The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is leading a coalition of trade associations and businesses in suing the Trump administration to block restrictions against various nonimmigrant worker visas, writes Thomas J. Donohue, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a New York Times op-ed. The administration has taken a “sledgehammer” to laws crafted over decades, Donohue writes, exceeding the authority of the executive branch and jeopardizing the nation’s economic recovery. “If you want businesses to grow and the economy to rebound, you allow skilled workers to come here legally to work and contribute to the well-being of our nation; you don’t lock them out. If you want the next revolutionary start-up to be founded in America, you welcome foreign students; you don’t threaten to upend their lives and send them home during the middle of a pandemic.”

“The Chamber hopes to work productively with the administration on these issues, as we have on a broad array of other policies like tax reform and streamlining regulation. But if the administration persists with its job-killing immigration restrictions, we will see them in court.”

Welcome to Friday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected]. 

CLIMATE REFUGEES – A first-of-its-kind investigation led by Abrahm Lustgarten at ProPublica together with The New York Times Magazine and the Pulitzer Center models how climate refugees may move across borders in the coming decades as rising temperatures make farming impossible in certain regions. “If governments take modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and 2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming, that number jumps to more than a million people. (None of these figures include undocumented immigrants, whose numbers could be twice as high),” Lustgarten reports. The fact is that migration driven by climate, poverty and violence will be impossible to manage by enforcement alone. Different solutions are needed.

WHIPLASH – In the five weeks since the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s efforts to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) were “arbitrary and capricious,” Politico’s Anita Kumar reports the president “has been flailing over one of the most controversial and consequential decisions of his presidency.” Karen Tumlin, founder of the Justice Action Center and an attorney involved in one of the DACA cases the Supreme Court ruled on, summed it up as “whiplash.” Needless to say, it’s unclear how this will be resolved. But for the time being, the administration should be taking new DACA applications – and it is not.

PAINFUL PATTERN – Three immigrants at Stewart Detention Center, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in rural Georgia operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, describe being treated violently after requesting medical attention. “All three incidents follow a pattern: After detainees demanded medical attention, guards threw them to the floor. Two of the immigrants were using wheelchairs at the time, and guards hurled them out of the chairs nonetheless,” Gaby Del Valle and José Olivares report for The Intercept. Rather than treating the immigrants in their care, Stewart staff have apparently made a practice of deporting detainees in need of medical assistance: “After two weeks of submitting requests for medical attention that went ignored, [Roberto Blanco-Gonzalez] staged a one-man protest … Blanco was diagnosed with Covid-19 on arrival in El Salvador in late May.”

$105 MILLION – With the next stimulus package around the corner, Al Cárdenas, Former Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida and Co-Chair of ABIC and IMPAC Fund, penned an op-ed for the Tampa Bay Times calling on lawmakers to remove the provision featured in previous relief packages that denied economic impact payments to U.S. citizens married to a foreign national without a Social Security number. “Fortunately, thanks to Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Republicans have a chance to address this unfair mistake. Rubio and Tillis have filed a bill that would allow U.S. citizens, regardless of their spouse’s nationality, to qualify for the payments. In Florida … this could inject more than $105 million into local economies.” My quick take here.

SELF-EVICTION – Despite moratoria on evictions in many states during the panedmic, including Texas, undocumented immigrants facing reduced work hours and pressure from landlords are being forced into self-eviction — and homelessness — as the pandemic-fueled recession drags on. “On paper, an undocumented tenant has the same rights as anyone else during the eviction process,” Meena Venkataramanan and Juan Pablo Garnham report for The Texas Tribune. “But housing attorneys and tenant and immigration advocates say undocumented immigrants are frequently hesitant to exercise those options. Their fear of the legal system and lack of access to government-funded financial help prompt many to self-evict.” Josephine Lee, an organizer with the workers’ group El Pueblo Primero, pointed out that “[e]ven before the pandemic, things were tough in our community … People were living check to check. This pandemic basically made it where it was completely unbearable. People call us saying that most of them haven’t paid a month [of rent], but half of those haven’t paid for two or more months.”

VISAS & GREEN CARDS – Lila Seidman at The Los Angeles Times has a helpful breakdown of how the Trump administration’s various COVID-related immigration restrictions (our running list here) impact visas and green cards. “‘This is all very, very complex’ and differs based on individual situations, said David Rugendorf, a Los Angeles-based immigration attorney. ‘The danger is that somebody thinks that something applies to them when it doesn’t or doesn’t realize something applies to them when it does.’” Seidman notes that those in the U.S. with valid work visas are still able to renew their status, “regardless of whether it’s one of the suspended classes.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali