May 15, 2024

A Century Later, Restrictive 1924 U.S. Immigration Law Has Reverberations in Immigration Debate

Muzaffar Chishti and Julia Gelatt, MPI, May 15, 2024 "The Immigration Act of 1924 shaped the U.S. population over the course of the 20th century, greatly restricting immigration and ensuring that arriving immigrants were mostly from Northern and Western Europe. It closed the door on almost all new Asian immigration and shut out most European Jews and other refugees fleeing fascism and the horrors of the Holocaust...

May 15, 2024

America’s Misunderstood Border Crisis, in 8 Charts

Nicole Narea, Vox, May 12, 2024 "For all the attention on the border, the root causes of migration and the most promising solutions to the US’s broken immigration system are often overlooked."

May 14, 2024

“Unbuild Walls”: Detention Watch’s Silky Shah on Debunking Immigration Myths & Embracing Abolition

Democracy Now! - May 14, 2024 "Amid an intensifying crackdown on asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, we speak to the author of the new book Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition about U.S. immigration policy under the Biden administration. Author Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network and a longtime immigration rights advocate whose new book aims to “debunk the...

May 12, 2024

Feds, Groups Sue Iowa

Justice Department Files Lawsuit Against the State of Iowa Regarding Unconstitutional State Immigration Law Civil Rights Groups File Lawsuit to Block Iowa’s Unconstitutional SF 2340

May 10, 2024

Expert: Biden Between a "Rock and a Hard Place" on Asylum

Aline Barros, VOA, May , 2024 "President Joe Biden on Thursday proposed a new regulation to expedite the asylum claims process for specific migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, but the plan drew objections from both immigrant advocates and administration critics. ... The Biden administration is between “a rock and a hard place,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr , a professor of immigration law at Cornell Law...

May 10, 2024

CBP FOIA Lawsuit Filed

CIVIL RIGHTS EDUCATION AND ENFORCEMENT CENTER, AL OTRO LADO and TEXAS CIVIL RIGHTS PROJECT v. CBP "This is an action seeking to compel U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”), a component of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), to comply with the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”), 5 U.S.C. § 552, et seq. Defendant CBP has failed to abide by FOIA’s...

May 10, 2024

Lawsuit Challenges Iowa's State Deportation Law

AIC, May 9, 2024 "Iowa Migrant Movement for Justice, a membership-based immigration legal services and advocacy organization, and two Iowa residents challenge Iowa’s new criminal reentry and removal law, Senate File 2340. S.F. 2340 attempts to replace federal immigration law and set up an independent, punitive state immigration scheme. S.F.2340 purports to give Iowa state officials broad power to arrest,...

May 08, 2024

Immigrant America: A Portrait

UCI, May 7, 2024 "In their newly released edition of Immigrant America: A Portrait (University of California Press), UCI Distinguished Professor of sociology Rubén G. Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes of both Princeton University and the University of Miami, provide their fifth decennial update of the "permanently unfinished" story of immigration to the U.S. A modern classic, considered foundational...

May 08, 2024

MALDEF Sues Credit Union for Denying Loan to DACA Recipient

MALDEF, May 3, 2024 "A Latino civil rights organization filed a class-action lawsuit today against a Southern California credit union for unlawfully denying a loan to a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient on the basis of his immigration status. MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) filed the suit challenging the lending practices of Kinecta Credit Union on behalf of...

May 07, 2024

How to Make Immigration Popular Through Demonstrably Beneficial Policies

This Week in Immigration: Episode 169, May 07, 2024 " In this week’s episode, BPC Senior Advisor Theresa Cardinal Brown and Senior Policy Analyst Jack Malde chat with Alexander Kustov , an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte . We discuss Professor Kustov’s research on how we might, or might not, be able to shift public opinion in the United States...

May 07, 2024

Could Thomas Jefferson Get a Visa?

Cyrus D. Mehta and Jessica Paszko, May 7, 2024 Can a Renaissance Person Ever Qualify for a US Visa Classification? "Surely, USCIS would be hard-pressed to find that any one of the men who contributed to the founding of our great nation did not possess “extraordinary ability,” but would it draw the same conclusion about each of our Founding Fathers in the early days of their careers when their extraordinary...

May 07, 2024

Elections Have Consequences: Predicting and Preparing for US Immigration Changes

Angelo A. Paparelli, Manish Daftari, My 2024 "As federal and state elections in November 2024 draw near, mobility leaders face the prospect of major policy and programmatic changes to US immigration programs and requirements. The focus of any new laws or executive actions (that is, the degree to which they will reflect hostility to, or a welcoming of, noncitizen workers) predictably depends on which candidates...

May 06, 2024

Expert: Many DACA Holders Eligible for Obamacare

Kimberly Adams, Marketplace, May 6, 2024 "The Biden administration is expanding health care access for “dreamers,” those who are covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also known as DACA. The Department of Health and Human Services has finalized rules , first announced a year ago, which will allow DACA recipients to participate in the Obamacare exchanges, something they weren’t...

May 03, 2024

California’s Alien Land Laws

Sara Rimer, EJI, May 3, 2024 "... On May 3, 1913, California enacted the Alien Land Law, designed to deny Japanese families their foothold in America by denying them the right to own land. The law was tightened in 1920 and 1927 to bar Asian immigrants, their American-born children, and even corporations run by Asian immigrants from leasing and owning land. The penalty for conspiring to evade the law was up to two...

May 03, 2024

DOJ Warns It Will Sue If Iowa Tries To Enforce Its New Immigration Law

Galen Bacharier, Des Moines Register, May 3, 2024 "The U.S. Department of Justice will sue Iowa to block a new immigration law criminalizing "illegal reentry" if it remains in effect, a top DOJ official wrote to Gov. Kim Reynolds and Attorney General Brenna Bird Thursday. In a letter obtained by the Des Moines Register, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton wrote that the department...

May 02, 2024

Expert: Courts Could Block Trump's Border Plans

Sophia Bollag, San Francisco Chronicle, Apr. 30, 2024 "Former President Donald Trump says he will compel local police to enforce federal immigration law if he’s reelected, which would put him in direct conflict with California laws passed during his presidency prohibiting police from doing just that. ... Stephen Yale-Loehr , an immigration law professor at Cornell University, said if Trump tries the same...

May 02, 2024

“We Couldn’t Wait” - Digital Metering at the US-Mexico Border

HRW, May 1, 2024 "The administrations of US President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador are forcing thousands of people seeking asylum in the US to wait for months in Mexico, exposing them to danger, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The 68-page report, “We Couldn’t Wait: Digital Metering at the US-Mexico Border,” details how the Biden...

May 02, 2024

Video: Marielena Hincapié Interviews Jonathan Blitzer

eCornell Keynotes, May 1, 2024 "In this discussion, Marielena Hincapié, Distinguished Immigration Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Cornell Law School, interviews Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer at The New Yorker and immigration expert, on his recently published book Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis . They will discuss how the politics and policy of...

April 30, 2024

The Case for Open Borders: A Podcast with John Washington

Melissa del Bosque, The Border Chronicle, Apr. 30, 2024 "A defining issue of this century will be people on the move and where they settle. Wealthier countries like the U.S. are responding by walling themselves off from the rest of the world and investing in deterrence and detention, which only contributes to more deaths and misery while providing no long-term solutions. There must be a better way. This was John...

April 30, 2024

Tracking Potentially Harmful State Bills

A very useful spreadsheet by the American Immigration Council .

April 26, 2024

Title 42 Postmortem: U.S. Pandemic-Era Expulsions Policy Did Not Shut Down the Border

Muzaffar Chishti, Kathleen Bush-Joseph, and Julian Montalvo, MPI, Apr. 25, 2024 "This article provides an overview of the scale, impact, and effectiveness of Title 42, ahead of the one-year anniversary of the order’s lifting in May 2023. While Title 42 was just one of many landmark and wide-ranging immigration restrictions imposed by the Trump administration, the public-health authority was both larger in...

April 25, 2024

Groups Release Border Management Proposal

National Immigration Forum, Apr. 24, 2024 "Today, center-right advocacy organizations hosted a press conference unveiling a border framework that prioritizes security, order and humanity at the southern border. A recording of the call is available here . “The challenges at the border continue, and Congress must act. Our proposed solutions are viable when Republicans and Democrats return to the table. A remarkable...

April 24, 2024

How Immigrants and Their U.S.-Born Children Fit into the Future U.S. Labor Market

Jeanne Batalova, Julia Gelatt and Michael Fix, MPI, April 2024 "The U.S. economy has changed dramatically in recent decades, from one that was heavily industrial to one that is mostly service and knowledge based. In the process, demand has grown for workers with higher levels of education and a different mix of skills. This period of rapid change is far from over. Population aging, the rise of new technologies...

April 24, 2024

The Borderlander (Video)

Chronicle of Higher Education "One woman’s journey between two countries in pursuit of an education and a brighter future Every weekday for the past 10 years, Viviana Mitre has driven back and forth from her home in Juárez, Mexico, to the University of Texas at El Paso, to work toward her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. While alone in her car each time she makes the crowded border crossing...

April 24, 2024

DeSantis Trafficking Victims Gain Work Permits, Visa Eligibility

News reports indicate that some of the migrants trafficked to Martha's Vineyard by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will receive work permits, protection against removal and eligibility for U visas. See here , here , here and here .