Last summer, Philadelphia began offering lawyers to immigrants facing deportation as part of the Pennsylvania Immigrant Family Unity Project (RAIFUP), but given budget shortfalls due to COVID-19, the program might be cut, reports Jeff Gammage for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“The right to publicly funded legal representation seems an ingrained part of American law. But federal Immigration Court is different. Defendants generally have no right to court-appointed counsel, and even children can be made to serve as their own lawyers.”

Having a lawyer matters: In a Penn Law Review study of 1.2 million deportation cases, those with lawyers obtained relief from removal at 5.5 times the rate of those without counsel.

Welcome to the Friday-before-Memorial Day edition of Noorani’s Notes. Thank you for reading, and have a safe and healthy weekend. If you have a story you’d like us to include, email me at [email protected].

HISTORY 1/2 – A new book that might interest you: In One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, Jia Lynn Yang, a deputy national editor at The New York Times, takes a deep dive into the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act (passed only a few years after the 1918 flu epidemic, by the way) which “marked the start of a dark chapter in the nation’s immigration history” by cutting the total number of immigrants allowed in each year and effectively ending immigration from Asia, Anna Diamond writes in Smithsonian Magazine. It put in place strict quotas — “defined as ‘two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census’ — in order to favor immigrants from northern and Western Europe and preserve the homogeneity of the nation.” Yang “details the drive to implement and sustain the 1924 legislation and the intense campaign to reverse it, a battle that culminated in the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.”

HISTORY 2/2 – Today there is a great deal of attention on the immigrant and refugee workers in meatpacking plants, where working conditions leave them vulnerable to contracting COVID-19, writes University of Montana history professor Anya Jabour in an op-ed for The Washington Post. This issue isn’t new: “In the early 20th century, social worker Sophonisba Breckinridge investigated the horrific conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. Then, as now, much of this labor was performed by immigrants. And then, as now, immigrants were an especially vulnerable group of workers.” America wasn’t an easy place to navigate for newcomers back then, either: “foreign-born workers struggled to survive a toxic stew of inadequate workplace protections, unwelcoming immigration policies and unscrupulous employment practices — often without the ability to speak or write English.” In the case of most employers, things have improved — but the vulnerability of this workforce remains.

ZOOMIN’ SUCCESS – As the coronavirus pandemic has brought in-person interaction to a halt, the world finds itself depending on Zoom, a video conferencing platform created by Chinese-born Eric Yuan, reports Jon Sarlin for CNN. “Yuan grew up in the Shandong Province in China in what he describes as a middle-class family. The child of geological engineers, Yuan was an average student who studied computer science, and after a stint working in Japan, decided he wanted to come to the center of technological innovation: Silicon Valley.” Yuan applied for an H1-B visa eight times before being accepted to come to the United States. Colleagues recount Yuan often being overlooked or subject to unconscious bias because of his accent — so “[w]hile Yuan couldn't control how others understood his English, he focused on what he could control: his work.”

ESSENTIAL – Immigrants working in essential occupations during the coronavirus pandemic are often dismissed as not essential enough to remain in the United States, writes Bishop Mario E. Dorsonville in America Magazine. “I would argue that immigrants are not only essential to our economy but also to our schools, houses of worship, our communities and our common good. As we show our extreme gratitude for the many essential immigrant workers going forward, we must find a path to citizenship for those who are undocumented or those with temporary status, such as Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status holders. … In the end, it truly will take all of us, together, to overcome the impact of the Covid-19 virus.”

JUDGE OVERRULED? – Hector Garcia Mendoza, an immigrant who filed a lawsuit to be removed from a New Jersey detention facility where he feared contracting COVID-19, was moved to Mexico on the same day that a federal judge prohibited U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from deporting him, reports Alyssa Aquino for Law 360. “Later that day, ICE sent Garcia Mendoza across the southern U.S. border and cut off contact with him, making him unreachable to his attorneys, according to the NYU School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic co-director Alina Das.” It’s unclear whether Mendoza was released before or after the judge granted the emergency relief. 

REMEMBERING SHAFQAT – Shafqat Khan immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan in the 1980s and spent much of the past two decades helping other Pakistani immigrants who joined his community, Deepti Hajela reports for the Associated Press. On April 14 at age 76, Khan died of COVID-19, leaving behing “his wife, three children, seven grandchildren and a legacy of connections.” Khan worked six days a week at a convenience store owned by a person he had tutored years earlier in Pakistan, and eventually started an organization to educate Pakistani immigrants about U.S. politics and help them to register to vote. After 9/11, Khan’s group “shifted its focus to holding events where leaders ‘from various religious and cultural backgrounds engaged in honest, open dialogue about the state of things post 9/11, including the stigma that Muslims faced.’” Khan is one of the many we have lost during this painful time.

Thanks for reading,

Ali