| Your weekly summary from the Council. |
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An effort to arrest, detain, process, and remove one million undocumented immigrants per year would cost the U.S. government at least $88 billion per year, ultimately adding up to nearly one trillion dollars in taxpayer costs. |
While immigration remains a top issue for the nation as a whole, for years Minnesota has taken an active role in integrating and supporting immigrants throughout the state. Governor Tim Walz’s record demonstrates a commitment to novel and inclusive immigration policies at the state level. |
As Springfield, Ohio, and its purported (largely invented) problems with its Haitian population have continued to dominate both national news and the presidential campaign, people on both sides have struggled to fit the newly-arrived Haitian population into the conventional boxes of immigration politics: “legal immigrants” versus “illegal” ones. |
Immigrants have, for generations, been blamed for negative economic outcomes in the United States. But the fact remains: immigrants help the economy, often without reaping any of the benefits themselves. In 2022, immigrant households paid nearly one in every six tax dollars collected by federal, state, and local governments, helping to fund a wide range of social services, from public schools to food assistance programs and health insurance for low-income American families. The American Immigration Council’s Map the Impact data interactive offers comprehensive immigration data, including statistics on state and local economics.
Read more: Map the Impact of Immigration: U.S. Economic Data & Numbers |
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a final rule to extend the Biden administration’s asylum restrictions previously announced in June and make them harder to lift.
The rule creates an arbitrary asylum system that depends not on the strength of a person’s claim, but on the number of border crossings. The rule denies asylum by default to anyone who crosses the border when a presidential proclamation restricting access is in effect, as it is now. President Biden modified the proclamation last week to provide that it will only lift once Border Patrol apprehensions fall below 1,500 a day for 28 days in a row, up from 7 days in a row. This higher threshold means the asylum restrictions will likely remain in effect indefinitely.
In reaction to the revised rule, the Council advocated for a balanced approach to addressing challenges at our southern border, as well as prioritizing sustained investments to ports of entry, clearing immigration court backlogs, and making our asylum system fair, fast, and just. Read more: Extended Harsh Asylum Restrictions Won’t Fix Our Broken Immigration System |
In recent months, some politicians and policymakers have renewed calls for mass deportations of immigrants from the United States.
While some plans have envisioned a one-time, massive operation designed to round up, detain, and deport the undocumented population en masse, others have envisioned starting from a baseline of one million deportations per year.
This new report from the Council provides an estimation of what the fiscal and economic cost to the United States would be if the government deported roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Read more: Mass Deportation: Devastating Costs to America, Its Budget and Economy |
On September 30, a federal judge ruled in a case challenging the Biden administration’s policy of turning back asylum seekers who approach ports of entry along the southern border without first obtaining an advance appointment through the CBP One smartphone app. The court considered the administration’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit and ultimately allowed the case to proceed.
The lawsuit was filed last summer on behalf of Al Otro Lado, Haitian Bridge Alliance, and nine individual plaintiffs seeking to represent a broad class of asylum seekers who sought to request protection at U.S. ports of entry, only to be turned away because they had been unable to obtain an appointment via the CBP One app. The organizations and asylum seekers are represented by the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, the American Immigration Council, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, along with the law firms Mayer Brown LLP and Vinson & Elkins LLP.
Read More: Al Otro Lado v. Mayorkas |
“Sometimes people think, oh, mass deportation is only going to impact the immigrant community. And one thing that we really want to highlight here is this would fundamentally transform all of American society.” |
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