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2023-01-18
American Immigration Council;
The American Immigration Council works to strengthen America by shaping how America thinks about and acts towards immigrants and immigration and by working toward a more fair and just immigration system that opens its doors to those in need of protection and unleashes the energy and skills that immigrants bring.
2023-03-30
Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law;
Built from 22 agencies with disparate missions, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) routinely gathers intelligence to guide its strategic and operational activities. But in the two decades since its inception, scores of incidents have undermined the legitimacy of its intelligence programs.Congress and the department's own general counsel and inspector general, among others, have shown that DHS intelligence officers abused their counterterrorism authorities to suppress racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. In support of the Trump administration's goals to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement and spin an election-season story of anarchy, DHS sent intelligence officers to Portland, Oregon, to surveil protestors, create dossiers on dissidents, and enable U.S. Border Patrol special forces to whisk demonstrators away in unmarked vehicles. DHS's Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) also surveilled prominent national security journalists and issued intelligence reports on their tweets. This political targeting was enabled by expansive intelligence authorities and a lack of meaningful checks on discretion.The time has come to rethink DHS intelligence operations and build safeguards that permit the department to provide its leadership with the information it needs while protecting civil rights and civil liberties. This report charts a course for doing so. It focuses initially on I&A, explaining how the office has veered from its counterterrorism mission into tracking social and political movements, often distributing shoddy information and analysis. It then turns to other parts of DHS's intelligence infrastructure, highlighting significant operations run by CBP and ICE as well as situational awareness initiatives, which have often targeted Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. Finally, it explains why the departmental oversight bodies created by Congress to protect civil rights and liberties consistently fail to prevent intelligence abuses at DHS.
2023-02-06
Urban Institute;
Mixed-status immigrant families, where one or more members are undocumented and all other members are either US citizens or have lawful immigration status, are in a difficult predicament. Undocumented family members often have limited economic opportunities because they lack work authorization, are restricted from accessing federal safety net programs, and are under constant threat of immigration enforcement. Immigrant families may fear enrolling their children in safety net programs, even when children may be eligible, because of immigration-related concerns. Yet, limited data on the undocumented population in the US has made it difficult to assess the level of material hardships mixed-status families experience.We examine data from the Urban Institute's December 2021 Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey, a nationally representative survey of adults ages 18 to 64, to assess material hardships in the previous year among adults in mixed-status families, adults in families with permanent residents, adults in families with naturalized citizens, and adults in all-US-born families.Our findings show the following:Adults in mixed-status families were more likely than adults in families with other immigration statuses and adults in all-US-born families to report material hardships. Nearly half of adults in mixed-status families reported food insecurity, a share much higher than that for adults in other families.Adults in mixed-status families were much more likely than those in other families to have a child in the family and to have low family incomes.Our findings support previous research on how immigration policies designed to limit access to employment and safety net supports for undocumented individuals can affect other members of their family. If a goal of policymakers is to reduce hardships among low-income families and improve equitable access to safety net programs and economic opportunity, then the unique circumstances of mixed-status families, which can include members eligible for these programs, must be considered.
2023-01-17
Public Religion Research Institute;
As politicians struggle with how to address immigration issues, Americans' views on immigration have become increasingly polarized, with Republicans becoming significantly more anti-immigrant in their attitudes over the past few years. Republicans have continually attacked the Biden administration's handling of immigration, claiming that his policies will increase the flow of immigrants over the southern border and calling for U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to resign. These criticisms are expected to increase now that Republicans have regained control of the House of Representatives.Though the Trump-era narrative still resonates among certain portions of the American public, this report reveals that majorities of Americans do not view immigrants as a threat. But people who are more likely to think of immigrants as a threat — including those who most trust conservative media sources and Fox News — they are considerably more anti-immigrant and less supportive of open immigration policies.
2023-06-07
Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University;
The importance of immigrants to the U.S. economy — with or without documents — is well established. But despite the important participation of immigrants in U.S. labor markets, especially in certain sectors, labor shortages have been a growing problem for the U.S. economy for some time. This was the case even before the pandemic, mainly due to an aging workforce and a decline in national fertility rates, but also due to a fall in immigration rates (which accelerated under the Trump administration). All of these factors have led to fewer people participating in the workforce. Consequently, with fewer individuals available to work, there are fewer people contributing to producing goods and services in the U.S., which caps economic growth. This labor force scenario does not bode well for the ongoing dynamism of the U.S. economy, demanding ever more workers. More closely linking immigration and labor markets may suggest possible solutions to both the problem of migration and the need for additional workers.
2023-04-04
Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University;
This brief explores the potential of the TN visa — a category of work permits created by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and preserved in its successor, the United States-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement (USMCA) in 2020 — to aid in solving the growing structural problem of labor shortages in the United States, as well as the country's deepening immigration crisis. Specifically, it outlines modifications that could be made to the visa's eligibility parameters in 2026 — when the USMCA reaches its mandated review date — to provide an important, albeit partial, solution to two urgent issues facing the United States today: 1) key weaknesses in the country's labor markets, including demographic shifts that are shrinking the U.S. workforce, and 2) the need to promote legal, orderly immigration to the United States.
2023-04-17
Porticus;
People with personal experience of migration and forced displacement contribute diverse strengths, expertise and wisdom to their new countries and communities. They bring seeds in their pockets. Over the past 12 months Porticus has been working together with a learning partner and 10 pilot partners, all of which include people with lived experience of migration and forced displacement in their leadership, for our Seeds in our Pockets 12-month pilot project. Their knowledge and insights are central to this report, and we are grateful to be able to share what we learned with our community. The programme which was created as a result of this pilot project (known as MOVE) will focus on supporting movements and lived-experience leadership to realise systems change.
2023-06-20
American Immigration Council;
A record 100 million people around the globe were forced to flee their homes in 2022, up from 65 million in 2015. Of those displaced last year, 32.5 million were refugees who had to leave their country in fear of persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or group membership. Political debates on how to handle recent refugees often focus on questions of humanitarian obligation or public safety concerns. While these are critical considerations, they fail to capture what many Americans experience as the most enduring legacy of refugees: the positive social and economic impact these newcomers have on their cities and towns.This report builds on the previous work published by New American Economy (now a part of the American Immigration Council) and provides updated analyses of how recent refugees are contributing to the U.S. economy. Using the 5-year American Community Survey (ACS) from 2019, we identify a pool of nearly 2.4 million likely refugees based on their country of origin and year of arrival in the United States. This method is conservative in nature but provides us with a large and representative picture of the 3.5 million refugees who have arrived since 1975. The results our work produces are clear. Refugees pay tens of billions of dollars in taxes each year. And in a country where immigrants have long been known to be more likely than the U.S.-born to start businesses, refugees show a particular willingness to make such long-term investments in the country. They found companies, become U.S. citizens, and buy homes at notably high rates.
2023-03-17
Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University;
This brief explores how Syrian refugees who are women and children gain access to employment and how their vulnerabilities influence their integration into Turkish labor markets, specifically the agricultural sector. This analysis incorporates the concept of "intersectional vulnerabilities," or the interconnected disadvantages created by social categorizations such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and social status. It also highlights the interconnectedness between women's activities in the realms of production-paid work and unpaid domestic responsibilities by focusing on how the feminization of Syria's agricultural labor force in Turkey is built on the intersectional vulnerabilities of women and children.Finally, this brief examines how Syrian female labor is institutionalized through paid and unpaid activities that are directly related to production of low-cost crops that can compete in international markets or that support lower wages for domestic consumers.
2023-03-20
Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University;
In this policy brief, we summarize our research on the sexual and reproductive health of women migrants in Morocco, as well as their history of violence and utilization of support services. Our findings show a high prevalence of SGBV among women migrants in Morocco, poor utilization of support services, as well as significant SRH issues. We recommend improving access to adequate information about existing protection and support services, establishing and strengthening support networks, improving research and data collection on SGBV and the barriers to access services, improving coordination mechanisms between actors in migrant health and protection, and promoting transparency and accountability.
2023-03-19
Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University;
Female Palestinian refugee adolescents living in camps face enormous challenges that influence their health. Studies have shown the spatial and physical contexts of people's lives — where and how they live — determine their health, meaning that refugee health cannot be fully understood in isolation from the spatial and physical contexts that shape and sustain health conditions and community environment. Chronic disease, mental health issues, health conditions, and behavior are all affected by spatial and physical factors such as neighborhood socioeconomics, social environment, and the physical (built) environment, all of which are amplified inside refugee camps, including Palestinian camps. Place and space take into account the social relations and social construction of a community as well as the personal experience of spatiality, temporality, and materiality that influence the process of shaping the health status of individuals, especially refugees. This study investigates the construct of space in Palestinian camps in Jordan and the West Bank, and its effect on the health of female adolescents living in these camps. We examine how place and space influence and shape the health status of refugees. To do this, we consider the social relations and social construction of these refugee communities as well as individual refugees' personal experiences of spatiality, temporality, and materiality.
2023-03-21
Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University;
Against the perception of people on the move as helpless and passive, this brief draws on the stories of 12 Sudanese females residing in Ard El-Lewa, a densely populated informal urban area in Cairo with a substantial presence of Sudanese. This ethnographic fieldwork was conducted between January and June 2021. Admittedly, these stories do not represent whole communities of people on the move. But they are a glimpse into the lives of the Sudanese women I collaborated with, interviewed, and observed through fieldwork. More importantly, these stories showcase how people on the move are not mute victims. This brief demonstrates that the stories and voices of people on the move should be noticed and reflected, and that people on the move should have a leading say regarding the contexts and conditions that affect them, as well as how they are represented.