Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety (Tuesday, March 15, 2022)

First, many members of the public mistakenly believe that our current laws permit anyone to immigrate legally to the United States as long as they don’t have a criminal background or other negative baggage and are willing to wait their turn in line. But as members of this subcommittee are well aware, our laws take the opposite approach. Being free of such disqualifying characteristics is not enough. To be admitted as a lawful permanent resident (LPR), a person must also affirmatively qualify under one of several specific categories created by Congress. The main categories are those seeking unification with specified family members who are U.S. citizens or LPRs, those whose occupational skills are needed by U.S. employers, those who hail from countries that in the past five years have sent relatively few immigrants to the United States, and refugees. A person who doesn’t fall within any of those four categories (or a handful of much smaller miscellaneous categories) cannot lawfully immigrate to the United States.
Second, the Immigration and Nationality Act contains more than 20 pages laying out the grounds on which otherwise qualified intending immigrants are ineligible. These inadmissibility grounds generally relate to criminality, national security, communicable diseases, likelihood of becoming a public charge, protection of the U.S. labor force, and the integrity of the immigration system itself.
Third, with some important exceptions, there are annual numerical limits on the admission of qualified immigrants. Those limits are of two kinds. There are annual numerical ceilings for eachcategory (and many subcategories) of immigrants – family immigration, employment immigration, etc. Within each of those categories, there are additional annual limits on how many immigrants may be admitted from a single country. In the past three decades Congress has enacted several laws concerned principally with immigration enforcement. Not since the Immigration Act of 1990, however, has Congress taken any major action to update our nation’s policies on legal immigration. In the intervening decades, much has changed, and there is now ample reason to revisit the system that governs the lawful admission of immigrants to the United States.

See video and read statements here>

This NYT article, March 7, 2021, highlights the plight of Cristina Morales, a T.P.S. holder, and her daughter, Crista, who are the lead plaintiffs in the case seeking to prevent the U.S. government from terminating the program for Salvadorans. Their earlier Lawsuit Prevented 400,000 Deportations.

Now It’s Biden’s Call. Trump tried to end a 30-year program that shielded migrants, many fleeing conditions that U.S. foreign policy helped foster. What does America owe them?

This excellent article, in English and Spanish, shows the origins of this program and the attempts by the Trump political operatives to ignore the State Department advisors on this program, and terminate this program.

Here is the web site. There is also an audio recording available on this site.

Many Americans have never heard of this humanitarian immigration program.

Congress created Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the Immigration Act of 1990. It is a temporary immigration status provided to nationals of specifically designated countries that are confronting an ongoing armed conflict, environmental disaster, or extraordinary and temporary conditions. It provides a work permit and stay of deportation to foreign nationals from those countries who are in the United States at the time the U.S. government makes the designation. There were approximately 411,000 TPS recipients residing in the United States as of October 2020.

1. “Immigrants will take American jobs, lower our wages, and especially hurt the poor.”

This is the most common argument and also the one with the greatest amount of evidence rebutting it. First, the displacement effect is small if it even affects natives at all. Immigrants are typically attracted to growing regions and they increase the supply and demand sides of the economy once they are there, expanding employment opportunities. Second, the debate over immigrant impacts on American wages is confined to the lower single digits—immigrants may increase the relative wages for some Americans by a tiny amount and decrease them by a larger amount for the few Americans who directly compete against them. Immigrants likely compete most directly against other immigrants so the effects on less-skilled native-born Americans might be very small or even positive.

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Our attitudes about immigrants are wrapped up not only with our personal characteristics, life experiences, and beliefs about a wide range of other issues, they are also integrally shaped by our social identities. For instance, we are galvanized when a social group that we feel a part of is under threat. Amidst today’s toxic polarization, for example, both liberals and conservatives feel threatened by the other. We are also influenced by the emotions and stances our social groups have or take towards an issue (group norms). People often think and act in accordance with perceived group norms rather than rely on their own individual attitudes or beliefs. Lastly, both threat and the influence that group norms have on us feel even more powerful when our group affiliations overlap (e.g., say one is white, evangelical, and conservative, and that each of those groups shares the same life situations, threat perceptions and policy stances).

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At a time when people have more information at their fingertips than ever, it feels as though it has become equally easy to share it widely or to ignore, discount, and discredit it. Several factors have contributed to this state of affairs. New technologies have given a platform to a wider range of voices, but this has also meant that unvetted information and politically motivated “fake news” find their way more easily into the bloodstream of public debate. Human nature also shapes how people consume and recall information, making them more likely to resist information that contradicts their existing beliefs and personal experiences.

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