The Future of Immigration Policy

by: CJ

Mon Sep 21, 2009 at 10:02:23 AM EST

The assumption that fuels anti-immigrant sentiment is that without border control a mass number of the world’s poor would arrive to the country of destination and swamp the country’s capacity and public services. This fear, has led this country to increase funding for border security, immigration enforcement, and the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants. It has also resulted in policies, at the federal, state and local level, that aim at targeting and persecuting, immigrant communities. Investing resources in protecting our borders from immigrants, however, can be considered inefficient government spending. As Casey says:

there should be widespread acceptance of the reality that current restrictions on immigration and considerable spending on border control have only had minimal impact on irregular immigration.

Weekly Immigration Wire: Obama Administration Absent on Immigration

by: The Media Consortium

Thu Mar 05, 2009 at 12:36:16 PM EST

President Obama is shaking up the established political and corporate order with a bold economic agenda. Sadly, immigration reform remains untouched by Obama’s energizing blueprint for Change. Immigration policy and programs are still tied to President George W. Bush and former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff: Paramilitary-style raids, detention centers, and the deputizing of otherwise-engaged local police forces continue to stand strong.

Obama-Biden Immigration Policy Group Leaders Named

by: gregflynn

Wed Nov 19, 2008 at 17:00:49 PM EST

IMMIGRATION

T. Alexander Aleinikoff has been Dean of the Georgetown University Law Center and Executive Vice President of Georgetown University since July 2004. He has been a member of the Georgetown faculty since 1997. Dean Aleinikoff served as General Counsel and Executive Associate Commissioner for Programs at the Immigration and Naturalization Service for several years during the Clinton Administration. From 1997 to 2004 he was a Senior Associate at the Migration Policy Institute, where he now serves on the Board of Trustees. He has written widely on immigration, refugee and citizenship law and constitutional law. Dean Aleinikoff is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Yale Law School.

Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar is Professor and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School. His work focuses on how organizations manage complex regulatory, migration, international security, and criminal justice problems. During the Clinton Administration he served at Treasury as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Enforcement, where he worked on countering domestic and international financial crime, improving border coordination, and enhancing anti-corruption measures. He has served on the boards of numerous organizations, including Asylum Access and the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. He has testified before Congress on immigration policy and separation of powers, and was appointed to the Silicon Valley Blue Ribbon Task Force on Aviation Security. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

What's so Broken about the Status Quo?

by: marsguero

Mon Nov 03, 2008 at 01:27:02 AM EST

We do not have upwards of 12 million people living here without legal status because the system is broken.  They are here because the forces that have impelled them to come to our country are beyond the scope of unilateral government control, and because the political myths and the rhetorical frames that prevail in our discourse keep our politicians and policy makers from frankly admitting this to the American public.

This creates government paralysis when it comes to making sound immigration policy because meaningful reform will require us to recognize that policy solutions must involve compromising our traditional definition of sovereignty.  This cooperation with other governments means a massive investment in the economic development of Latin America, and yes, the deregulation of labor markets in the form of an open border policy within the NAFTA block.  

Faced with the daunting task of taking on a policy issue of this complexity, it isn't surprising that our political establishment chooses to treat the issue only when it serves as a prop in the political theater.  What those who insist the system is broken have missed, however, is that broken things do not work as intended.  The situation we have with our neighbors and family members the government calls "aliens" is working exactly the way they want it to.  

Hate Speech, Vandalism, and Death Threats Have No Place in Immigration Debate or the Election

by: kesquivel@nclr.org

Wed Oct 29, 2008 at 10:48:19 AM EST

NCLR launched http://www.WeCanStoptheHate.org to address the surge of hate and violence infecting the immigration debate, but this is not the only place where hate is showing up these days.  Extremists are now bringing hate into the voter debate and the portrayal of people of color.  Most recently, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) was bombarded with malicious emails, voicemails, and death threats, and transgressors vandalized their Boston and Seattle offices.

The Emails:

Email #1:

"_____ is going to have her life ended."

Email #2:

"You blue gums are not going to steal the election.  All of you porch monkeys need to go back to Africa."  

Taking a Bite out of Immigration Policy

by: rachelfirm

Wed Jul 02, 2008 at 10:03:00 AM EST

As we approach 4th of July weekend, millions of Americans will be eating that quintessential symbol of the USA. But, as the article points out, hot dogs were an "invention" of German immigrants, who sold their traditional sausages from street carts in their new country.

"If I had been celebrating Independence Day 150 years ago, however, [they] wouldn't have been on the menu. In those days, Germans weren't considered Americans, or even white. When they fought over the most lucrative street corner for food vendors [against Italian immigrants] in the 1880s, the press called the incidents "race riots."

The identity of America is constantly evolving. The question "Who is an American?" is not as easily answered as many nativists would like to believe.

Restrictionists have frozen images of a "true" America, as though our identity hasn't changed since 1776. Stasis, however, is a fiction. Cultures do not stand still, nor should we want them to. We have the chance now to remake our immigration policy in the modern era, not by taking it back to the 1920s, but by grappling honestly with the fact that the American identity is always undergoing cultural change. Modernity challenges us to create a policy that recognizes the full humanity of all immigrants without regard to their racial identity.

So, as we gear up for 4th of July picnics, pool parties and cookouts, let's remember that our identity has been molded and changed by a wonderfully diverse array of cultures, backgrounds and traditions. And it is still evolving. As it should be.

Below is the full text of the original article:

Rinku Sen, Commentary

On this July 4, I will be eating hot dogs. While I was trying to fit in as an Indian immigrant child throughout the 1970s, they represented the quintessential American food.

I begged my mother to let me have them for dinner every night instead of chicken curry and rice. She nixed the hot dogs but sometimes allowed spaghetti and meatballs - straight from a can.

Hot dogs were "invented" by German immigrants, serving their traditional sausages in the hustling streets of the new world, and spaghetti, everyone knows, came from Italy. If I had been celebrating Independence Day 150 years ago, however, neither would have been on the menu. In those days, Germans and Italians weren't considered Americans, or even white. When they fought over the most lucrative street corner for food vendors in the 1880s, the press called the incidents "race riots."

I'll be sharing this holiday with a group of restaurant workers, largely immigrants. Along with the hot dogs, we'll have tacos, samosas, falafel. According to one side of the immigration debate, we can keep our goodies to ourselves. America doesn't want them, or us.

Immigration restrictionists argue not only that we need to stop undocumented immigration, but cut back drastically on legal immigration as well. They argue that this economy - no longer industrial but focused on information and service - has no room for masses of poor immigrants.

There's a fear that technology makes travel and communication so easy that new immigrants won't break ties with the old country and reassign their loyalty.

Restrictionists have tried to modernize their argument, but it hasn't changed much through the years. Immigration of the late 19th century was dominated by Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Jews and other groups from southern and eastern Europe. At that time, these new residents were widely seen as inferior to native-born whites. They were reviled for their refusal to speak English, for their political and economic demands on American corporations, for being so poor that they became "public charges" or undercut the wages of the native-born workers.

The Immigration Acts of 1920 and 1924, the most restrictive immigration policies we've ever had, limited new entrants to 150,000 per year, which was less than a quarter of the total immigration rate at that time. These laws crafted large quotas for northern Europeans while setting limits for countries such as Russia and Italy.

As immigrants were deported for violating the quota policies, social reformers began to fight for long-time residents who had built families and communities in the U.S. These reformers won a series of changes that gave immigration officials the ability to change someone's status.

The liberalization remade the American identity, but kept it white.

Mexicans, for example, were left behind by the process. According to historian Mae M. Ngai, they weren't explicitly excluded, but they had little access to the mechanisms through which to change their status, and no one cared to correct that oversight. In 1929, Congress also passed the Registry Act, allowing people to change their status if they paid $20, hadn't left the U.S. since 1921, and were of good moral character.

Of the 115,000 people who were forgiven between 1930 and 1940, 80 percent were European or Canadian. The attorney general began to suspend deportation orders after 1940, and an internal Justice department study in 1943 revealed that the overwhelming majority of suspensions went, ironically, to Germans and Italians; only 8 percent involved Mexicans. Instead of liberalization, Mexicans got a guest worker program.

Restrictionists have frozen images of a "true" America, as though our identity hasn't changed since 1776. Stasis, however, is a fiction. Cultures do not stand still, nor should we want them to. We have the chance now to remake our immigration policy in the modern era, not by taking it back to the 1920s, but by grappling honestly with the fact that the American identity is always undergoing cultural change. Modernity challenges us to create a policy that recognizes the full humanity of all immigrants without regard to their racial identity.

If we are indeed what we eat, Americans are already eating like the world. It's time for our policy to catch up to our palates.

Rinku Sen is the president of the Applied Research Center and the publisher of ColorLines magazine.