Greg Siskind on Immigration Law and Policy

IMMIGRANT OF THE DAY: EUGENIA BRIN - SCIENTIST

 

I had a chance to get to know Genia Brin, Google founder Sergey Brin's mom, when we jointly served on the board of HIAS. She's an impressive woman who could sit back and relax, but instead she goes to work everyday as a NASA scientist and works on climate and forecasting projects for our nation's space agency. This week Genia entered the public limelight when she co-wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Daily News making the economic case for immigration reform. Genia has not forgotten her own immigrant experience and is heading up a major project for HIAS involving archival preservation relating to the Russian Jewish wave of immigration in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

WHITE HOUSE SIGNALS IMMIGRATION REFORM EFFORTS DEFINITELY A GO FOR 2010

This is key. We've been hearing that the White House was still up in the air between the energy bill and immigration and that one of the two would likely be pushed back until after the election. Now it looks like the White House thinks it can walk and chew gum (presumably after the President's approval ratings are slipping as people sense the White House is not actually keeping any of its promises).

IMMIGRATION HUMOR: LOU DOBBS "QUITS" CNN, DEMANDS THAT PEOPLE STOP PUTTING QUOTES AROUND "QUIT"

More fun Dobbs humor at Ridiculopathy.

IPC RELEASES RECOMMENDATIONS ON FUTURE OF E-VERIFY

The Immigration Policy Center has released a new report entitled FOCUSING ON THE SOLUTIONS -
Employment Verification: Repairing our Broken Immigration System which discusses the future of the E-Verify program. IPC makes a number of helpful recommendations including the following:

1. Comprehensive immigration reform - No mandatory E-Verify unless it is incorporated in to comprehensive reform legislation.

2. Apply to new hires only

3. Data accuracy: Every effort must be made to ensure that the data accessed by employers is accurate, continuously updated, and subject to review.

4. Documentation: The documents that workers are required to present must be documents that all U.S. citizens and legal workers will reasonably be able to obtain.

5. Worker protections: There must be rigorous oversight of the program and significant penalties for employer misuse of the program.

6. Complaint and redress procedures: If a worker is adversely affected by an employer’s misuse of the program, or because of a database error, a clear complaint process must be available so the worker can report the incident and receive redress.

7. Due-process protections: Individuals must be allowed to view their own records and contact the appropriate agency to correct any errors that exist.

8. Privacy protections: The amount of data to be collected and stored must be minimized, and penalties must be created for collecting or maintaining data not authorized in the statute. Furthermore, there must be serious penalties for use of EEVS data to commit identity fraud, unlawfully obtain employment, or for any other unauthorized purpose.

9.Resources: Sufficient resources will be necessary to implement and maintain a new or expanded EEVS, including additional personnel to handle the enormous increase in queries associated with a mandatory system.

10. Outreach: Significant community outreach and education must precede any expansion of EEVS in order to inform both employers and workers about how the system works, their rights and responsibilities under the new system, and avenues for redress in cases of error or unfair employment practices.

IPC Report on E-Verify -

IMMIGRATION HUMOR: THE REAL REASON DOBBS IS LEAVING CNN

 
From the fine folks at The Onion.

EFFECTIVELY IMMEDIATELY!

Lou Dobbs has quit CNN and his last show was this evening. No word from the Dark Lord on his next haunting post.

FLORIDA SENATE CANDIDATE TRIES TO STRADDLE IMMIGRATION ISSUE

Marco Rubio has a challenge. He needs to appeal to conservatives in order to drum up enough votes to defeat popular Governor Charlie Crist in next year's Florida GOP primary. Then he has to run back to the middle to appeal to an increasingly liberal Florida general electorate. When it comes to immigration, he needs to come off as tough on illegally present workers. And then he somehow has to seem reasonable on the issue by the time he gets to the November election. The Miami Herald reports on how this is going to be a tough task.

SENATORS THINK WORKERS ARE WIDGETS

When I was in law school at the University of Chicago, our economics-oriented professors would often refer to "widgets" when they needed to refer to an unnamed manufactured object. A widget is really an "any object" that is interchangeable with other widgets. The idea is that you can focus on broader economic principles if you can keep the student from focusing on the particulars of a given industry. 

And despite a stated concern for workers, Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) really think of workers as widgets - interchangeable cogs in the world of business. They are proposing the Employ America Act which seeks to bar employers that have had layoffs from being able to file H-1Bs even if a needed H-1B employee is in a field completely different than the occupation of laid off workers and even if a company only employs a very tiny percentage of H-1Bs in its workforce. This is a sledgehammer approach to immigration policy and is simply protectionism that would likely constitute a violation of the General Agreement on Trade in Services. If it passed, it could land the US in the world trade court.

Workers are NOT widgets and to say that any person can basically replace any other person really insults the dignity of the American worker.

grassley letter -

IMMIGRANT OF THE DAY: NASIM PEDRAD - COMEDIAN

 
Saturday Night Live welcomed Iranian-born Nasim Pedrad as its newest cast member this season. Nasim is the cast's first Asian performer and comes from a successful improv career in Los Angeles. I'm looking forward to seeing what memorable characters Nasim will bring us this season.

IMMIGRANTS PLAYING CRITICAL ROLE IN MILITARY

My friend Margaret Stock has prepared an excellent report for the Immigration Policy Center entitled ESSENTIAL TO THE FIGHT: IMMIGRANTS IN THE MILITARY EIGHT YEARS AFTER 9/11. Margaret, an officer in the army and the undisputed leading national expert on immigration and the American armed forces, notes a number of key findings in her report:

• As of June 30, 2009, there were 114,601 foreign‐born individuals serving in the armed forces, representing 7.91 percent of the 1.4 million military personnel on active duty. Roughly 80.97 percent of foreign‐born service members were naturalized U.S. citizens, while 12.66 percent were not U.S. citizens.
• In Fiscal Year (FY) 2009, 10,505 members of the U.S. military were naturalized. Naturalizations of immigrants in the military are at their highest during times of war.
• The September 11 attacks precipitated immediate changes in policies on immigrants in the military. Once the nation was at war, immigrants in the armed forces were eligible for naturalization under the special wartime military naturalization statute. As of October 2009, more than 53,000 immigrants had taken advantage of this provision to become U.S. citizens.
• Recognizing that immigrants could provide special assistance to the armed forces as translators, Congress in 2006 passed a law providing for up to 50 immigrant visas per year for translators serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.1 Congress briefly expanded this number to 500, and later enacted laws allowing additional immigrant visas for Iraqis and Afghanis who had worked overseas for the U.S. government.
• Despite the important contributions of immigrants to the military, Congress still has not passed the Development, Relief, and Education Act for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would legalize young undocumented immigrants—when they pursue a college education or serve in the U.S. military—if they entered the United States before the age of 16, graduated from a U.S. high school, stayed out of trouble with the law, and have at least five years’ continuous presence in the United States.

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