Brookings: Topics - Immigration

This Week in Immigration: SJC Sends Immigration Reform to the Floor

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:06:00 -0400

Big news in immigration policy: Last night, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send S.744 to the Senate floor. In a 13-5 vote, Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Flake joined their Democratic colleagues. Much of the day was focused on contentious amendments aimed at making the pathway to citizenship impossible for undocumented immigrants. Sen. Hatch’s reworked high-skilled amendments were approved. “With a heavy heart,” Sen. Patrick Leahy withdrew one of the most controversial amendments extending immigration protections to gay couples.

A brief recap of last week’s markup: Last Tuesday the Committee wrapped up amendments regarding border security and began discussion of temporary high-skilled workers. Notably, the Committee rejected the use of a biometric entry-exit system as a trigger for beginning the legalization process (expect Sen. Rubio to bring it up again) and approved an amendment that doubles labor certification fees, allocating them to STEM education. On Thursday the Committee addressed E-Verify.

The House’s Gang of Eight – Democrats Luis Gutierrez (IL), Zoe Lofgren (CA), John Yarmuth (KY), and Xavier Becerra (CA), and Republicans Raul Labrador (ID), John Carter (TX), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), and Sam Johnson (TX) – has come to an “agreement of principles” and will release a bill in the near future. The road was (and still is) rocky, with talks looking like they might unravel right before their self-imposed deadline of last Thursday. Rep. Carter is a vocal critic of the Senate bill and anti-immigrant rhetoric is harsh in the House, so expect this bill to be more conservative than S.744.

In the meantime, the Rep. Bob Goodlatte is not satisfied with S.744 and House Judiciary Committee is still working on its piecemeal approach to immigration reform. Over the last week it held hearings on its two bills, covering E-Verify and a temporary agricultural worker program, as well as the Senate’s bill. Next up is a bill from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) addressing “rules for highly skilled and educated foreign workers.”

It is well documented the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) union isn’t happy with the Schumer-McCain bill. But another agency union is joining them – U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) – claiming “the bill would fail to address an ‘insurmountable bureaucracy’ at the federal agency.”

How does your legacy on immigration issues affect your election prospects? It depends on who you ask, but it promises to play a role for Republicans eyeing 2016 or former U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo’s potential bid for Colorado governor. For one Republican, it was enough to change parties: the Republican National Committee’s State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach switched his affiliation to Democrat because of the “culture of intolerance” toward immigrants.

There is a slew of government reports from the last week to check out:

The Congressional Budget Office released their 2013 update to “A Description of the Immigrant Population.” It includes some great top-level statistics about the foreign-born population in the United States.
The Congressional Research Service released a report finding “a widely touted Border Patrol initiative to send migrants back to Mexico far from the points they are caught entering the U.S. illegally has one of the worst track records at discouraging people from trying again.”
The Census Bureau released a report estimating “net international migration is projected to overtake natural increase as the driver of population growth in 2032.”
USCIS released the latest DACA applicant numbers. As of April 30, they received 515,922 applications.

Authors

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka

Image Source: © ERIC THAYER / Reuters

This Week in Immigration

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:46:00 -0400

The immigration reform legislation debate is ramping up with last week’s activities including hearings at the Joint Economic Committee, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, and Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

But by far, the star of the week was the Senate Judiciary Committee’s markup of S.744. By Wednesday, over 300 amendments were filed. You can find the Senate Judiciary Committee’s official list of amendments and actions here. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) is on the ball with the ins and outs of the legislative process—check out their compilation of each amendment’s “stated purpose” in one document.

After the flurry of amendments, no real surprises emerged, but Sens. Jeff Sessions, Chuck Grassley, and Ted Cruz, all Republicans, look to be the biggest kill-the-bill proponents. On the left, the most controversial amendment covers the rights of gay couples, filed by committee chairman Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.)

The first day was focused on the bill’s first title, border security. Sen. Leahy’s office offers a “recap” on the first day of markup, including details on the 22 amendments passed, six rejected, and four withdrawn. Also helpful is AILA’s detailed summary. Perhaps the most notable accepted amendment comes from Sen. Grassley and expands the border security plan from only “high-risk” sections to the entire southern border. As reported by ABC News Univision, some of the adopted provisions on border security play a political game to attract conservative support in the House, while tougher “trigger” amendments were rejected. The markup will resume Tuesday, most likely with high-skilled temporary immigration.

We still have not seen anything from the House’s “Gang of Eight,” and as reported by The Hill, Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez says if they do not introduce their bill by the end of the month, they will not introduce anything. Is the glass half empty or half full?

Off the Hill, Monday’s Heritage Foundation report, claiming legalization would cost $6.3 trillion, has been hotly contested; the pushback from the right has been loud and swift. The fallout continued after details emerged about co-author Jason Richwine’s dissertation, which claimed “the average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population,” and tied IQ to genetics and race. On Friday, Richwine resigned from Heritage.

There was another cost-benefit analysis last week, but it hasn’t garnered the same attention as the disputed Heritage report. According to a study requested by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the Social Security Administration estimated passage of immigration reform would “boost Social Security’s coffers by more than $240 billion over the coming decade and add $64 billion in new tax revenues to Medicare. It would also increase the size of the economy by a full percentage point by 2017, and increase employment.”

Tensions on temporary workers are still simmering. On Point took up the issue of H-1B workers, with a rousing debate among panelists. My colleagues Jonathan Rothwell and Neil G. Ruiz look at the misconceptions surrounding the STEM shortage and H-1B visas. On the lower-skilled side, the New York Times reported on hiring practices for farm workers that might pit native-born and foreign-born workers against each other.

At the state level, Colorado has been the site of some immigration legislation this week. The state legislature passed laws allowing driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants and in-state tuition for some undocumented college students.

Authors

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka

Image Source: © David McNew / Reuters

H-1B Visas and the STEM Shortage

Jonathan Rothwell and Neil G. Ruiz — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:01:00 -0400

Last month, a landmark immigration reform bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate that has the potential to both increase the number of available H-1B visas for foreigners working in specialty occupations and shift the U.S. employment-based visa system to a more merit-based scheme favoring science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers.

As it stands today, businesses say they cannot find the skills they need in the domestic labor pool and need access to a global pool of STEM workers. Bolstering their contention are a number of studies that suggest that STEM jobs exhibit characteristics of under-supply: high wages and low unemployment.

Yet, some analysts have argued that there are plenty of U.S. native-born workers who can do these jobs. They claim that H-1B workers do not have special skills but instead are preferred because they are paid lower wages.

Without attempting to fully resolve this complex issue, new detailed data on H-1B wages by occupation, presented more fully here, suggests that the H-1B program helps to fill a shortage of workers in STEM occupations.

Employers request H-1B visas for hard-to-fill STEM jobs. The vast majority—90 percent—of H-1B applications are for jobs requiring high-level STEM knowledge. This finding is based on our analysis of Department of Labor survey data on the knowledge needed to perform occupations. The evidence shows that these vacancies are harder-to-fill than other job openings.

Labor market experts interpret the duration of a job opening as an indicator that qualified candidates are hard to find. Such an interpretation of vacancy survey data is empirically grounded in both historical and many contemporary labor market surveys from private firms and state governments.

Using 2011 job openings data from the Conference Board for the 100 largest metropolitan areas, we find that 43 percent of job vacancies for STEM occupations with H-1B requests are reposted after one month of advertising, implying that they are unfilled. By contrast 38 percent of vacancies in non-STEM occupations requiring a bachelor’s degree go unfilled after one month, and just 32 percent of job postings for all non-STEM occupations. In a statistical analysis of over 50,000 openings, we find that those requiring STEM knowledge take significantly longer to fill, even controlling for requirements for education, experience, training, and managerial knowledge, as well as wage rates and metropolitan area location. The most commonly requested H-1B occupations in each metropolitan area also take longer to fill.

H-1B visa holders earn more than comparable native-born workers. H-1B workers are paid more than U.S. native-born workers with a bachelor’s degree generally ($76,356 versus $67,301 in 2010) and even within the same occupation and industry for workers with similar experience. This suggests that they provide hard-to-find skills.

To reach this conclusion, we analyzed 2010 H-1B petitions obtained from labor economists Magnus Lofstrom and Joe Hayes through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. We combined these data with micro-records from the American Community Survey to compare employed the U.S. native-born with a bachelor’s degree to their H-1B counterparts.

Like Lofstrom and Hayes, we find that H-1B workers earn more than Americans in the same occupation and age cohort. The 20 most common cohort-minor occupation combinations found in the H-1B program are listed below. These groups comprise roughly three-quarters of all H-1B workers in the database. In 17 of the 20 groups, wages are significantly higher for H-1B workers, and there is a significant negative difference only for life scientists aged 30 to 35. For the three largest computer occupation groups, wages are much higher.

Download this data (PDF) »

Wages are increasing in occupations with most H-1B requests. In recent years, from 2009 to 2011, nominal wage growth for U.S.-born workers with at least a bachelor’s degree has been high for the most prominent H-1B occupations. The average native-born worker experienced flat annual growth in wages over that period (0.0 percent), but wage growth for those in computer occupations—the largest H-1B category—grew by 1.3 percent each year since 2009 and 2.7 percent each year since 2000 for those with a bachelor’s degree. Wage growth was even higher for engineers, with 2.1 percent growth since 2009 and 3 percent growth since 2000.

For every prominent H-1B occupational category except life scientists and operations specialties managers, wage growth was stronger than the national average since 2009. Since 2000, all but postsecondary teachers have seen higher than average wage growth.

Download this data (PDF) »

There are two important caveats. First, hard-to-fill high-skilled jobs do not always require many years of post-secondary training. Even among H-1B visa requests, about 25 percent are for occupations that typically require only an associate’s degree, meaning that the current U.S. workforce could be trained to do these jobs at relatively little cost. Second, not all STEM jobs are experiencing the same symptoms of shortage.

A data-driven bureau is needed to identify occupational shortages. Overall, there is compelling evidence that the H-1B visa program is helping to alleviate acute shortages in various occupations. Yet, because of data limitations, the evidence is far from complete. If the Senate bill is passed into law, the proposed Bureau on Immigration and Labor Market Research should collect better information from employers about job openings, including occupations, the number of qualified applicants, the number of interviews conducted, and the length of time it takes to fill the job. Likewise, the bureau should also consider how demand and supply play out in regional or metropolitan area labor markets, since job search and recruitment often happen locally. Armed with such information, as well as indicators presented above, visas and public funding for training and education in hard-to-fill occupations could be more confidently allocated.

Authors

Image Source: © Brian Snyder / Reuters

It Takes Two: Immigration and the Rule of Law

Peter Skerry — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:20:00 -0400

With an immigration bill finally on the table, Republicans would do well to stop and ponder how they have arrived at this juncture. Since the November election they have been preoccupied with how to approach Hispanics on this critical issue. Because almost 80 percent of illegal immigrants are Hispanic, conservative elites have—appropriately—been wrestling with terminology and have just about persuaded themselves that “illegals” are more prudently referred to as “the undocumented.”

But the soul-searching seems to have stopped there. Whatever they call them, Republicans continue to insist that the undocumented must be treated as law-breakers, even as criminals, who must be penalized and not allowed to benefit from their transgressions. For a party struggling to renew itself, this isn’t much progress. What Republicans now need to consider is that the undocumented are hardly the only law-breakers here. More precisely, Republicans must assess how much responsibility for illegal immigration can be fairly attributed to employers.

This won’t be easy. Especially at this juncture in the process, no one wants to point fingers—certainly not at employers who are complicit in illegal immigration. To be sure, back in 2009 the Obama administration prioritized the criminal prosecution of employers who hire the undocumented and brought some large firms to heel. But right now, Democrats want to mobilize their troops and focus attention on the travails of worthy newcomers who just happen to be here without documents.

Republicans, as I have suggested, have their own problems. For them, immigration enforcement has meant securing our border with Mexico, for which public support has been readily mobilized with images of imposing physical barriers, sophisticated surveillance technology, and thousands of Border Patrol agents. By contrast, interior enforcement has been a much tougher sell. After all, it arouses images of busy Americans being hassled at highway checkpoints or hard-working businessmen wasting their time filling out government forms and answering the questions of intrusive bureaucrats. And since employers tend to be well organized and vocal when it comes to immigration, Republicans have sought to avoid offending what looks to be a natural constituency. But then so have many Democrats.

As for the rest of us, Americans tend to identify with employers, who are like “us.” In many cases the employers are us, insofar as they are homeowners relying on laborers, gardeners, painters, carpenters, cleaning ladies, and nannies, who are typically undocumented.

In fact, casual reliance on illegal immigrant workers is unlikely to run afoul of the law. Individuals who hire fewer than 10 illegal workers during any 12-month period are effectively exempt from prosecution. To be sure, candidates for high government appointments and politicians are subject to embarrassing exposure on this point, and they might be legally vulnerable for failing to pay Social Security taxes for undocumented workers. But the average American can still drive down to the Home Depot parking lot and hire a day laborer without fear of violating the law.

And so it has been for most of our history. It was not until 1986, when Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), that employers were prohibited from hiring noncitizens lacking work authorization. Up to that time, to be sure, it had been a felony to harbor illegal aliens. But at the insistence of agricultural interests, the so-called Texas Proviso stipulated that employing illegals was not to be construed as harboring them. So those who insist on upholding “the rule of law” would do well to consider how immigration law has evolved and changed.

In any event, IRCA changed all that, and for the first time, employers—excepting the homeowners described above—became subject to fines and prosecution for hiring undocumented immigrants. Yet an unholy alliance of immigrant advocates, business interests, and civil libertarians raised alarms about the creation of a “national identity card” and stymied efforts to create a secure means of identification that would allow employers to reliably determine the legal status of job applicants. At the same time, Congress enacted anti-discrimination provisions to discourage employers from avoiding the risk of hiring illegal immigrants simply by not hiring foreign-looking applicants. The result is that employers have been required to ascertain the legal status of their employees but discouraged from doing so aggressively.

It gets worse. To establish their eligibility for employment, applicants may rely on driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, and birth certificates—all of which can be counterfeited. Yet employers are not required to verify the authenticity of such documents, merely to confirm that they “reasonably appear on their face to be genuine.” Documenting all this on the now-infamous I-9 form completes the ritual and allows employers to satisfy the letter of the law by affirming that they did not knowingly hire undocumented workers.

Despite such ease of compliance, employers—no one knows how many—still evade or violate the law outright. Many hire undocumented workers indirectly by relying on subcontractors who assume the risk of skirting the law. Perhaps most notorious for this tactic is Walmart, which has used subcontractors who secured undocumented workers to clean its stores. Much less notoriously, homeowners routinely hire, for example, landscaping contractors who employ illegals. Technically, such homeowners are not in violation of the law, but this was small consolation to Mitt Romney a few years back. More blatant is the hiring of undocumented workers off-the-books and paying them substandard wages “under the table” with no benefits.

Such common practices highlight why American employers have grown so dependent on illegal immigrant workers. The usual explanation is lower wages, which are undeniably part of the story. Yet not to be overlooked is the willingness of undocumented workers to work long hours on short notice. As economist Gordon Hanson has pointed out, illegals are valuable to employers precisely because they are more flexible and responsive to market forces than other workers. This is particularly true in agriculture but also in construction and the service industry.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: The Weekly Standard

Image Source: © Joshua Lott / Reuters

Displacement and Migration Policies: Exploring the Interconnections

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:30:00 -0400

Event Information

May 7, 2013
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

People leave their communities and their countries for many reasons. Sometimes they are forced to flee because of conflict or disasters; in some cases they cross an international border and are recognized as refugees. More often, they remain within the borders of their country and are known as internally displaced persons (IDPs). At the same time, even larger numbers of people leave their communities in search of economic opportunities or to join family members. Their positive contribution to the economic, social and cultural development of both sending and destination countries is today widely acknowledged. The international system distinguishes between those who are displaced and those who migrate voluntarily and between those who move within or across national borders. But in practice, the lines aren’t so clearly drawn, posing challenges to governments and human rights advocates.

On May 7, the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement analyzed the interconnections between displacement and migration with reflections of U.S. and Swiss policy by Anne Richard, assistant secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration at the U.S. Department of State and Ambassador Claude Wild, head of Human Security Division at the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. Chaloka Beyani, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of IDPs and co-director of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, offered comments based on his observations in the field. Senior Fellow Elizabeth Ferris, co-director of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, moderated the discussion.

This Week in Immigration: Senate Markup

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:22:00 -0400

Last week, we saw the first modifications to immigration, specifically student visas, in light of the Boston Marathon bombings. Two of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s friends, Kazaks in the United States on student visas, were “charged with conspiring to obstruct justice.” Now, as reported by the Associated Press, “The Homeland Security Department ordered border agents to verify that every international student who arrives in the U.S. has a valid student visa.”

While many senators were visiting their districts during the recess, there’s still plenty to report on. May Day rallies in support of comprehensive reform and citizenship were scattered throughout the country, including an event with Sen. Harry Reid in Las Vegas. Sen. Orrin Hatch “appears willing to support” reform that includes a pathway to citizenship. “Gang of Eight” Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham were on the town hall offensive to promote their proposed legislation. Markup begins this week; be sure to check out this Politico piece, detailing what kind of amendments you can expect to see and from whom.

Representatives in the House are slowly releasing individual legislative pieces. The first, introduced by Reps. Bob Goodlatte and Lamar Smith, is an expansion of E-Verify. The second, introduced by Goodlatte, is an agricultural guestworker program. With a flexible cap but 500,000 visa minimum, it looks like there is a lot to work out between the House and Senate.

President Obama visited Mexico and Costa Rica last week, and immigration reform became a central focus. Prior to his trip, Obama held hosted an advocate briefing at the White House. As reported by the Washington Post, Janet Murguía, President of the National Council on La Raza was in attendance and recalled Obama’s remarks: “He said, ‘If the bill were presented on my desk today, I would sign it,’” and “He looked at the advocates and said, ‘We’re not going to get everything we want in this.’”

Sen. Marco Rubio continues to be at the front and center of immigration reform. Over the last week, we learned Rubio doesn’t have high hopes for the Schumer-McCain bill in the House, considers provisions for same sex couples a deal breaker, and published a high-profile op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times also reported on the relationship between Rubio and former Sen. Jim DeMint, his one-time “mentor.”

If there is a rift between Rubio and DeMint, it looks like it will only continue to grow. Today DeMint’s Heritage Foundation released a report on the fiscal impacts of the Schumer-McCain bill, making immigration reform look very costly. The libertarian Cato Institute especially pushes back on Heritage’s methodology, already releasing a rebuttal. The reason? Heritage uses a “static fiscal scoring” as opposed to “dynamic fiscal scoring” that assesses the impact among all sectors of the economy.

While Heritage’s report on the costs of immigration reform will cause a stir, I’ve been enjoying NPR’s coverage of the economic impacts of different aspects of immigration. Stories on costs of “farmworker shortages,” impacts of reform on “low-wage black workers,” and how “major American companies benefit from undocumented workers” have all been on-point.

Authors

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka

Image Source: © David McNew / Reuters

President Obama's Trip to Mexico Emphasizes America's Future Economic Prosperity and Security

Diana Villiers Negroponte and Ted Piccone — Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Mexico and the U.S. are mutually dependent on one another for their collective and respective economic and national security interests. President Obama’s meetings with Mexico’s new president Enrique Pena Nieto will certainly cover border security issues, weapons, drug trafficking and immigration, but these two leaders will want to find ways to further cement the economic relationship between the two countries. Earlier this week, Senior Fellows Ted Piccone and Diana Negroponte sat down together to examine the importance of these talks.

Video

President Obama's Trip to Mexico Emphasizes America's Future Economic Prosperity and Security

Authors

Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

A Conversation on President Obama’s Trip to Mexico and Costa Rica

Joshua Meltzer, Diana Villiers Negroponte, Ted Piccone and Neil Ruiz — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:59:00 -0400

In advance of President Obama’s trip to Mexico and Costa Rica later this week, Brookings scholars Ted Piccone, Joshua Meltzer, Neil Ruiz and Diana Negroponte discuss the main priorities on the agenda between the United States, Mexico and Costa Rica. Topics covered include: expanding trade and economic cooperation between the U.S., Mexico and Central America, U.S. immigration reform, border security, drugs, crime and violence in Mexico and Central America, energy cooperation, and local politics in Mexico.

Read the transcript » (PDF)

“I think there has a been a view around for awhile now that the bilateral relationship at least with Mexico has been dominated by drugs and violence. And I think there is going to be a concerted effort here to refocus attention on to the depth and size of the economic relationship.” — Joshua Meltzer

“It’s a second term trip for the president, but its early in his second term and I think he’s got a lot of heavy lifting still to do on issues that are particularly important to Latin America and especially important to Mexico and Central America. These issues [jobs and the economy, immigration, security] are not the typical ones on the foreign policy agenda. These are issues that are bread and butter, hot-button domestic political issues but they are very important to the Latins, particularly in Mexico and Central America.” — Ted Piccone

“Immigration is a hot button issue of course. It’s something that is still alive here in the U.S. There’s no reform yet to report back to Mexican and Central American leaders. But these meetings actually set the stage for building the relationship for working together once immigration reform is implemented into law.” —Neil Ruiz

“This is a time when Enrique Pena Nieto, the newly elected Mexican president, has got a chance to really celebrate the strength of the Mexican economy: 3.5 percent GDP growth this year, 3.9 percent GDP growth last year… [and] a growing middle class, which means more people with a car and an ability to take a vacation, with iPods, with cellular telephones, and more mobile.” —Diana Negroponte

Downloads

Download the transcript

Audio

A Conversation on President Obama’s Trip to Mexico and Costa Rica

Authors

This Week in Immigration

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:41:00 -0400

Following the Boston Marathon bombings, questions about the Tsarnaev brothers’ immigration status dominated last week, containing serious implications for the future of reform. Some argued that reform talks should be stalled. Some questioned our refugee program and foreign student visas. Some wondered if we are doing enough to integrate young immigrants.

Last Monday the Senate Judiciary Committee held an epic hearing (23 testifiers!) on the Schumer-McCain bill. The hearing ran the gamut of immigration-related topics, but the argument between Sens. Chuck Grassley and Chuck Schumer over attempts to delay the legislation was by far the most covered discussion of the hearing. Tuesday’s rescheduled hearing with Janet Napolitano also focused on Boston, with Napolitano reiterating comprehensive immigration reform would make our country more secure.

Is there any other action to report on? On the Senate side, mark your calendars for May 9. That’s when the Schumer-McCain bill’s “markup” is set to begin. While the “Gang of Eight” senators are hopeful the bill will pass with bipartisan support, National Journal’s Michael Catalini reports on eight additional senators that might be big influencers on that vote tally.

The House of Representatives is the next place to watch for action on reform, and last week they upped their game. In an opinion piece at Fox News, Judiciary Committee Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) announced he soon release piecemeal bills, beginning with E-Verify and a “new temporary agricultural guestworker program.” This also puts Rep. Troy Gowdy, chair of the Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, back in the spotlight. House Democrats are feeling the pressure, and recently briefed their party on a long-in-the-works comprehensive bill. Responding to the House announcement, Sens. McCain and Schumer reinforced the need for a comprehensive package that will not leave out any components, most importantly a path to citizenship. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is also making his pro-reform stance known, teaming up with Illinois Democrat Rep. Luis Gutierrez at an event in Chicago last week.

In additional to Goodlatte, some other big name conservatives penned op-eds on the reform debate over the last week: Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Rand Paul, and Grover Norquist.

While reform is being debated, there is also some movement related to deportations. First, as reported by the New York Times, for the first time “a federal judge in California has ordered immigration courts in three states to provide legal representation for immigrants with mental disabilities who are in detention and facing deportation, if they cannot represent themselves.” Second, according to ABC’s Ted Hesson, “The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that immigrants caught sharing small amounts of marijuana will not be subject to automatic deportation.” And third, not all news is good news. “A court challenge by federal immigration agents seeking to block President Obama’s deferred-deportation initiative,” led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, “will probably succeed, a judge said.” The news is alarming for DACA recipients and immigration activists. According to the Huffington Post, the threat of repeal exacerbates the need to pass reform soon.

Finally, the Washington hardy perennial of cutting or or even eliminating the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey (ACS) resurfaced. The recent efforts come from Republicans Rep. Jeff Duncan, Sen. Rand Paul, and Rep. Ted Poe. Here are past but relevant responses from by Brookings’ colleagues about the importance of the ACS and how it guides federal funding.

Authors

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka

Image Source: © Mike Blake / Reuters

President Obama’s Visit to Mexico: Key Anti-Crime Issues

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:57:00 -0400

Up to two weeks ago it looked like President Barack Obama would be going to Mexico with a very strong hand. Had the gun control measures, which the Obama administration pushed as one of its key domestic issues in the second term, passed in the U.S. Congress, the U.S. President could have arrived in Mexico next week having delivered on a sticky bilateral issue: For more than a decade, successive Mexican presidents have been demanding greater weapons checks and tighter gun control from the United States, with the hope that such measures would reduce the excruciatingly high criminal violence in Mexico.

Mexico’s other long-term demand has been immigration reform: increasing legal job opportunities for Mexican workers, reducing deportations, and allowing Mexican families to travel and connect without great personal security and legal risks. President Obama might yet be in a position to remove the immigration thorn from the U.S.-Mexico bilateral relationship. Clearly, any immigration reform will not pass before he goes to Mexico next week. But he can credibly indicate that his administration has made immigration reform a key domestic priority and that there is more congressional movement on immigration, including on offering a path to citizenship to the millions of undocumented migrants living in the United States, than there has been in years. And at least until the Boston terrorist attacks, it appeared that immigration reform would finally pass in the U.S. Congress. Those opposing immigration reform or demanding a tightening of borders and fail-proof screening that cannot realistically be achieved, are seizing on the Boston attacks as an excuse for derailing the immigration reform legislation. But the prospect of reform is still very much alive.

In addition to gun control and immigration, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto will want to talk economics. Upon assuming office last year, he announced that he would like to break out of the Mexico-U.S. relationship being captured in the prism of the drug trade violence and collapsed into anti-crime cooperation, and to have the relationship refocus on global and bilateral trade and energy issues.

But security issues will inevitably be on the agenda, and the discussions may not be easy. For a long time, Washington was suspicious that if the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which President Peña Nieto leads returned to power, it might be tempted by its old ways —again lessening Mexico’s determination to tackle organized crime and its penetration into Mexico’s law enforcement and administrative institutions and its grip on large segments of Mexico’s society. Since being elected, President Peña Nieto has repeatedly disavowed any negotiations with criminal groups, but he has also maintained that the priority for his government will be not to disrupt drug flows to the United States (as his predecessor President Felipe Calderón sought to do), but to minimize the terrible drug violence in Mexico. Both the reduced focus on disrupting drug flows and the new emphasis on reducing violence, especially should it lead to changed interdiction and targeting patterns in Mexico, might be difficult to sell to Washington and would require the United States to abandon some of its established, albeit often ineffective and counterproductive, international anti-crime and anti-drug policies.

For its part, the new Mexican government has been surprised and made uncomfortable by the extent and tightness of U.S.-Mexico anti-crime cooperation that was established during the Calderón years. Not only has much of the strategic and tactical intelligence for interdiction and other anti-cartel operations come from the United States, but also, and in an unprecedented way, U.S. advisors have become intimately involved in helping to design and shape tactical interdiction operations of several Mexican entities used for anti-cartel law enforcement as well as in reforming law enforcement institutions in Mexico. Conscious of sovereignty, eager to establish tight control of these security institutions, and seeking to redirect Mexico’s security policy to reducing violence, the Peña Nieto administration has been mulling over whether or not and how to shape U.S.-Mexico security cooperation. It needs to take care not to throw the baby out with the bath water. U.S. cooperation, including intelligence provision and law enforcement reform assistance, continue to be greatly valuable for Mexico, and Mexico is hardly in the position to do without them.

For its part, Washington needs to recognize that seeking to reduce criminal violence, including killings, kidnappings, and extortion, is the right priority for Mexico, and indeed, should be a key goal for law enforcement in any country. The United States should wholeheartedly support that objective in Mexico. But achieving violence reduction in Mexico will not be easy, as President Peña Nieto and his security team have already learned in their first six months. Major questions remain about the details, operationalization, and actual implementation of the security strategy Peña Nieto has outlined. As I detail in my report Peña Nieto’s Piñata: The Promise and Pitfalls of Mexico’s New Security Policy against Organized Crime, many components of the new strategy, such as the organizational reshuffle of Mexico’s security institutions, the establishment of a new gendarmerie, or even the youth-crime prevention focus (important as the last element is for any sustainable long-term strategy to reduce criminality) do not easily, quickly, and directly translate into violence reduction in Mexico.

Paradoxically, the policy that is most directly available to Mexico to reduce criminal violence is the one for which it needs the most cooperation from the United States: changing targeting patterns. Instead of deploying the Mexican military or federal police or the gendarmerie (whenever it will actually become available) merely in response to wherever violence intensely breaks out and making cartel capo decapitation the core of its strategy, Mexico needs to prioritize targeting in a way that will reduce violence. That means abandoning both top-level decapitation and reactive deployment of forces. Instead, a wiser interdiction pattern would be more selective and based on an analysis of which law enforcement actions will stimulate what responses and actions from and among the criminal groups. The changed interdiction pattern can include focusing on the most violent group in a particular area and focusing on the middle layer, as opposed to the top capos, of a cartel. As I also explain in another report, Focused Deterrence, Selective Targeting, Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime: Concepts and Practicalities, strategically choosing the basis of prioritized targeting and moving away from interdiction based only ad hoc on how intelligence becomes available requires careful calibration and an uneasy balancing of the pros and cons of each possible option for prioritized interdiction. It often entails uneasy tradeoffs.

Nonetheless, Washington should not define the prioritized interdiction approach (which can mean not vigorously going after some groups for a while) as yet another manifestation of the corruption of Mexican law enforcement institutions by organized crime groups. In turn, explaining to the United States that prioritizing law enforcement actions is smart policy, not weakness and corruption, requires that Mexico maintains extensive discussions with Washington.

What in the long term will increase the rule of law in Mexico is ensuring that communities obey laws, by increasing the likelihood that illegal behavior and corruption will be punished via effective law enforcement, but also by creating a social, economic, and political environment in which the laws are consistent with the needs of the people and allow citizens to embrace their police forces and state presence. Reducing criminal violence is a key element. Adopting a smarter interdiction pattern is an important first step.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

This Week in Immigration: A Bill Drops in a Frenetic Week

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:20:00 -0400

What a week. Over the last seven days this nation experienced the Boston Marathon bombings and ensuing manhunt, the West, Tex. fertilizer plant explosion, and the failure of gun control in the Senate. Intertwined in all of these, the Senate “Gang of Eight” released their immigration reform bill, “Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013”. Here is a rundown of what’s happened.

On April 15, the Gang of Eight and the immigration policy community were prepping for the legislation’s introduction. An opinion piece by Sens. John McCain and Chuck Schumer in the Wall Street Journal positioned their comprehensive bill as a true compromise that would fix our broken immigration system. However, in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, the senators delayed its release.

To whet the appetite of interested parties, the Senators released a 19-page outline of the then-forthcoming legislation on Tuesday. Though the bill is available to the public, this summary is still a good entry point before jumping into the legislation.

On Wednesday, Sen. Schumer introduced the group’s bill (S. 744), which has come to be known as the Schumer-McCain bill. The 844-page immigration bill is still being digested by the Senate and immigrant communities alike. The eight Senators held a press conference Thursday to officially announce the bill, presenting a united front and explaining key components.

Over the week, these are the helpful articles explaining the bill I’ve gone back to explaining the bill:

Wonkblog’s Q&A summary and the Post Politics crew’s “Inside the Immigration Bill” posts
The New York Times highlights some of the bill’s hidden gems
ABC News’ explanation of merit-based visas
The Immigration Policy Center, taking a fresh approach to social media launched Think Immigration, a policy wiki that explains the bill’s provisions and facilitates discussion
You might also want to check out my colleague’s reactions: Audrey Singer’s initial response to the bill and Jill Wilson and Neil Ruiz’s discussion of the changes to the H-1B program

What have the reactions been like? Start at NBC Politics, where Carrie Dann catalogued the reactions of major players in the debate. Supporters of immigration reform like Center for American Progress’ Angela Kelley want to see a quicker path to citizenship and decoupling of such from border security metrics. Opponents of immigration reform are also making their voices heard and gearing up for a fight. With his Tea Party roots, many conservative Republicans are heading to Sen. Marco Rubio with their questions and complaints. Last week, Rubio’s office set up an “Immigration Reform Facts” website, complete with a “Myth-busting” section and met with Heritage Foundation representatives about the economic benefits of immigration reform.

Two issues from the week directly reflected challenges to the immigration debate moving forward—the failed gun control effort and the immigration status of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings. On the gun control front, the Post’s Chris Cillizza makes the argument that voting for both background checks and immigration reform could cost too much political capital for vulnerable politicians—maybe a good sign for immigration.

In Friday’s first Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill, Sen. Chuck Grassley angled for the brothers’ immigration status to delay the legalization component of reform. On Sunday Sens. Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer rebuffed that idea, arguing reform would strengthen our immigration system. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Edward Alden offers a nuanced take that is worth a read.

The next big piece of the puzzle will be the on the House—how will members react and when will we see their comparable legislation? Stay tuned—with House Judiciary Chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte already voicing his displeasure it is bound to be a bumpy ride.

Authors

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka

A Balancing Act for H-1B Visas

Neil G. Ruiz and Jill H. Wilson — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The annual H-1B visa scramble ended in just five days earlier this month. Due to high employer demand, 39,000 requests for H-1B workers were denied, and the 65,000 available visas were allocated using a lottery system. So it’s wait until next year for those out of luck.

However, change is afoot as the proposed comprehensive immigration reform bill from the U.S. Senate’s “Gang of Eight” could rewrite the rules of the H-1B race.

The Senate’s proposal attempts a balance between providing American businesses with more visas and protecting American workers.

On the one hand, the provisions almost double the visa cap from 65,000 to 110,000 (close to its level in the late 1990s), as proposed in the Immigration and Innovation Act of 2013 (I-squared), introduced in January. At the same time, it prioritizes the need for American-trained science and tech workers by targeting 25,000 visas for STEM master’s and doctoral graduates and boosting the number from 20,000 in the current law reserved for advanced degree-holders in any field.

On the other hand, it includes features from Sen. Grassley’s H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act of 2013, which raises wages for H-1B workers, requires employers to make an effort to hire American workers first by posting job openings publicly, and prevents abuse of the H-1B program by increasing fees for employers who are heavily dependent on H-1B workers. To further decrease reliance on the program, companies will be banned from employing more than 75 percent of their workers on an H-1B or L-1 visa in 2014, decreasing to 65 percent in 2015, and 50 percent in 2016.

If passed, the bill would replace the static annual cap on H-1B visas with an automatic “H-1B escalator,” similar to what was proposed in the I-Squared Act in January. The new legislation raises or lowers the H-1B visa cap by up to 10,000 visas each year, so long as it never exceeds 180,000 or drops below 110,000. A “High Skilled Jobs Demand Index” would determine the actual amount by which the cap changes from one year to the next, based on changes in the demand for foreign labor and the availability of domestic workers. The Index as currently proposed would be calculated in terms of: (1) the number of H-1B petitions filed in the previous year in excess of the cap, as a share of that year’s cap, and (2) the percent change in the average number of unemployed individuals in “management, professional, and related occupations” (as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

How would the H-1B escalator apply to the coming year? As we wrote previously, employers sought 39,000 more H-1B visas than were made available under the base cap of 65,000 for FY 2014. According to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of unemployed individuals in “management, professional, and related occupations” decreased by 5.7 percent between 2011 and 2012. Using the proposed formula, the cap would increase by 31,463. Yet, because the cap cannot be adjusted by more than 10,000 visas each year, the total number of visas available this coming year would be 65,000 + 10,000 = 75,000.

Although the proposed index to set cap levels on H-1B visas is a balanced attempt at incorporating both demand for foreign skilled workers and the supply of the current American workforce, the formula should additionally allow for future adjustments, use unemployment data for more detailed occupational groups, and consider geographic variation.

Flexibility is Key. The occupations included in the High Skilled Jobs Demand Index should not be set in stone. The skills America needs may change in five, 10, or 20 years, so tying the visa system to fixed metrics is mistaken. Similar to our recommendations in “The Search for Skills,” the proposal to establish a new statistical agency (the Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research, to be housed within the Department of Homeland Security) to use data to designate labor shortages by occupation and location is well founded—as is its mandate to study and make recommendations on the effects of immigrants on the U.S. labor market. Such a body of experts would provide up-to-date analyses to inform future adjustments of immigrant admissions. However, under the new Senate proposal, the bureau is set up to devise its own methodology for changing the cap for the newly-created W visa for lower-skilled positions, but not for H-1B visas. If the High Skilled Jobs Demand Index remains the automatic method for annually adjusting the H-1B cap, the bureau should at least be able to make recommendations on changes to the formula based on occupational and geographic variation in the supply of and demand for high-skilled workers.

Precision Counts. The unemployment rates in the broad “management, professional, and related occupations” category differ significantly from those in more specific occupational categories for which H-1B demand is greatest. For instance, while the number of unemployed individuals seeking jobs in the “management, professional, and related occupations” category declined by 8.8 percent between 2010 and 2011, the decline in unemployment was significantly greater in the two subcategories with greatest H-1B demand. Unemployment in computer occupations declined by 16.9 percent, and among engineers by 23.5 percent (51.0 percent and 8.6 percent, respectively, of all H-1B petitions filed over this period by cap-subject employers were for workers in these occupations). To link supply and demand for labor more precisely, the formula should be based on specific occupational groups rather than the much broader category.

Place Matters. As we showed in our report, the demand for H-1B visas varies from place to place. For example, the Columbus, Ind. metropolitan area—which experienced economic growth throughout the recession—has the second-highest intensity of demand for H-1B workers in the nation, driven by engine manufacturer Cummins. In 2010, Columbus had an overall unemployment rate of 6.1 percent and a 3.0 percent rate among those with bachelor’s degrees and above, compared to the respective national rates of 10.8 percent and 5.0 percent in 2010. The annual determination of H-1B admissions levels should take into account metropolitan-level data on employer demand along with regional labor market indicators.

In sum, a new system that structures our future immigration flows to better meet the demand for high-skilled workers while at the same time protecting the American workforce is a delicate balancing act worth pursuing. As the bill moves forward in the legislative process, Congress should consider broadening the new statistical bureau’s purview to include H-1B admissions to ensure that the visa system can smartly respond to changing economic needs in the future.

Authors

Neil G. Ruiz
Jill H. Wilson

Immigration Reform’s Bold First Step

Audrey Singer — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:36:00 -0400

Early this morning [April 17], a bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced a long-awaited immigration bill after months of wrangling in a pressurized political environment. Their compromise is a complicated, but fairly balanced, set of reforms to the existing system. The bill, entitled “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013,” contains three main emphases: border security, legalization, and admissions. While we take time to pore over the details of the 844 page bill, highlighted below are some of the more novel provisions of the proposal.

Stronger Border Security with New Consequences. While enforcement goals have always been to reduce the number of illegal crossings into the United States, the bill proposes increased surveillance and security on the border and measures its effectiveness. More resources will be appropriated to achieve and maintain an effective strategy. What’s new in this bill is that undocumented immigrants would be able to apply for temporary legal status only after certain security metrics are met.

Legalization of Three Groups. The second emphasis is to bring eligible undocumented immigrants into a registered provisional immigrant status (RPI), one that would give them the right to live and work in the U.S. and travel abroad. In order to qualify, immigrants must be able to show they have lived in the United State continuously since December 31, 2011, pay a penalty and application fees, and pass a criminal check. What’s new in this bill is that there are three tracks to legalization. After a five-year provisional status, childhood entrants (a.k.a. the “Dreamers”) will be eligible for green cards followed by immediate citizenship. Agricultural workers will also have an accelerated path to a green card after five years of work. For the rest, RPI will last a minimum of 10 years after which they are eligible to transition to a green card through a new merit-based visa system.

Reorganizing Admissions. The third emphasis, on future admissions, would shrink the share of permanent visas allotted based on family ties and expand the share of employment-based visas, eventually equalizing the two. Multiple cross-cutting policies would open up spaces for superlative workers in a range of high-demand fields and increase visas for entrepreneurs and investors. At the same time, reductions to existing categories of relatives and elimination of the diversity visa will shift the focus of the admissions program toward workers with America’s economic competitiveness in mind. What’s new in this bill is that, five years after enactment, “merit-based immigration” will play a greater role as immigrants will qualify based on education, employment, length of residence, and other considerations.

The intricate temporary visa program we have now will become more complex. The proposal alters requirements of high-skilled H-1B visas and allows for an adjustable cap. A brand new “W visa” creates a registry for employers looking to hire lower skilled workers, providing three years (renewable) of work during which time a worker can bring family members. A Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research will be established to identify shortage occupations and determine the annual cap for the new visa, and report on every aspect of the immigration system related to employment.

* * *

The arrival of the bill has already unleashed a flurry of reactions and questions. No matter the details, the bill recognizes three key tenets: immigrants are vital to our economy; we need a policy that is flexible to meet the needs of a dynamic economy; and immigrants are, ultimately, a positive force to be embraced.

A long legislative process lies ahead. No doubt, Congress has a lot of work to do to get this right.

Authors

Audrey Singer

Welcome to America: The Business of Immigration Is More than Business

Peter Skerry — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:51:00 -0400

Editor’s note: Peter Skerry reviews the book Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution by Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick. The following is reprinted with the permission of The Weekly Standard.

Immigration Wars has gotten a lot of attention because of its proposal to offer undocumented immigrants permanent legal resident status in lieu of citizenship—and because of Jeb Bush’s subsequent walking it back and expressing a willingness to support some kind of a path to citizenship for illegals. Just as noteworthy is the book’s critique of the bedrock of our immigration policy—family reunification—and its proposal to eliminate preferential visas for immigrant parents of U.S. citizens over 21, who, along with the noncitizen spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens, are currently granted permanent residence outside of otherwise rigid quotas. Similarly significant is the book’s support of an array of biometric identification procedures to monitor the entry and exit not only of visitors to this country, but also of individuals, including citizens, seeking employment.

The most striking, and unremarked on, proposal is for a “market-driven system of immigration,” with the number of work visas “automatically adjusted...on an annual basis to reflect changes in market needs.” Emphasizing the importance of “priorities based on objective criteria,” authors Bush and Clint Bolick acknowledge that “any future Congress could, of course, adjust the formula.” But as they envision, “the point is that appropriate shifts in immigration numbers would not require congressional action and thus would not be subject to the vicissitudes of politics.”

How seriously should we take these proposals? Bush and Bolick’s critique of family reunification is bold and seemingly strikes at the heart of a policy framework under which two-thirds of the more than one million green cards awarded annually are on the basis of family ties, as opposed to about 13 percent on work-based criteria. But when it gets down to specifics, our authors do not actually eliminate visas to the immigrant parents of citizens, or to their adult sisters, brothers, and children—the sources of so-called chain migration. Indeed, Bush and Bolick end up either bungling or fudging the overall number of immigrants to be admitted under their proposal. Undoubtedly, this is because they are intent on increasing the number of immigrants arriving here annually (despite current political resistance, which they acknowledge). But if they don’t really mean it, why raise the issue of family reunification and antagonize its primary beneficiaries: Asians and Hispanics?

Under the Bush-Bolick proposal, increased numbers of immigrants would be driven by employment criteria—either as skilled or unskilled workers, the latter as “guest workers” on renewable annual visas who, after five years, would be eligible for green-card status and eventual citizenship. But the more fundamental point is that all such workers would be admitted on the basis of market demand, as determined by employers, with minimal input from politicians, bureaucrats, or labor unions.

It is, of course, unlikely that such “objective criteria” would ever be agreed upon, and equally unlikely that Congress would cede its authority in this critical domain—either to employers or to bureaucrats. But even if we assume that allowing high-tech firms to hire as many skilled employees as they claim to need would help achieve the 4 percent annual growth in GDP that Bush and Bolick set as their goal, would affording similar latitude to landscapers, restaurants, and hotels to hire unskilled laborers result in commensurate growth? The answer depends, in part, on the fiscal demands such unskilled immigrants put on public services. Addressing this point, Bush and Bolick emphasize that America needs high levels of immigration precisely because “the diminishing ratio of workers and those whose social services depend on them is shrinking alarmingly.” To back this up, they cite an authoritative 1997 study by the National Research Council reporting that “immigrants on average pay $1,800 more in taxes than they consume in services.”

Unfortunately, Bush and Bolick misinterpret this finding. Piling error upon error, they cite a Brookings Institution study that, itself, misinterprets the 1997 research. The original study does conclude that the average immigrant pays more in taxes than he receives in government benefits. But it then clearly notes that “most people would find this figure misleading...because it does not include the fiscal impacts of the immigrants’ young children born in the United States.” When such impacts are factored in, the $1,800 fiscal surplus turns into a $370 fiscal deficit.

A related issue involves our emerging reliance on skilled immigrant workers in the critical STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. According to Bush and Bolick, one reason for our lack of STEM graduates is our poor performance in educating immigrant children, especially Hispanics. Thus, they acknowledge that “we would not need nearly so many immigrants if we were able to produce more highly skilled American students, workers, and creators.” But at what point do we get caught up in a kind of Ponzi scheme in which we take in educated immigrants to make up for our inability to educate the children of other immigrants?

Bush and Bolick argue that the remedy for such ills is “a market-driven system of education” that would afford immigrant families substantially greater school choice. And yet, however worthy such proposals may be, might it not also make sense to limit the number of unskilled immigrants until we do a much better job of educating their children? The authors feint in this direction—only to retreat and argue for increased numbers of both unskilled and skilled immigrants.

Yet the larger problem with the Bush-Bolick proposal goes deeper than mere numbers. They fail to articulate what the national interest is in increased levels of both unskilled and skilled immigrants. To be sure, they invoke the usual rhetoric about ours being “a nation of immigrants,” but they quickly reduce immigration to a matter of revitalized economic growth. As they put it, “Getting immigration policy right will enable us to reclaim the prosperity that in recent years has eluded our grasp.” This is obviously an important objective, and one which immigration policy can do a lot to help us achieve. But it will also require difficult policy choices that will hardly be guided by “objective criteria” determined outside of the political process. Nor should those choices be delegated to the legitimate, but inevitably narrow, self-interested needs of employers.

At one point, Bush and Bolick highlight how much agriculture in Alabama suffered when the state clamped down on illegal immigration, warning that if we don’t fix our overall immigration policy, agriculture there and elsewhere will be lost to overseas competitors. They specifically point with alarm to China, where “half the world’s apples are now grown.” But what they fail to do is make a serious case as to why we should care if China dominates the world apple market. To be sure, we would have reason to be concerned if China were a serious competitor in computer sciences or genetic research. But is there some strategic reason to protect the world market share of American apple growers—other than the obvious self-interest of the growers themselves? About the former, we hear nothing from Bush and Bolick, which clearly reflects their preoccupation with the latter. And that is simply not an adequate or realistic basis on which to achieve the kind of reform that immigration policy so desperately needs.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: The Weekly Standard

Inside the Immigration Process

Darrell M. West — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:09:00 -0400

At a time when national leaders are debating ways to reform immigration laws, most Americans would be shocked to know what actually happens inside the current process. As a native-born resident, I had no idea until I married a German woman and sought to get her citizenship. I assumed marrying an American automatically made her a citizen and that administrative approval would be simple and straight-forward.

So it was a surprise when the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services rejected her citizenship application on grounds we weren't actually married. We had been married for five years and assumed that sending the agency a copy of the marriage license along with other bits of evidence would document our union. With this highly bureaucratic organization, though, the marriage certificate only proved we were married on the date of the ceremony, not the several years thereafter.

I had met my wife, Karin Rosnizeck, in Munich, Germany where she worked as a public affairs specialist for the U.S. consulate. She was smart and highly educated. She had a master's degree in American and French Literature and spoke impeccable English, better than mine, we joked. On the surface, she seemed exactly the type of person America should welcome with open arms.

But a warm and welcoming attitude was not what we encountered with our country's immigration authorities. All of our friends knew we were legally married because they had attended the ceremony and partied with us at the wedding reception. But as we would learn in going through the green card and naturalization applications, there is nothing routine about the process.

I knew something about the topic. I was vice-president of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. I had moved there in 2008 after teaching political science and public policy for 26 years at Brown University. I had published a book through Brookings Institution Press entitled Brain Gain: Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy. But none of these credentials prepared me for the rigors of the immigration office.

For starters, getting a green card and becoming a citizen is very expensive. Something I didn't realize when I started the process is that Citizenship and Immigration Services is funded by applicant fees, not federal tax dollars. That means it is perpetually understaffed and underfunded. There were charges for taking your finger-prints. File the wrong form and have to send in a new one? You paid twice. Since the agency has no independent money, it charges its customers thousands of dollars. Despite the Statue of Liberty rhetoric of "give us your huddled masses," the high cost demonstrated that the United States no longer wants poor immigrants.

As part of the green card application, my wife signed away her right to basic government services. She would not be eligible for public assistance as long as I had assets to support her. I had to list my salary, savings deposits, personal property, stocks, bonds, and life insurance policy demonstrating that I had income at least 125 percent of federal poverty guidelines so that she would not become a "public charge" of the United States.

In Providence, Rhode Island where we initiated the green card process and in Washington, D.C. where my wife applied for citizenship, the offices for collecting biometrics were located in distant suburban communities with no bus lines or mass transit. This was not a problem for us since we owned a car, but if you didn't have access to wheels, the constant trips to these offices would have been a nightmare.

For many immigrants, it is virtually impossible for them to afford the fees, handle the paperwork, and navigate a complex bureaucratic process. Even with a Ph.D. in political science, I was overwhelmed with the complexity of the multiple applications, fees, documentation, interviews, and trips to the immigration office.

But transportation and money aside, that was only the tip of the iceberg looming ahead for our application. There were many obstacles along the path to citizenship. For a country that has fully embraced the digital revolution, the immigration office has an open distaste for technologies that are a staple of American businesses. All the government immigration forms are paper-based and require hours of photocopying important documents (sometimes more than once when they get lost). Materials could not be electronically transmitted to immigration authorities despite the opportunity to save money, avoid lost documents, and speed up the process. Virtually every communications involved physically going to the post office and mailing documents back and forth. American immigration is a 19th century process in a 21st century world.

But the most shocking incompetency came with our citizenship application. We filed forms showing that we were married, but the application was rejected on grounds we hadn't proved our marriage was genuine and that we still were living together. Friends suggested we send pictures of our honeymoon, but they didn't realize such images would prove little in the eyes of immigration authorities.

For more definitive evidence, I put together documents including tax returns, bank statements, insurance forms, employment status, and even Facebook pages showing we had gotten married in 2007 and been living together on a continuing basis since that time. Trips out of the country had to be documented to show that our periodic absences from one another were not evidence of a sham marriage.

In April, 2012, we went to the D.C. immigration office located an hour outside of town in Fairfax, Virginia. We were ushered into a small office with a hearing officer. She had our thick stack of documents in front of her. Fearing the worst, she instead gave us good news. She said our file looked good and we would get a letter confirming Karin's citizenship application.

We were ecstatic that our appeal seemingly had worked. We had fought city hall and won. But you should never spike the ball until you are in the end zone and have won the game. We waited for months to get the official letter, but nothing arrived. I wrote a letter noting the positive hearing and requesting clarification of her case, but got no response.

I emailed the agency using a new electronic communication address the agency had set up, but there was no response. I called the agency's 800 number and the person informed me his computer was down and could provide no help. When I called back, I got another person who said the last thing in our online file was the citizenship denial. There was no record that our April appeal even had taken place. On another occasion, an immigration officer asked Karin to retake the citizenship knowledge test of American history and law even thought she already had passed it months earlier with a perfect score.

Eventually, one immigration phone operator gave us a very helpful hint. "Go to the immigration website," he advised, "and request an in-person meeting." The volume of letters and emails the office receives is so heavy that there often is no response. Throughout November and December, I went to the agency's InfoPass website to request an appointment only to get a message every time saying no appointments were available. Over Christmas, I got lucky. We received a January 11, 2013 appointment for a meeting at the local office.

The day arrived, and we made the early-morning drive from D.C. to Fairfax. We met a pleasant young man in his 20s and explained that Karin's citizenship request had been denied in December, 2011 and we had an April, 2012 hearing, but had gotten no communication over the last half-year. He looked at his computer and said he would go to a back room to check our file. Ten minutes went by and I worried about worst-case scenarios. Would we have to go through another hearing? Would the agency simply deny Karin's appeal?

After a long wait, the young man reappeared with a supervisor. "Good news," he said. "Your citizenship application actually was approved last April following your hearing." Among the various scenarios I had role-played in my head, this was not one I had expected. "Our application was approved six months ago?" I asked incredulously. "Yes," he said. "Did you send us a letter informing us of this?" I inquired. "No, we didn't," he replied sheepishly.

The news slowly dawned on us. My wife's application had been approved nine months earlier, but no one had called, written, or emailed the approval. Instead of delivering the good news in the months following our hearing, they had demanded new fingerprints, a new citizenship test, and a new hearing. Each part of the agency has no idea what other sections are doing. Even with multiple phone calls concerning our case disposition, no one had informed us our documents were in order and she had been approved for U.S. citizenship. It was a mind-boggling conclusion to a five-year process.

A few weeks later, Karin was sworn in with over 100 other immigrants at the federal courthouse in downtown D.C. It was a joyous occasion filled with great emotion for everyone in the room. More than 50 countries were represented, and I felt proud to be an American. Not only were people celebrating their new status as American citizens, they had overcome the most forbidding and intransigent bureaucracy in the United States. Those new Americans had demonstrated extraordinary patience, ingenuity, and perseverance.

In reflecting on the entire experience, there are several administrative reforms needed as our country embarks on a new round of immigration reform. The immigration agency should update its processes for the 21st century. The current paper-based approach is costly, inefficient, unresponsive, and prone to major breakdowns. No company in American operates its business this way.

The agency needs appropriations help from the federal government. Immigration officials already are swamped with millions of new applications and backlogged cases. Beyond individual inefficiency and screw-ups in our particular cases, there is a structural problem that makes the agency highly inefficient and unpleasant for all involved, applicants and employees. It should not fund its operations solely on user fees. Immigration is a legitimate part of government and should be funded as such.

Americans should realize that even during a time of high national unemployment, we have unmet economic needs in low and high skill industries. Information technology companies have more job openings than the current supply of American workers with appropriate math and computer skills. Farmers need help harvesting fruits and vegetables. Hotels and restaurants have difficulty filling current employment needs. We need immigrants to do the jobs Americans don't want or aren't trained for.

We should resurrect the view from long ago that immigrants help America. At the ceremony, I recalled why I had put a picture of famed physicist Albert Einstein on my immigration book cover. I wanted to remind readers that immigrants have made valuable contributions to U.S. commerce, entertainment, cuisine, and innovation. Half of the Silicon Valley companies founded in the last decade had an immigrant founder or co-founder. What if Google were based in Russia, eBay were in France, Yahoo were in Taiwan, and Intel were in Hungary? The American economy would look a whole lot weaker if Sergey Brin, Pierre Omidyar, Jerry Wang, and Andrew Grove had developed their transformative ideas in their home countries and not come to America.

Authors

Darrell M. West

Publication: The Huffington Post

This Week in Immigration: Tomorrow’s the Day Edition

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:00:00 -0400

• Well, despite the speculation, last week came and went without a comprehensive immigration reform bill from the Senate’s “Gang of Eight.” But with a deal reached on temporary agricultural workers, verbal commitments to a Tuesday release, and a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill this Friday, we’d best all set aside some reading time this week.

• Lots of details about the bill have been leaking out over the last few days. So how will our immigration system change? ABC’s Ted Hesson summarizes the details we know thus far, including measurable border security “triggers,” a “cut-off date” of December 31, 2011 for provisional status eligibility, future flow of immigrants more closely related to work than family, and backlog reductions. The Los Angeles Times presents an overview of future immigration levels under the proposed reforms. Expect pushback from a whole host of unsatisfied businesses.

• Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) went “full Ginsburg” on Sunday, appearing on all five major talk shows as well as Univision and Telemundo (is “full Rubio” the new standard?). In his interviews, he announced his support for the Gang of Eight’s forthcoming legislation, disregarding claims of amnesty and outlining the steps undocumented immigrants must take before they become eligible for citizenship. More details are available from a blizzard of tweets by Rubio’s chief of staff Cesar Conda.

• Things are moving on the House side, too. Rep. Bob Goodlatte will introduce some piecemeal bills in the House Judiciary Committee he chairs and moderate Democrats announced their “framework for comprehensive immigration reform”.

• New polling data continues to show the nation’s support for a pathway to citizenship. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds 76 percent of Americans support a “pathway to citizenship [that] would require paying fines and back taxes, as well as passing a security-background check.” A Latino Decisions poll finds that 87 percent of undocumented Latino immigrants “would plan to apply for citizenship if immigration reform passes”.

• Here are some other interesting stories from the last week that fill in the picture:

Thousands marched to the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday for immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship, while thousands more showed their support in rallies throughout the country.
Conservative policy shops are debating the costs of comprehensive immigration reform.
The latest DACA numbers are in: As of March 31, over 488,000 people have applied and 268,000 have been approved.
NPR’s take on labor costs and the construction industry in Texas from both workers and contractors.
And finally, check out this slideshow about foreign students in the United States, written by my Metropolitan Policy Program colleague Neil Ruiz.

Authors

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka

Brookings: Topics - Immigration

This Week in Immigration: SJC Sends Immigration Reform to the Floor

Authors

This Week in Immigration

Authors

H-1B Visas and the STEM Shortage

Authors

It Takes Two: Immigration and the Rule of Law

Authors

Displacement and Migration Policies: Exploring the Interconnections

Event Information

Audio

Transcript

Event Materials

This Week in Immigration: Senate Markup

Authors

President Obama's Trip to Mexico Emphasizes America's Future Economic Prosperity and Security

Video

Authors

A Conversation on President Obama’s Trip to Mexico and Costa Rica

Downloads

Audio

Authors

This Week in Immigration

Authors

President Obama’s Visit to Mexico: Key Anti-Crime Issues

Authors

This Week in Immigration: A Bill Drops in a Frenetic Week

Authors

A Balancing Act for H-1B Visas

Authors

Immigration Reform’s Bold First Step

Authors

Welcome to America: The Business of Immigration Is More than Business

Authors

Inside the Immigration Process

Authors

This Week in Immigration: Tomorrow’s the Day Edition

Authors