How Cornell Law is Helping to Fix America’s Broken Immigration System

Stephen Yale-Loehr, Dec. 9, 2024

"The U.S. immigration system is broken. Why? Several reasons. Congress is paralyzed; it hasn’t passed major immigration reform legislation in over twenty years. Because of Congress’s failure to act, presidents try executive actions but then are immediately sued. Federal courts seem to be the final arbiters of immigration policy these days. In the meantime, employers face labor shortages. There are over 8 million unfilled job openings across the U.S. economy. At the same time, the percentage of the U.S. population over 65 will grow by nearly 30 percent by 2040. This combination is unsustainable. An aging workforce will produce fewer workers precisely when the population’s heath care and elder care needs are skyrocketing. Since we won’t have enough domestic workers to fill the shortfall, at least part of the solution is more migrants. Adding to the issue, more people worldwide are fleeing the breakdown of civil society, climate change, and persecution than ever before. The United Nations estimates that there were around 281 million international migrants in the world in 2020, nearly double the number in 1990. Of that total, the United States is home to one-fifth of the world’s international migrants. Against this bleak backdrop, Cornell University and Cornell Law School are working hard to improve the immigration system. ... 

Immigration projects at the Law School include: 

• a novel Path2Papers project to provide recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program with access to work visas and other pathways to legal residency, including through taking advantage of a new waiver process the program helped establish, in part managed by the program’s academic fellow Dan Berger
• efforts led by visiting scholar Marielena Hincapie to allow up to 500,000 undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens to remain in the United States and receive work permits, which the program helped secure, in part through a letter to the Biden administration I coauthored that was signed by over one hundred law professors
• progress creating a model for expanding farmworker legal services across land grant universities
• leadership with the Internal Revenue Service and the American Bar Association to provide complex tax return assistance to low-income immigrants
• behind-the-scenes policy work with the Biden administration on such topics as immigrant legal representation led by visiting scholar Charles Kamasaki and efforts to help high-skilled international researchers stay in the United States led by visiting scholar Amy Nice
• solidifying the role of the Law School in the Cornell-wide Migrations initiative, such as the joint presentation on Rethinking Migration that featured visiting scholar Marielena Hincapie
• collaboration with medical and public health experts to examine the role of immigration status in the health of unaccompanied child and youth farmworkers
• creating creative access to justice models to secure legal status for immigrant children and youth in rural upstate New York who are living (and often working) in the United States without their parents"