USA Green Card Immigration Blog

Abraham H. Foxman: The Road Ahead for Immigration Reform.

There’s no doubt immigration will be one of the critical political and social issues of 2012. While substantial progress has been made on one significant concern — improving border security — overall the system remains broken. Whether America is successful in reforming it depends on the tone of the discussion in this country, guidance from the courts, and the prevailing political winds.

So far, when it comes to immigration and efforts by some states to impose a solution absent federal reform, we have seen a combination of initiatives — unevenly applied at best, constitutionally untenable at worst — and a national discussion that has wavered between constructive debate and hateful, ugly stereotypes.

In short, the immigration reform debate has engendered a mix of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Let’s start with The Good: Both former President George W. Bush and President Obama have supported proposals for comprehensive immigration reform. In a 2006 speech, President Bush stated that “an immigration reform bill needs to be comprehensive, because all of the elements of this problem must be addressed together — or none of them will be solved at all.” Five years later, in his May 2011 address in El Paso, Texas, President Obama echoed those remarks, asserting that “what we really need to do is keep up the fight to pass genuine, comprehensive reform.”

This past August, in the absence of a legislative progress toward immigration reform, President Obama on his own took some small positive steps, using his executive authority to ease some of the hardships the broken immigration system is causing, especially for youth and families. For example, the federal Department of Homeland Security now exercises prosecutorial discretion to target the agency’s enforcement resources on those who pose the greatest risk to the public. However, the administration’s actions do not obviate the need for comprehensive legislative reform.

There’s also good news in the broad public support for meaningful reform. Recent studies indicate significant public support for reforms including streamlining the process for employers to hire foreign-born workers to perform seasonal work.

In an October 2011 national poll conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, we found that a strong majority of Americans — 60 percent — were in favor of a six-year path to citizenship if the children had arrived here before they were 15 years old and had lived here at least five years. And 65 percent of Americans said that children of illegal immigrants who were born in the U.S. should be considered American citizens.

Sixty percent of those polled indicated they would oppose any change in the 14th Amendment that would remove automatic citizenship for anyone born in the U.S.

Now comes The Bad: Many states across the nation — including Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina — have moved to pass anti-immigrant laws that are on shaky ground constitutionally and of questionable efficacy. Some courts are already reacting to these anti-immigrant laws by striking down the most controversial of the provisions.

The Supreme Court this term will rule on the legality of Arizona’s SB 1070, the state law which seeks to push undocumented immigrants out by way of punitive measures. Passed in 2010, the Arizona law was the first in a wave of harsh state immigration laws that are having detrimental consequences on industry, citizens, and documented and undocumented immigrants alike.

In many of the states that have passed SB 1070 “copycat laws,” local police are authorized to check an individual’s immigration status during a traffic or any other lawful stop; during an investigation of petty offenses like open container laws, underage drinking, jay-walking, or smoking in an elevator; even during domestic violence incidents where often both the perpetrator and victim are initially arrested. For example, should an undocumented victim of domestic violence call 9-1-1 to report an incident in one of these states, that victim could be deported as a result of the police investigation.

And, of course, there’s The Ugly: The stereotypes, hateful rhetoric, and dehumanizing language about Hispanics, Latinos or immigrants we’ve seen surrounding the issue, especially during the past year, threaten to derail meaningful reform and taint the national discussion.

Regardless of how Americans feel about immigration, appeals to prejudice and bigotry simply have no place in a civil debate.

The climate of bias and hostility toward immigrants that pervades the immigration debate hurts our country and stands in the way of the kind of reform Americans desperately seek to the broken immigration system.

Our own experience in the Jewish community has taught us that when a society begins to distinguish a group as less deserving of rights, then discrimination, exploitation, and worse can follow. The current system fails more than just immigrants seeking opportunity and fair treatment. It fails all of us by refusing to embrace a future that welcomes diversity and equal access to the American dream.

The consequences of a venomous, anti-immigrant climate impact us all. In Alabama, home to one of the nation’s most restrictive immigration laws, headlines report that in the days after the law took effect, as many as 15 percent of Hispanic students were too afraid to attend school. In other states we hear stories about families broken apart, unpicked crops rotting on the vine, the embarrassing arrest of an international car company employee, and damage to tourism.

Without a doubt these stories highlight the imprudence of harsh state immigration laws. These provisions drive a wedge between law enforcement and immigrant communities. In particular, they deter Hispanics or Latinos — whether documented or undocumented — from reporting or serving as witnesses to criminal activities, including hate crimes.

The most severe impact falls upon Hispanics or Latinos who are undocumented or have undocumented family members, friends or co-workers. For such persons, these laws can create credible fear that any contact with law enforcement will result in arrest or deportation.

As we begin a new year, one that promises to bring key decisions from the courts, let us remember that there is a direct connection between the tenor of this political debate and the consequences to our communities. It is incumbent upon all of us to press for fair and workable federal immigration reform and to demand civil dialogue and respect in the process.

The Next Immigration Challenge – NYTimes.com.

THE immigration crisis that has roiled American politics for decades has faded into history. Illegal immigration is shrinking to a trickle, if that, and will likely never return to the peak levels of 2000. Just as important, immigrants who arrived in the 1990s and settled here are assimilating in remarkable and unexpected ways.

Taken together, these developments, and the demographic future they foreshadow, require bold changes in our approach to both legal and illegal immigration. Put simply, we must shift from an immigration policy, with its emphasis on keeping newcomers out, to an immigrant policy, with an emphasis on encouraging migrants and their children to integrate into our social fabric. “Show me your papers” should be replaced with “Welcome to English class.”

Restrictionists, including those driving much of the debate on the Republican primary trail, still talk as if nothing has changed. But the numbers are stark: the total number of immigrants, legal and illegal, arriving in the 2000s grew at half the rate of the 1990s, according to the Census Bureau.

The most startling evidence of the falloff is the effective disappearance of illegal border crossers from Mexico, with some experts estimating the net number of new Mexicans settling in the United States at zero. The size of the illegal-immigrant population peaked in 2007, with about 58 percent of it of Mexican origin, according to the Pew Hispanic Center; since 2008, that population has shrunk by roughly 200,000 a year. Illegal immigrants from Asia and other parts of the globe have similarly dwindled in numbers.

This new equilibrium is here to stay, in large part because Mexico’s birthrate is plunging. In 1970 a Mexican woman, on average, gave birth to 6.8 babies, and when they entered their 20s, millions journeyed north for work. Today the country’s birthrate — at 2.1 — is approaching that of the United States. That portends a shrinking pool of young adults to meet Mexico’s future labor needs, and less competition for jobs at home.

If the number of immigrants is declining, what about that other nativist bugbear, assimilation? There’s little doubt that immigrants’ potential as economic contributors turns on their ability to assimilate. Fortunately, recent studies by John Pitkin, Julie Park and me show that immigrant parents and children, especially Latinos, are making extraordinary strides in assimilating.

Today, barely a third of adult immigrants have a high-school diploma. But the children of Latino immigrants have always outperformed their parents in educational achievement. By 2030 we expect 80 percent of their children who arrived in the 1990s before age 10 to have completed high school and 18 percent to have a bachelor’s degree.

But it is immigrants’ success in becoming homeowners — often overlooked in immigration debates — that is the truest mark of their desire to adopt America as home. Consider Latinos. Among those in the wave of 1990s immigrants, just 20 percent owned a home in 2000. We expect that percentage to rise to 69 percent — and 74 percent for all immigrants — by 2030, well above the historical average for all Americans.

Who will be selling these homes to these immigrants? The 78 million native-born baby boomers looking to downsize as their children grow up and leave home. Fortunately for them, both immigrants and their children will be there to buy their homes, putting money into baby-boomer pockets and helping to shore up future housing prices.

Indeed, with millions of people retiring every week, America’s immigrants and their children are crucial to future economic growth: economists forecast labor-force growth to drop below 1 percent later this decade because of retiring baby boomers.

Immigrants’ extraordinary progress in assimilating would be faster if federal and state policies encouraged it. Unfortunately, they don’t. This year, the Department of Homeland Security plans to spend a measly $18 million — far less than a tenth of 1 percent of its budget — on helping immigrants assimilate. Meanwhile, states with large immigrant populations are cutting the budgets of community and state colleges, precisely where immigrant students predominantly enroll.

How do we change course and begin treating immigrants as a vast, untapped human resource? The answer goes to the heart of shifting from an immigration policy to an immigrant policy.

For starters, the billions of dollars spent on border enforcement should be gradually redirected to replenishing and boosting the education budget, particularly the Pell grant program for low-income students. Some money could be channeled to nonprofits like ImmigrationWorks and Welcoming America, which are at the forefront of helping migrants assimilate.

Second, the Departments of Labor, Commerce and Education need to play a greater role in immigration policy. Yes, as long as there remains a terrorist threat from abroad, the Department of Homeland Security should have an immigration component. But immigration policy is all about cultivating needed workers. That means helping immigrants and their children graduate from high school and college. It means that no migrant should have to stand in line for an English class. It means assistance in developing migrants’ job skills to better compete in an increasingly information- and knowledge-based economy.

Thanks to our huge foreign-born population (12 percent of the total), America can remain the world’s richest and most powerful nation for decades. Shaping an immigrant policy that focuses on developing the talents of our migrants and their children is the surest way to realize this goal.

Latino Immigration to the U.S. Could End This Year – Shannon K. O’Neil – International – The Atlantic.

Looking ahead to the new year ahead of us, these next two weeks I want to look at important developments affecting Latin America that are worth keeping a close eye on in 2012. The first is the changing nature of immigration.

The flow of immigrants from Latin America to the United States, a constant and often accelerating trend of the last three decades, slowed in 2011. The most prominent was the change from Mexico. New arrivals fell off a cliff, with apprehensions at the border hitting their lowest levels in seventeen years. The drop is so great that Doug Massey, head of the Mexican Migration Project (a long term survey of Mexican emigration at Princeton University), claims that for the first time in sixty years, Mexican migration to the United States has hit a net zero.

Though Mexico is the single largest source of migrants to the United States, providing roughly a third of all newcomers, they weren’t the only change. Anecdotal evidence at least suggests that many Brazilian migrants – which once numbered around one million – started heading home as well. Unemployment fell to all time lows, and numerous articles pointed out the labor scarcities both for high and low skilled workers.

There are many reasons behind these trends, some general, some country specific. Many point to the Obama administration’s rather tough immigration policy as one reason for the decline. A record-breaking 400,000 immigrants were deported last year, and immigration prosecutions increased almost eighty percent along the U.S-Mexico border in the last four years. For Mexico, others speculate that the rise of organized crime and violence along the border may deter some from contemplating the journey (though studies, such as that done by Jezmin Fuentes et al., suggest this may be less of a deterrent than many claim).

An important factor is the weak U.S. economy. With unemployment rates hovering at just over eight percent, there are fewer jobs for natives and migrants alike. This has occurred at a time when many of their home countries are growing steadily – at a decent 4 percent regional average clip, and much more in particular countries and economic strongholds. Better job opportunities in the region broadly — but particularly in Brazil — encouraged many to return home, and kept others from leaving at all.

Looking ahead, a U.S. economic recovery would recreate the pull north for Latin Americans seeking to improve their lot. If the Chinese economy stumbles this too could slow returns, or push more migrants north (especially from Brazil, which counts China as its largest trading partner). Meanwhile, flows from Central America are likely to continue as long as economic opportunities there remain scarce. The real question is Mexico. There, demographics have already shifted, with fewer Mexicans coming of age and entering the work force each year. As a result, the Mexican immigration boom of the 1990s and early 2000s is unlikely to be repeated ever again.