Articles Posted in Comprehensive Immigration Reform

The division of red states and blue states once again surfaced in an American presidential election. But so did an American tradition of giving a guy who has done a good job under difficult circumstances another term in office.

Moreover, Americans endorsed President Obama’s overall approach to restoring the American economy for the middle class and continuing with a national guarantee of reforming our Broken Immigration System. The general feeling is good, our clients are optimistic and excited and we see that from our Facebook page comments as well as my email inbox.

See Below a statement from AILA:

They came to the United States as children, their parents bringing them into the country illegally through no fault of their own.

For some, it’s the only home they’ve ever known. Though they’re undocumented, they hope to build their lives here.

And their future lies in the hands of elected officials for whom they can’t vote.

As many as two million undocumented immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States as children could qualify to stay under the proposed DREAM Act, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. While Congress has unsuccessfully worked on immigration reform for years, one of Idaho’s congressmen is optimistic that gridlock will soon dissolve.

But with different proposals on the table, no one knows what that reform might look like.

DREAM Act vs. Deferred Action
There are plenty of immigration reform options for Congress to consider.

The widely cited DREAM Act gives legal permanent residency to qualifying undocumented students. First introduced in 2001, the bill has been reintroduced in various forms frequently since then.

Despite Democrats controlling both House and Senate in 2010, Senate Republicans blocked passage of the bill through filibuster.

In June 2012, President Barack Obama issued an executive order deferring deportation cases for undocumented immigrants who meet certain criteria, such as graduating school and having no significant criminal record.

Deferred action isn’t DREAM — it offers no path to citizenship, for one — but it’s a step in the right direction, said immigration attorney Jeremy Pittard in an interview last week.

“I’d like to see it become legislation,”said Pittard, who practices in Twin Falls and Jerome. “It’s going to take an act of Congress to make this permanent.”
The STEM Act
The DREAM Act and deferred action aren’t the only immigration proposals, and not all deal with undocumented immigrants.

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This post was provided by AILA today before the debate, wanted to share with our readers. Who do you think did better this evening?

Questions for Mitt Romney on immigration for the first debate:

1. You’ve stated that within two years of taking office “we will have the full immigration reform plan” you’ve proposed in place. To date you have stated that you would veto the DREAM Act, that you are in favor of self-deportation, and that you support visas for graduates with advance degrees. Can you detail for us the main components of your immigration reform package? Specifically, how you will resolve the issue of the 11 million aspiring citizens who don’t have legal status?
2. Do you feel that you will have to prioritize immigration reform over other key domestic policy goals in order to ensure that it is put in place within your first two years of office?
3. What will happen to those “DREAMers” who have received work permits if you are not successful?

Questions for Barack Obama on immigration for the first debate:

1. You’ve said that you’re “biggest failure” was not getting comprehensive immigration reform done and that you are going to “try to do it in the first year” of your second term. How exactly will you accomplish this while facing, most likely, a divided Congress? Why will your second term efforts be more successful than the first?
2. What other key domestic priorities are you willing to sacrifice in order to get immigration reform done?
3. Your opponent claims that the temporary reprieve you offered “DREAMers” is just a “temporary measure that…will be just enough to get [you] through the election.” Why is he wrong? What specific efforts will you make to pass the DREAM Act in a 2nd term?

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Last week we posted an article on how low skilled workers are not a priority in the U.S. despite the economic need for having low skilled immigrant workers within our economy. In this blog we bring to you news of a bill being proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives. House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R) of Texas unveiled a bill Friday that would grant 55,000 visas a year to foreign-born graduates of American universities with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

Rep. Smith reasons that “These students have the ability to start a company that creates jobs or come up with an invention that could jump-start a whole new industry. In a global economy, we cannot afford to educate these foreign graduates in the US and then send them back home to work for our competitors.”
The bill prioritizes PhD recipients who will work in the US for five years and who come from 217 universities that are qualified as top research institutions by the Carnegie Foundation. The bill attempts to protect US workers from foreign competition by excluding biological and biomedical advanced graduates from the program and requiring companies that want to hire applicants for the special visa to post the job on the site of state workforce agencies.

The provocative question is not whether the US should have more STEM immigrants. From 165 university presidents who sent a letter to President Obama and congressional leaders arguing for STEM visas to bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for similar STEM-boosting legislation in the past to polls showing 3 in 4 Americans (including 6 in 10 conservatives) support such measures, support for more STEM immigration is widespread.

The thorny issue is that public support for more STEM visas has not been previously linked to reducing another form of immigration; can Congress and the president stomach more STEM visas if they come at the expense of the diversity green card program?
“I would like to improve the STEM visa program without doing damage to other parts of our legal immigration system,” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D) of Illinois in a statement. “The president has made this a priority, and I am prepared to support a clean STEM increase because it will help our economy and create jobs. Republicans are only willing to increase legal immigration for immigrants they want by eliminating legal immigration for immigrants they don’t want.”

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Many people view low-skilled immigrants as an economic burden because they produce few income taxes. But it’s not just these immigrants—almost half of all Americans had no income tax liability in 2011. In other words, according to the logic of immigration’s opponents, America’s economy would benefit from deporting half the country’s population. Despite its absurd implications, no other argument against immigration receives more attention from Congress and the media.

Many policies advocated by the major anti-immigration groups—NumbersUSA, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Center for Immigration Studies—rest on the assumption that the U.S. would benefit greatly from significantly fewer people. These groups’ founder, radical environmentalist John Tanton, argue that reducing the population leads to environmental progress, but “[if you] double the number of people,” he says, and “we’re back where we started.” All three groups he founded apply his views to immigration and use the tax argument in favor of deporting undocumented workers and even ending low-skilled immigration altogether.

This view misses the point that low wage earners contribute in a significant way to the economy and government budgets. These workers allow Americans to specialize in more productive endeavors. Consider for a moment the worker who files paperwork for a doctor. Because the doctor is now free to see more patients, the worker has created economic value from both his efforts and the doctor’s efforts. Child care providers free mothers to work; construction workers allow U.S. engineers to finish more projects; many others create similar benefits, and truly make a more substantial contribution to the economy and to the U.S. Treasury than appear on tax returns.

Sergio Garcia’s long fought story may be coming to an end soon. The 35 year old earned his law degree three years ago and passed the bar exam on his first try. As great an accomplishment as this is, Garcia is still pursuing the right to a lawyer’s license because of his immigration status, in flux since 1994 when he returned from Mexico to rejoin his family and finish high school. Garcia has wanted to be a lawyer since he was 10 and never imagined that simple dream would be so complicated.

Thanks to the nation’s wrenching debate over illegal immigration, it has now engulfed Garcia’s path to success. He is at the center of an unprecedented California Supreme Court case that will determine whether the state bar can grant an undocumented immigrant a card to practice law in California.

“I hope the California Supreme Court will let me move on with my life,” Garcia told the Daily Democrat during a day of interviews around his hometown. With the Florida Supreme Court recently taking up a nearly identical case, the issue has inflamed both sides of the immigration conflict and may draw the Obama administration into the fray. Among other legal questions, the California Supreme Court has asked the U.S. Justice Department to address whether federal law precludes the state from granting a professional license to an illegal immigrant.

The share of U.S. small businesses owned by immigrants has expanded by 50 percent since 1990, with almost one-fifth of business owners born outside the country. The number of foreign-born business owners has increased in tandem with the immigrant workforce. Immigrants made up about 9 percent of workers in 1990 and 12 percent of business owners with fewer than 100 employees, according to the report, which analyzed U.S. Census data. In 2010, the foreign-born share of the workforce had grown to 16 percent, and immigrants made up 18 percent of small business owners.

According to the New York Times, Immigrant entrepreneurs are concentrated in professional and business services, retail, construction, educational and social services, and leisure and hospitality. They own restaurants, doctor’s offices, real-estate firms, groceries and truck-transportation services. More of them come from Mexico than any other country, followed by Indians, Koreans, Cubans, Chinese and Vietnamese. California has the highest percentage of immigrants among small-business owners at 33 percent, followed by New York (29 percent), New Jersey (28 percent), Florida (26 percent) and Hawaii (23 percent).

A new study from the Fiscal Policy Institut rousingly affirming the centrality of immigration in the American economy, the study exposes a fault line running through the Republican Party, which mythologizes small-business owners while treating immigrants with hostility bordering on fury. Something to think about.

These are major News!! The court struck down three portions of Arizona’s controversial immigration law on Monday, but allowed one of the key provisions to stand in a highly anticipated split decision.

The Supreme Court stated that Arizona overstepped its authority by creating state crimes targeting illegal immigrants. One provision made it a state crime for illegal immigrants who failed to carry registration papers and another created a crime for soliciting work. The third portion of the law struck down allowed state and local police to arrest illegal immigrants without a warrant in some cases.

The court did allow the main component of the law to stand. That requires state and local police to check the immigration status of people they’ve stopped or detained if a “reasonable suspicion” exists that they’re in the country illegally.

The United States faces intense competition from foreign countries, especially China, who seek to persuade highly skilled citizens who have settled in our country to return home to start businesses there, according to a report released Tuesday by an immigration group led by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York.

“China is proving the most aggressive and ambitious” among the United States’ economic competitors in seeking to reverse a brain drain and lure back their scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, the report by Mr. Bloomberg’s group, the Partnership for a New American Economy, found.

The report is broadly critical of the American immigration system, which says is slow, inflexible and not in sync with the nation’s labor needs. “Self-inflicted economic wounds” caused by the system, the report says, discourages foreigners from investing and blocks foreign students with advanced degrees from American universities from remaining here.

This past April, a decision came down from the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) that addressed an important issue concerning Advance Parole for aliens whose unlawful presence for one year or more would trigger the 10 year ban from the U.S. The BIA decision of Matter of Arrabally and Yerrabelly has clarified what counts as a departure under the INA.

The statute that concerns all immigrants who have been in unlawful presence for one year or more is as follows: “Beginning April 1, 1997, a person who has been unlawfully present in the U.S. for one year or more consecutively and again seeks admission is barred for 10 years from the date of such person’s departure or removal from the U.S. INA section 212(a)(9)(B)(i)(II), 8 U.S.C. section 1182(a)(9)(i)(II). In order to trigger the 10-year bar, departure from the U.S. is required, H.R. Conf. Rep. 104-828, 104th Cong., 2d Sess. at 207.”

The (BIA) has clarified the term – departure — in the Matter of Arrabally on April 17, 2012 which will help thousands of immigrant applicants who like Manohar Rao Arrabally have been entangled in the web of statutes, regulations, case law, and agency memorandum.