Policy

By Royce Bernstein Murray, Esq.

The dramatic announcement on May 17, 2011 that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for another eighteen months to Haitians, including those who entered the country no later than January 12, 2011, is a welcome step forward in the saga of the Haitian earthquake. The decision to extend and redesignate Haiti for TPS has been a long time coming and reflects more than a year of solid effort on the part of advocates and the Haitian community. In many ways, DHS’s handling of the devastating January 2010 earthquake in Haiti is emblematic of the triumphs and tribulations discussed in a recent report issued by the Immigration Policy Center, Second Annual DHS Progress Report: An Analysis of Immigration Policy in the Second Year of the Obama Administration. This critique found that the immigration agencies appear to be tackling issues affecting Haitians independently, failing to coordinate their enforcement and benefits-oriented policies. At times, critical information was disseminated in a limited and ad hoc fashion, generating confusion and unease about DHS policies. Observers have been left questioning how DHS’s priorities are ordered and whether they are integrated at the department level. DHS’s latest actions offer hope that a more coordinated, thoughtful, and humanitarian approach will prevail. 

Published On: Thu, May 26, 2011 | Download File

Updated 09/09/11 -Frustrated by the lack of comprehensive immigration reform, many advocates, from grassroots community organizers to Members of Congress, have begun calling on President Obama to take action. They want the President and his administration to use the power of the executive branch to defer removals, revisit current policies and priorities, and interpret the law as compassionately as possible. The specific requests vary greatly. Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN), for instance, last year asked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to defer the removal of young people who qualified for legal permanent residence until such time as their legislation, the DREAM Act, became law. In April 2011, nineteen Democratic and Independent U.S. Senators, including Senators Harry Reid (D-NV), Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Kristin Gillibrand (D-NY), reiterated the call to stop the removal of all students who meet the strict requirements of the DREAM Act. While the DREAM Act is frequently invoked, many community groups have also  called for exercising prosecutorial discretion in individual cases by declining to put people in removal proceedings, terminating proceedings, or delaying removals in cases where people have longstanding ties to the community, U.S.-citizen family members, or other characteristics that merit a favorable exercise of discretion. Read more...

Published On: Thu, May 26, 2011 | Download File

How U.S. Integration Policy Stacks Up Against Other Countries

Integration is an often overlooked but key component of U.S. immigration policy. Successful integration of immigrants fuels their success, strengthens communities, and builds bridges between newcomers and other community members. Time and again, the influx of immigrants into a community has been shown to reverse economic decline and breathe new life into urban areas, small towns, and rural communities. Moreover, integration can be a key to entrepreneurship and future economic growth. For example, research by Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander found that nations which focus more on immigrant integration have higher levels of economic competitiveness, are more innovative, and have higher rates of entrepreneurship. Understanding how federal and state laws facilitate or hinder integration is therefore an important component of setting integration policy.Read more...

Published On: Mon, May 09, 2011 | Download File

President Obama’s insistence that his “hands are tied” by Congressional inaction on immigration has raised questions about how much executive power the President has when it comes to immigration. To this end, top immigration law experts, including former counsels to the agencies that manage immigration, have drafted a legal memo outlining the scope of executive branch authority and examples of its use in the immigration context.

Published On: Mon, May 02, 2011 | Download File

By Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, Ph.D.

California is home to nearly 10 million immigrants, more than one quarter of the state’s population. Of those, 2.7 million are undocumented, and the vast majority of them have been living in the United States for more than 10 years. California’s immigrant contributions to the Golden State cannot be overstated. From Cesar Chavez, the pioneering agricultural labor-rights leader in the 20^th century to Sergei Brin, the Russian entrepreneur behind one of the 21st century’s most revolutionary companies, Google Inc., the foreign born and their descendants are woven into the state’s cultural and economic fabric. 

Still, that reality has not prevented some Californians, frustrated with our broken federal immigration system, to call for an Arizona-style “papers please” approach. The stated goal of this new wave of state-based enforcement legislation is to trigger a mass exodus of undocumented immigrants, by making “attrition through enforcement” the policy of state and local government agencies. The threshold question that proponents of S.B.1070-style legislation have failed to answer is whether that goal serves the economic interests of the state’s constituents.Read more...

Published On: Wed, Apr 27, 2011 | Download File

Estimates of the State and Local Taxes Paid by Unauthorized Immigrant Households

Tax Day is an appropriate time to underscore the often-overlooked fact that unauthorized immigrants pay taxes.  The unauthorized, like everyone else in the United States, pay sales taxes.  They also pay property taxes—even if they rent.  At least half of unauthorized immigrants pay income taxes.  Add this all up and it amounts to billions in revenue to state and local governments.  The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) has estimated the state and local taxes paid in 2010 by households that are headed by unauthorized immigrants. These households may include members who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants.  Collectively, these households paid $11.2 billion in state and local taxes.  That included $1.2 billion in personal income taxes, $1.6 billion in property taxes, and $8.4 billion in sales taxes.  The states receiving the most tax revenue from households headed by unauthorized immigrants were California ($2.7 billion), Texas ($1.6 billion), Florida ($806.8 million), New York ($662.4 million), and Illinois ($499.2 million) {See Figure 1 and Table 1}.  These figures should be kept in mind as politicians and commentators continue with the seemingly endless debate over what to do with unauthorized immigrants already living in the United States.  In spite of the fact that they lack legal status, these immigrants—and their family members—are adding value to the U.S. economy; not only as taxpayers, but as workers, consumers, and entrepreneurs as well. Read more...

Published On: Mon, Apr 18, 2011 | Download File

Many who support deportation-only immigration measures want to expand the E-Verify electronic employment verification system. However, doing so would place enormous additional responsibilities on the Social Security Administration (SSA)—an already overburdened agency.  If SSA has to spend time and resources verifying Social Security numbers and fixing database errors for work authorization purposes, SSA will have less time and resources to handle its primary function: providing benefits to millions of deserving Americans.  That’s why the AARP, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and other organizations have voiced their concerns over mandatory E-Verify.  In 2007, the president of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations, Inc. testified that mandatory E-Verify could “cripple SSA’s service capabilities” and negate any progress in addressing the backlog of applications for disability benefits. Read more...

Published On: Fri, Apr 15, 2011 | Download File