Immigration Reform Research Articles

Focus: The Voice of the People

10 | International Union Rights | 24/3 FOCUS | FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION With Bermuda facing rising unemployment and an unequal burden of sacrifice being placed on the lowest and the least, a coalition of concerned persons including Bermuda’s unions and community groups formed the People’s Campaign for Equality, Jobs and Justice. The People’s Campaign was represented by three principals: Rev. Nicholas Tweed, Bro. Chris Furbert, President of the Bermuda Industrial Union, and myself, Jason Hayward, President of the Bermuda Public Services Union. As a group, we were concerned with the growing frustration and mistrust of the political process and the organisation provided a voice for the people during a very controversial time in our history. To raise the public’s awareness about key issues facing the island, the People’s Campaign organised a number of successful public rallies, marches and town hall meetings. The focus of these events included topics such as the economic impact of the government’s budget on its people, the need for comprehensive immigration reform, unfair banking practices and the government’s proposed precertification of medical testing for Bermuda’s healthcare system. The People’s Campaign also called for a Commission of Inquiry into the historical losses of citizens’ property through theft and/or dispossession . Additionally, we produced a monthly newsletter which focused on evaluating the effectiveness of the Government and the Opposition and organised a Youth Empowerment Symposium. In November 2014, the then Finance Minister Bob Richards announced that the One Bermuda Alliance (OBA) Government had reached an agreement with the Canadian Commercial Corporation (CCC) for the construction and financing of a new airport terminal building. CCC is a Crown corporation of the Government of Canada whose purpose is to assist Canadian businesses access foreign government procurement markets through government-to-government contracting. Given the impact that it would have on the public purse and job creation, the People’s Campaign was keenly interested in the $290m airport redevelopment project. Given our position on the importance of good governance and transparency, we were concerned with the process used to select Aecon as the contractor for the project by circumventing the Island’s tendering process. Additionally, it was felt that this project would potentially create a burden on the Government’s resources that would impede its ability to respond to the needs of vulnerable members of the public. Our concerns were also shared with the majority of the people of Bermuda, a sentiment reflected in a survey which was carried out in 2015 that revealed that 75percent of Bermudians felt it was a bad deal for Bermuda. With the support of the Bermuda Trade Union Congress, the People’s Campaign led the objections against this deal on behalf of the people of Bermuda. It is against this backdrop that I, along with my colleagues, became the primary targets of the former Government attacks. A people’s right: access to information The unwillingness of the Bermuda Government to provide the public with details on the deal brokered with CCC and Aecon led the People’s Campaign to submit an ‘Access to Information Request’ with the Canadian Government seeking access to documentation related to this project. As CCC is a Crown corporation, it is subject to the Access to Information Act which gives the public the right of access to the records of government institutions. Through this request, the People’s Campaign obtained copies of over 2000 emails related to this deal. The information contained in these emails highlighted some stark contradictions between the public statements made by MP Bob Richards versus the private exchanges made by the OBA Government, CCC and Aecon. These contradictions were most notably related to the lack of due diligence in the procurement process, transparency, misinformation and privatisation. The People’s Campaign believed that the public should have access to these emails so that they could discern for themselves whether or not our political leaders were acting in their best interest. A people’s right: freedom of speech Committed to the principles of good governance, accountability and transparency, the People’s Campaign released these documents to the public, and on 11 May 2015 held a special broadcast on a local television talk...

Geography Unbound in Héctor Duarte's Mariposas migrantes

This article examines an expansive mural project by Chicago-based painter Hector Duarte, located in his hometown pueblo of Caurio de Guadalupe, Michoacan, within the context of the massive immigration reform protests across the U.S. in 2006. The study discusses how the form, subject matter, and the process of creation of Mariposas migrantes transcends boundaries, including art historical categories and national borders. The study includes a map capturing the geographic distribution of hundreds of diverse artists who have collaborated on the mural project, reifying Duarte's transnational vision.

The Effects of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on the Educational Outcomes of Undocumented Students

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is the first large-scale immigration reform to affect undocumented immigrants in the United States in decades and offers eligible undocumented youth temporary relief from deportation and renewable work permits. While DACA has improved the economic conditions and mental health of undocumented immigrants, we do not know how DACA improves the social mobility of undocumented immigrants through its effect on educational attainment. This paper uses administrative data on students attending a large public university to estimate the effect of DACA on undocumented students' educational outcomes. The data are unique because they accurately identify students' legal status, account for individual heterogeneity, and allow separate analysis of students attending community colleges versus baccalaureate-granting, 4-year colleges. Results from difference-in-difference estimates demonstrate that as a temporary work-permit program, DACA incentivizes work over educational investments but that the effect of DACA on educational investments depends on how easily colleges accommodate working students. At 4-year colleges, DACA induces undocumented students to make binary choices between attending school on a full-time basis or dropping out of school to work. At community colleges, undocumented students have the flexibility to simply reduce course work to accommodate increased work hours. Overall, the results suggest that the precarious and temporary nature of DACA creates barriers to educational investments.

Proposing a One-Year Time Bar for 8 U.S.C. § 1226(c)

Section 1226(c) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) requires federal detention of certain deportable noncitizens when those noncitizens leave criminal custody. This section applies only to noncitizens with a criminal record (“criminal noncitizens”). Under section 1226(c), the Attorney General must detain for the entire course of his or her removal proceedings any noncitizen who has committed a qualifying offense “when the alien is released” from criminal custody. Courts construe this phrase in vastly different ways when determining whether a criminal noncitizen will be detained. The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) and the Fourth Circuit read “when the alien is released” to mean “any time after the alien is released,” allowing the government to detain and deport criminal noncitizens years or decades after their release from criminal custody. A majority of district courts as well as the First Circuit, however, have interpreted the clause to mean “immediately upon the alien’s release.” Under this construction, immigration enforcement can detain a criminal noncitizen for deportation and detention only shortly after her release from criminal custody. This Note argues that in light of recent legal and policy changes, the latter interpretation of section 1226(c) offers the correct understanding of the statute. It further contends that a universal one-year time bar should be implemented for detentions occurring under section 1226(c) to respect due process concerns.

US Immigration Policy and the Case for Family Unity

As the Trump administration contemplates immigration reform, it is important to better understand what works and what does not in the current system. This paper reviews and critically evaluates the...

Moving Beyond Comprehensive Immigration Reform and Trump: Principles, Interests, and Policies to Guide Long-Term Reform of the US Immigration System

This paper introduces a special collection of 15 papers that chart a course for long-term reform of the US immigration system. The papers look beyond recent legislative debates and the current era ...

From cultural sojourner to guestworker? The historical transformation and contemporary significance of the J-1 visa Summer Work Travel Program

Since the mid-1990s, the J-1 Summer Work Travel (SWT) program has quadrupled in size. While many J-1 visa holders are in the U.S. to study or conduct research, the primary activity of SWT participants is low-wage labor. We analyze the trajectory of the SWT program since its origins in the Fulbright-Hays Act, underscoring both change and continuity in the practical and discursive handling of what are, in effect, guestworkers. Our analysis reveals both longstanding concerns about the SWT program’s risks to foreign and domestic workers, as well as repeated efforts by U.S. government officials and private sector stakeholders to justify its status as cultural exchange rather than temporary work. Yet despite these concerns, over the last two decades, the SWT program has become larger and less regulated. We explore these changes in the context of two contending forces shaping the labor market: on the demand side, a transformation in the organization of work towards ‘fissured’ workplaces and contingent employment, and, on the supply side, limited access to foreign labor due to political gridlock over comprehensive immigration reform. We conclude that the SWT program both reflects broader trends in managed migration and embodies the model of flexible migrant labor many employers now demand.

Employer Organizations and Labour Immigration Policy in Australia and the United Kingdom: The Power of Political Salience and Social Institutional Legacies

AbstractThis article examines employer organizations and labour immigration policy in Australia and the United Kingdom. Drawing on 102 elite interviews, it analyses employer organizations’ preferences and influence over recent reforms. The article builds on Culpepper's arguments relating to the significance of political salience and identifies the importance of various institutional factors, particularly social institutions, in shaping employer organizations’ decisions and engagement with the policy process. Political salience and social institutional legacies are critical for explaining why employer organizations played a central role in driving labour immigration reforms in Australia and a marginal role in the UK. Large intakes of workers from the European Union, which sustained immigration as a high salience issue and fuelled the Brexit campaign, also influenced the strategies of UK employer organizations.

The Graying of the Immigrant DreamThe Sounds of Latinidad: Immigrants Making Music and Creating Culture in a Southern City. (Social Transformations in American Anthropology). By Samuel K. Byrd. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

The Graying of the Immigrant Dream<i>The Sounds of Latinidad: Immigrants Making Music and Creating Culture in a Southern City</i>. (Social Transformations in American Anthropology). By Samuel K. Byrd. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Hard to Believe: The High Cost of a Biometric Identity Card

A quarter century after the last major legalization in the United States, there is much evidence and a growing consensus that our current immigration system is unworkable and in serious need of reform. One of the proposed solutions has been the creation of a Biometric Enrollment, Locally-stored Information, and Electronic Verification of Employment (BELIEVE) card that would be mandatory for anyone — citizen or non-citizen — employed in a U.S. workplace. This plan was initially offered as part of a bi-partisan proposal on comprehensive immigration reform and is likely to be part of future comprehensive reform discussions. This paper analyzes the costs and unintended consequences of such a proposal. Our analysis shows that the BELIEVE system cannot achieve its goal of preventing unauthorized employment. We estimate that establishing a biometric employment card would cost almost $40 billion at the outset, with ongoing maintenance costs of at least $3 billion per year. Requiring all working Americans to get this identity card would fundamentally transform the information demands the United States government places on its citizens. The cards would be unreliable and inadequate to prevent fraud; would lead to privacy violations; and would place undue burdens on the poor. At the same time, the BELIEVE cards would likely be ineffective in targeting the employment of unauthorized migrants. We recommend that rather than spending tens of billions of dollars on an expensive, intrusive and ineffective program, the government examine the root causes of unauthorized migration and employment. In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), touting the new law as a solution to the employment of unauthorized immigrants. More than two decades of experience suggests that IRCA has been unable to prevent the employment of unauthorized workers and policymakers are once again searching for quick fixes. The BELIEVE system is not the answer; it will cost us dearly at a time when we can least afford it.

The role of public relations in ethnic advocacy and activism: A proposed research agenda

This essay proposes a research agenda for exploring public relations’ role in ethnic advocacy and activism, as a way to build the field’s knowledge of ethnic public relations. To highlight the potential contribution of public relations to ethnic organizations, and to describe the particular challenges that ethnic public relations faces in societies that sometimes marginalize ethnic groups and issues, this article describes two advocacy efforts by Latino-serving organizations, one in favor of immigration reform and the other in response to the offensive statements against Mexican immigrants stated by politician and entrepreneur Donald Trump. Additionally, the authors propose a research agenda for exploring how public relations is used by ethnic organizations to advance their goals.

Mass Opinion and Immigration Policy in the United States: Re-Assessing Clientelist and Elitist Perspectives

We argue that widely accepted elitist and “clientelist” models of immigration policy in the United States unduly minimize popular pressure on policy-making. These models portray majority opinion in ways that fail to recognize divergence between the public’s abstract goals for immigration policy and its support for the concrete policy changes needed to achieve them. As a result, they obscure many important instances in which immigration policy accords with public preferences despite counter-pressure from elites and organized lobbies. We demonstrate this point by identifying and explaining gaps between generalized attitudes and beliefs about specific policies in the domains of both legal and illegal immigration, showing that status quo legal admissions policies are not starkly at odds with majority preferences and that, contrary to interpretations of most commercial polling on the topic, majorities reject specific aspects of legalization programs that organized lobbies insist on as components of a “grand bargain” to overhaul an immigration system widely viewed as “broken.” Appreciating the nuance in mass opinion toward immigration policy helps explain policy stagnation that confounds elitist models and suggests that forging ahead with immigration reform will require persuading the public and not only successful bargaining among elites and interest groups.

For You Were Strangers in the Land of Egypt: Clergy, Religiosity, and Public Opinion toward Immigration Reform in the United States

AbstractRecently, a number of influential clergy leaders have declared their support for liberal immigration reforms. Do the pronouncements of religious leaders influence public opinion on immigration? Using data from a survey experiment embedded in the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we find that exposure to the arguments from high profile religious leaders can compel some individuals to reconsider their views on the immigration. To be more precise, we find that Methodists, Southern Baptists, and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America leaders successfully persuaded respondents who identify with these religious denominations to think differently about a path to citizenship and about the plight of undocumented immigrants. Interestingly, we also uncovered that religiosity matters in different ways for how parishioners from different religious faiths react to messages from their leaders. These findings force us to reconsider the impact that an increasingly strident clergy may be having on public opinion in general and on support for immigration reform in particular.

Immigration Reform

The topic of immigration reform has been at the forefront of the political debate for many years. The debate has been especially intense in Arizona, a border state where sentiments over immigration are strong and which has, in the last decade, approved a series of measures directed to curtail the presence of unauthorized immigrants. Using the critical race theory notions of majoritarian storytelling and counter-storytelling as well as interest-convergence theory, the present study examined the types of arguments provided by the editorials of two newspapers in Arizona, The Arizona Republic and La Prensa Hispana, on the topic of immigration reform in the period between 2007 and 2011. Results show that the English-language publication justified the need for reform in the interests of American businesses, whereas the Spanish-language newspaper cited the well-being of the immigrant community.

Illuminating Agency: A Latin@ Immigrant Parent's Testimonio on the Intersection of Immigration Reform and Schools

ABSTRACTAnti-immigration reform has created a hostile and threatening climate for Latin@ immigrants and their families. Simple everyday acts that are often taken for granted (i.e. parents dropping off children at school, driving to the grocery store, etc.) became acts that threaten to separate families. As a result, many Latin@ families are currently “living in the shadows” — hiding their immigration status from any agency (including schools) or individuals that may pose a threat. Via the use of field notes and interviews, the author reconstructs one parent's (Blanca) experience cruzando la frontera/crossing the border, as well the moment when Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials appeared at her doorstep, and subsequent actions thereafter. By utilizing Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Latin@ Critical Race Theory (LatCrit), this study centers and prioritizes Blanca's experience navigating the intersecting space between seemingly disconnected immigration reforms and school policies and practices. In doing this, the author illuminates the moment when the convergence of immigration reform and the school resulted in a heightened awareness of parental agency.

From Anglo-Saxon Nativism to Executive Order: Civil Religion and Anti-Immigration Rhetoric

AbstractThis article examines one aspect of current disagreements over immigration reform — Anglo-Saxon nativist rhetoric — through the lens of civil religion. It argues that the idea of America as a “New Jerusalem” can sometimes take on a nativist and even ethno-centric cast. The analysis uses two case studies to articulate the ways in which this nativism can play out in terms of civil religion: Patrick J. Buchanan's folding of immigration concerns into his culture wars rhetoric and some of the far-right rhetoric coming out of the 2016 presidential race in America. This sort of rhetoric can also be found surrounding President Obama's executive action on immigration. The analysis shows that these fears combine a view of American “chosenness” with a sense of existential threat generated by rapid demographic changes. However, while this rhetoric is grounded in civil religion, it is also a symptom of the corruption of the prophetic core of American civil religion.

Immigrant Politics. Analyzing U.S. Presidential Elections through Immigration and Hispanics

The United States is a democracy that every four years elects a President. During the presidential campaigns, the issue of immigration has grown to become one of the most debated in recent times. It has been used to attract voters and to develop the political platform of every candidate. By an empirical analysis of the last four presidential campaigns and the current one of 2016, regarding immigration positions of the candidates and politicians, this article looks to find the connection —if any— with this issue and the Hispanic vote. Thus, candidates focus on these issues in order to gain new constituencies. The declarations and policies about immigration of the 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 candidates will be analyzed in order to validate this premise.Keywords: Immigration Reform; Democrats, Republicans, Hispanics, Presidential campaigns.

Life after Limbo: Stateless Persons in the United States and the Role of International Protection in Achieving a Legal Solution

Stateless persons are not recognized as citizens by any country, and as such, their enjoyment of fundamental human rights depends on the good faith of host countries, and their basic human security and dignity are often subject to the whims of immigration authorities. Despite this intense level of vulnerability, U.S. immigration law does not explicitly recognize statelessness, nor does it provide for humanitarian protection to relieve stateless persons of their suffering. Rather, stateless persons are treated like any other unauthorized migrants in the United States; when they are ordered removed, they are mandatorily detained while immigration officials undertake efforts to execute those orders. Such removal efforts are futile in the case of stateless persons, and when they are ultimately released from detention, they are cast into a legal limbo in which they spend the rest of their lives on immigration parole, uncertain as to what their future may hold. This article argues that it is imperative to establish a protection mechanism for stateless persons in the United States, and critically analyzes a proposal by the U.S. Senate to establish a mechanism for the protection of stateless persons under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as part of its 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (SB 744). This article relies on the international law of statelessness as a benchmark for this critique, and argues that that the proposed mechanism may fail to meaningfully address the statelessness problem in the United States if it is not tethered to the international protection framework.

Policing immigrants: Fear of deportations and perceptions of law enforcement and criminal justice

Summary This study examined the relationship between the fear of deportation and perceptions of law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and the willingness to report crimes among Latinos in the US. Understanding the relationship between increased immigration enforcement and fear of deportation may promote public safety by improving the relationship between the police and Latino communities. Findings Multivariate ordinal logistic regression analyses of the data found that participants who had a greater fear of deportation reported: (1) less confidence that police would not use excessive force (p &lt; .01); (2) less confidence that police would treat Latinos fairly (p &lt; .05); (3) a lower likelihood of reporting crimes (p &lt; .05); and (4) less confidence that the courts would treat Latinos fairly (p &lt; .01). Applications Social work practitioners can help address this issue and improve the relationship between law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and the Latino community by: delivering cultural competence training for police and criminal justice personnel; educating Latinos about how to protect their rights when interacting with police and the criminal justice system; and by advocating for immigration reform that can help improve public safety and reduce fear in Latino communities.

Australian‐Asian Sociability, Student Activism, and the University Challenge to White Australia in the 1950s

During the 1950s, staff, students and graduates of Australian universities were increasingly critical of the racial restrictions on immigration, and their activism contributed to a broader government and community reassessment of the White Australia Policy. Personal experiences of cross‐cultural interactions between Australian students and an increasing number of international students from Asia, including those sponsored by the Australian government's Colombo Plan, underpinned the university challenge to immigration policy. Tertiary curriculum offering new academic interpretations of Asian history and decolonisation also contributed to a growing awareness among university‐educated Australians of Asia, and fostered empathy for its peoples. The publications of the Immigration Reform Group extended this critique of White Australia, and were driven by a moral indignation towards a policy that affected individuals personally known to the critics.