stated purpose and, more importantly, what the real intentions are for its inclusion. Given the openly anti-immigrant agenda advanced by the Trump administration, it is hard not to interpret this as yet another means of intimidating the immigrant community.

Invisible Wall

The Invisible Wall That President Trump Has Already Built

Legal immigration and the number of foreigners visiting the United States has taken a serious hit within the last year, as the Trump administration makes changes to policies and procedures without any Congressional action or approval.

These actions have already had a disturbing, cumulative effect as the administration begins to severely limit flows of immigrants and visitors without even beginning construction on a border wall.

While building an actual, physical wall was the hallmark of the Trump campaign, this primarily depends on congressional action and funding—which the administration has so far failed to secure.

However, it has slowly but quite deliberately started to restrict and attack legal immigration causing significant negative impacts on tourists and students choosing to come to the U.S., as well as employment-based, family-based, and humanitarian-based immigration.

These policy changes are detailed in the new report “Deconstructing the Invisible Wall” by the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

The report breaks down the administration’s changes to policy and procedures into six broad categories, covering issues from the travel bans and extreme vetting to the growing immigrant benefits backlog and new hurdles to naturalization for foreign-born soldiers.
As the report notes, the administration has already placed additional scrutiny in a variety of employment-based immigration areas, including:

“…nonimmigrant petitions for skilled workers, managers, executives, and others; a dramatic increase in Requests for Evidence (RFEs); the dismantling of rules to facilitate immigrant entrepreneurship; new interview requirements; and proposals to eliminate work authorization for spouses of certain H-1B workers, among many other changes.”

Americas Schools on ICE

How Aggressive Immigration Enforcement Hurts America’s Schools

Immigration enforcement has become increasingly severe, especially in the past year. Yet news coverage often merely scratches the surface of what people across the country are experiencing. Consequently, one topic that often gets left out of the larger conversation is the deep and lasting impact immigration enforcement has on the education of children.

Increasingly, education and childcare professionals report that this harsh approach to immigration enforcement is harming the environment in schools and childcare centers and, more broadly, the communities of students and families they serve. Two recent multi-state surveys add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating how immigration enforcement negatively affects children in the United States.

The first, a national survey of pre-K through high school educators conducted by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, reveals that immigration enforcement has negatively impacted U.S. schools and classrooms. Of the 5,438 teachers, administrators, and other school staff surveyed between October 2017 and January 2018, 73 percent observed potential impacts of immigration enforcement at their school.

“Fear” and “separation” were the two most common words used when describing students’ immigration concerns, based on about 3,500 responses from personnel in 730 schools in 12 states. Thousands of educators described how their students from immigrant families, the vast majority of whom are U.S.-born, “were terrified that families and friends, and occasionally they themselves, would be picked up by ICE… and that it was, at times, very difficult for students to learn and teachers to teach.”

Abolish ICE?

It’s Time to Abolish ICE
A mass-deportation strike force is incompatible with democracy and human rights.

Dan Canon is running for Congress in Indiana’s ninth district this year. A career civil-rights lawyer, Canon filed one of the cases against gay-marriage bans that eventually became the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges, and he proudly wore a Notorious RBG shirt under his suit to the Supreme Court. He is currently representing individuals suing Donald Trump for inciting violence at his rallies.

Canon has also defended clients swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and fought a Kafkaesque deportation system that, at one point, wouldn’t even disclose the location of his client. Now Canon believes ICE should be abolished entirely.

“I don’t think a lot of people have any kind of direct experience with ICE, so they don’t really know what they do or what they’re about. If they did, they’d be appalled,” Canon told me. “ICE as it presently exists is an agency devoted almost solely to cruelly and wantonly breaking up families. The agency talks about, and treats, human beings like they’re animals. They scoop up people in their apartments or their workplaces and take them miles away from their spouses and children.”

The idea of defunding ICE has gained traction among immigrant-rights groups horrified by the speed at which, under President Donald Trump, the agency has ramped up an already brutal deportation process. Mary Small, policy director at Detention Watch Network, said, “Responsible policymakers need to be honest about the fact that the core of the agency is broken.” Her group led the charge to defund ICE with its #DefundHate campaign last year.

USCIS Mission Statement

Removal of ‘Nation of Immigrants’ from USCIS Mission Ignores Agency’s Mandate and American History

Francis Cissna, Director of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), unveiled a new mission statement for the agency last week, notably deleting the words “a nation of immigrants” as well as other key principles central to the agency’s work.

Given the sweeping changes underway in the enforcement and adjudication of immigration laws, changing a few words here and there in a mission statement—something that is not mandated by law—may seem trivial. But for USCIS, the prior mission statement was a touchstone of the why and the how, informing both employees and the public of the core values driving the work of the agency. Removing references to a nation of immigrants, the promotion of citizenship, and customer service cuts the heart out of the agency.

The previous mission statement, unveiled as part of its first strategic plan in 2005 under the Bush administration by then USCIS Director Eduardo Aguirre, read:

“USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.”

The new mission statement reads:

“USCIS administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.”

The new version lacks context, as it no longer grounds the agency’s work in the history of our country. There is no vision connecting the past to the present or to the future. There is no mention of the important role USCIS plays in promoting and celebrating citizenship.

There is also a deliberate elimination of the reference to serving “customers,” purportedly to avoid treating immigration adjudications as a mere commodity. Yet USCIS was created in part because of the feeling that applicants were ill-served by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, with abysmal backlogs and a lack of information and transparency. Moreover, it is hard not to think of the petitioners and applicants as customers, since the agency is almost entirely funded by fees paid by these people, who simply want efficient and fair treatment—like most customers everywhere.

TPS Lawsuit

Lawsuit to Stop Blocking TPS Holders from Applying for Green Cards

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is an important humanitarian protection for people who are in the United States when certain natural disasters or civil conflict strike their home countries, making it unsafe for them to return. Despite the fact that conditions in many of these countries have not improved since their nationals received TPS, the U.S. administration recently announced that it is ending protection for several countries. If the people who lose TPS are deported, this could ultimately force hundreds of thousands of people to return to destabilized countries.

A new lawsuit, however, could help some TPS holders who have especially strong connections to the United States qualify for permanent legal status in this country. Given the administration’s decision to terminate these protections, it is especially important that TPS holders have a fair opportunity to apply for another type of legal immigration status if they are eligible.

The lawsuit asks the court to stop immigration officials from denying TPS holders’ applications based on a faulty interpretation of the law and was filed as a class action in New York. The plaintiffs are TPS holders who have applied to be lawful permanent residents based on close family relationships or their employment.

When an immigrant applies to become a lawful permanent resident of the United States, he or she must meet a wide and rigorous set of eligibility criteria. One requirement is that the immigrant show that he or she has been “admitted and inspected” into the United States—essentially, that immigration officials reviewed and agreed to an immigrant’s request to be in the United States.

Olympics Immigrant

Immigrants Bring Home the Gold for the U.S. Olympics Team

From their meme-worthy Opening Ceremony gloves to some stunning wins on the halfpipe, Team USA has started the 2018 Winter Olympics off with a bang. Early victories in the Pyeongchang, South Korea games would not be possible without this entire group of 242 talented

Americans—including the multiple athletes that have benefited from the United States’ immigration system and have gone on to compete for our country.

It’s not just the United States, either – countries all over the world benefit from having welcoming immigration policies.

Roughly 6 percent—or 178 Olympians—of all athletes in in this year’s games are competing for a country they weren’t born in. In fact, 12 countries are represented by athletes that are exclusively foreign-born, including Nigeria, Tonga, Bermuda, and Thailand.

One of these athletes is Maame Biney, who immigrated to the United States from Ghana at age five. She is the first black woman on the U.S. Olympic speedskating team and has stunned viewers with her agility on the ice.

Biney initially tried out ice skating after moving to the United States but was instructed by a coach to do speedskating instead – even as a child, she was too fast for ice skating. Judging by her successes with Team USA, speedskating obviously won out.