A new study released this morning shows that the children of immigrants have been driving the growth of U.S. university enrollment over the past two decades, Miriam Jordan writes in The New York Times.

Conducted by the Migration Policy Institute, the study found that “more than 5.3 million students, or nearly 30 percent of all students enrolled in colleges and universities in 2018, hailed from immigrant families, up from 20 percent in 2000. The population of so-called immigrant-origin students grew much more than that of U.S.-born students of parents also born in the United States, accounting for 58 percent of the increase in the total number of students in higher education during that period.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has proposed a new rule that would “set up roadblocks for hundreds of thousands of legitimate students and threaten the United States’ historical position as the top attractor of international talent,” Inside Higher Ed’s Elizabeth Redden reports.
Welcome to Thursday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].
NOBEL PRIZES – Immigrants have made up a significant number of U.S. Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, medicine, and physics over the last 20 years, according to new analysis from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). The numbers show the “outsized role” immigrants have played in “bringing honor and recognition to America in scientific fields,” NFAP Executive Director Stuart Anderson writes for Forbes. The study found that immigrants “have been awarded 37%, or 37 of 100, of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics since 2000 ... In 2020, one of the five U.S. recipients of Nobel Prizes in medicine, chemistry and physics was an immigrant to the United States.”

92% DECREASE – The decrease in legal immigration to the United States in the second half of fiscal year 2020 is the largest decline since we started recording these numbers, writes immigration policy analyst David J. Bier at the CATO Institute. The number of immigrants coming to the U.S. in the second half of FY 2020 represented a 92% drop from the first half, which is “larger than the drop during any single year in American history — larger than the 73 percent decline in 1915 coinciding with the start of World War I, larger than the 70 percent decline in 1925 coinciding with Congress closing legal immigration from Europe, larger than the 63 percent declines in 1931, 1942, and 1918 following the onset of the Great Depression and U.S. entries into each world war.”

LASTING EFFECTS – President Trump has enacted hundreds of restrictive executive actions regarding immigration — policies which have disproportionately impacted California and will have lasting effects on the state regardless of November’s election outcome, writes Molly O’Toole in the Los Angeles Times. “Even if a Biden administration did find solutions, he would inherit an immigration system that has been battered during Trump’s tenure and that faces a ballooning backlog of cases. And some of the effects of Trump’s policies would be difficult to erase. The most tangible effect may be the fear and uncertainty that Trump’s rhetoric and raids have created among immigrants in California, leaving many in years-long limbo and limiting opportunities.”

SCOTUS ARGUMENTS – In Supreme Court arguments Wednesday for the case of Pereida v. Barr — which involves Mexican immigrant Clemente Avelino Pereida, who has been in the country for 25 years and is fighting for relief from deportation — several of the court’s conservative justices indicated that they may rule in favor of the married father of three. Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson reports for Bloomberg Law that several justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, noted that removal of longtime immigrants “would cause ‘exceptional and extremely unusual hardship’ to their U.S. families.” Pereida was once convicted and fined $100 for using a fraudulent Social Security card to get a job — a “thin reed to make one categorically ineligible for cancellation of removal,” per Justice Kavanaugh.

CAMEROON UPDATE – A group of eight Cameroonian asylum seekers were spared from a deportation flight back to their dangerous home country on Tuesday — including two men who were removed from the plane moments before takeoff — following a complaint filed by several advocacy groups alleging that the men were violently coerced by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into signing deportation documents, Julia Ainsley at NBC News reports. “I can’t see well still from the pepper spray,” one of the men said in the complaint. “As a result of the physical violence, they were able to forcibly obtain my fingerprint on the document.” ICE still won’t say how many asylum seekers were actually deported back to Cameroon this week — a country where human rights groups say they are “likely to face grave risks upon their return … including the threat of execution.”

THE HORSESHOE VIRUS – This week on Only in America’s “Vote of Conscience” series, I speak to Bob Worsley, a businessman and former Republican member of the Arizona State Senate. He recently wrote a book called “The Horseshoe Virus” on polarization in politics. An active member of the LDS Church, Bob spoke about how his faith informed his civic engagement — and why advocating for commonsense immigration policies doesn’t have to be partisan. You can listen to the episode here; as always, thanks for listening!

Thanks for reading,

Ali