Today, the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule officially takes effect. The rule, which would reject immigrants’ visa or green card applications if those immigrants are deemed likely to rely on public assistance programs, will impact middle-income immigrants as well as those who are sick or impoverished, Stef W. Kight reports for Axios. The new restrictions could mean that as many as 400,000 applicants will be denied visas or green cards annually.
As Zolan Kanno-Youngs writes for The New York Times, even as Trump’s border wall continues to rise, it’s his “thick curtain of policy changes,” like this new rule, that have driven what is now a more than 11% nosedive in legal immigration to the U.S.
The National Immigration Forum put together this helpful resource on the details and potential impacts of the new regulations. As we explain, the negative consequences of the public charge rule have already been well-documented: “The new rule acknowledges that rules could lead to the following negative consequences arising from a drop in benefits usage: worse health outcomes, increased use of emergency rooms, increased prevalence of communicable diseases, and more. There are already widespread reports of immigrants disenrolling from nutritional and other programs for which they are eligible because they have heard news about the rule change.”
Welcome to your Miami Monday edition of Noorani’s Notes. Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected].
IGNORED – The Trump administration has largely ignored sick immigrants impacted by his administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, despite initial promises to grant medical exemptions, reports Zolan Kanno-Youngs for The New York Times. “Before Remain in Mexico went into force, immigration officials were required to provide care for sick asylum seekers in their custody. That changed when the administration began returning migrants, many of them already ill, to areas with little access to treatment.” Around 60,000 migrants have been sent south of the border to wait out the duration of their asylum cases. Previously, they could have waited in the U.S. with access to U.S. hospitals and clinics.
COMPROMISE? – Last week, we pointed to reports of the beginnings of a compromise from the Trump administration which, facing pressure from the business community, could expand temporary work visas to support industries hurting for workers. Writing for The Hill, Josh T. Smith of the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University explains why that deal is so urgently needed. “We already know that even temporary immigrant worker programs bring economic success to businesses, and not just in small towns,” Smith writes. “In a study looking at the stock market performance of agricultural and construction businesses, economists found that similar grants of temporary work authorization boosted their performance above the market, and did so for at least six months.”
40% – Immigrant and refugee organizations in the Dallas area continue working to allay immigrants’ fears that a citizenship question will be on this year’s census, Meredith Lawrence reports for the Dallas Observer. While the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration’s effort to include a citizenship question, recent policies and rhetoric have played to rising concerns about participating in the survey. An Urban Institute study released last week indicated that a third of U.S. adults — and 40% of nonwhite and Hispanic adults and adults in immigrant families — are concerned about how information they provide will be used; 31.6% “think it is extremely or very likely that answers to the census will be used to find people living in the US without documentation.”
GREYHOUND – Greyhound, the nation’s largest bus company, said on Friday that it will no longer allow border patrol agents to conduct immigration checks on its buses without a warrant, Gene Johnson reports for The Associated Press. The announcement came after the release of a leaked Border Patrol memo that confirmed agents cannot board buses without the consent of the company, a practice Greyhound had previously insisted they had no choice but to allow.
ART BY DREAMERS – As the Trump administration continues to push for an end to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Dreamers are turning to art to share their stories with the American public, writes Petula Dvorak for The Washington Post. One of them is Gabriel Mata, 28, a University of Maryland graduate student and dance teacher whose dances are designed to communicate the experience of growing up undocumented in America. “Sometimes, after a performance, someone from the audience will come and tell me ‘I wasn’t aware of this, I had no idea,’” Mata told the Post.
Thanks for reading,
Ali
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