NOORANI'S NOTES

 

 

Some key immigration jobs - including roles at agencies which
oversee facilities and shelters - remain unfilled by the Biden
administration as it deals with an increasing number of children and
families at the border, reports Jordan Fabian at Bloomberg
. 

Biden has yet to nominate a commissioner for Customs and
Border Protection (CBP); permanent leaders for U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services (USCIS); or a head of Health and Human Services
(HHS)'s Administration for Children and Families, which oversees
the care of unaccompanied migrant children.  

"The one thing about having political
leadership - Senate-confirmed, high-level political
leadership - is the heft," said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of
immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center
. "Having that ability to command an
organization, especially if you're responding to a crisis,
is important." She added that acting officials have less clout than
confirmed leaders to get a response from the White House about concerns
over agency policies.  

Fabian notes that while it's not unprecedented for
immigration-related agencies to lack confirmed leaders fewer than 100
days into a president's term, "former government officials say it's
yet another hurdle facing Biden at a pivotal moment." 

Welcome
to Thursday's edition of Noorani's Notes. I'm Joanna
Taylor, Communications Manager at the Forum and your NN host this week,
filling in for Ali. See a story you think we should include?
Send it to me at [email protected]
. 

[link removed]

**BORDER PERSPECTIVE** - "For too long, meaningful immigration reforms
have failed, in part because of the false premise that immigration
threatens U.S. national security," writes James M. Loy, a founding
member of the Council on National Security and Immigration
 (CNSI), in an op-ed for Morning Consult
.
Loy, a retired admiral and former commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard who
served as TSA administrator and deputy DHS secretary under President
George W. Bush, underscores that what's happening at the border right
now doesn't excuse congressional action on immigration reform - in
fact, more permanent solutions "can reinforce our national security and
economic interests and allow us to regain our footing as a global
humanitarian leader." If we're going to ease the longstanding
challenges at the southern border, he writes, we need a bipartisan
approach that includes "smart border-security technology, creating
pathways for legal immigration and improving the processing of those
seeking humanitarian relief." 

**GLOBAL MOBILITY** - A new report
 from 
from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and the UN's International
Organization for Migration (IOM) provides a "comprehensive analysis of
the travel measures and border closures that governments worldwide
implemented during 2020." The report compares restrictions and closures
across different regions and how they evolved over time, in addition to
the human impact of these policies. Using this data, the report
"considers whether the evidence supports travel restrictions as
effective tools for managing pandemics, analyzes the main policy levers
that have increasingly replaced blanket travel bans, and examines how
these measures may be seeding a new cross-border infrastructure built
around public health." 

**TEXAS FAITH** - Faith groups in Texas are "[redoubling]
efforts to show Christ's love" by helping communities respond
to the growing number of unaccompanied minors in immigration
custody, Ken Camp reports for The Baptist Standard
. Buckner
International,  a Baptist non-profit,
is currently helping manage all in-kind and financial donations
for the 2,300 migrant children housed in a downtown Dallas convention
center, while Catholic Charities of Dallas was tapped by the Office
of Refugee Resettlement to enlist Spanish-speaking volunteers at the
facility. Groups like Buckner and Catholic Charities have been critical
in caring for unaccompanied minors: "The number of children and
teenagers arriving at our country's border without a parent or legal
guardian has dramatically surpassed the capacity of our government's
infrastructure to provide appropriate care in compliance with U.S. laws,
and thousands of kids are presently stuck in unacceptable conditions,"
said Evangelical Immigration Table
 National Coordinator Matthew
Soerens. Last month, the EIT wrote a letter to the Biden administration
"urging the federal government to work with nonprofit organizations to
increase capacity to provide prompt and appropriate care for children."

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**CRISTINA** - For The New York Times Magazine
,
Marcela Valdes tells the story of Cristina Morales, a mother of two who
grew up amid the Salvadoran civil war, who is on the brink of losing
her Temporary Protected Status
 (TPS) in
the U.S. after 20 years following President Trump's attempts to end
the program. Compelled to fight back for the hundreds of thousands of
TPS holders in a similar predicament, "she and her daughter, Crista
Ramos, became the lead plaintiffs in Ramos v. Nielsen, a suit with 14
plaintiffs representing T.P.S. holders from El Salvador, Nicaragua,
Haiti and Sudan as well as their U.S.-citizen children." The
lawsuit ultimately prevented around 400,000 deportations during the
Trump era. But without a permanent solution from Congress or new
designations from the Biden administration, Valdes notes that those
400,000 TPS holders are at risk of deportation as soon as
October. "Because they are the parents of some 273,000 U.S. citizens
- most of them under the age of 21, like Morales's children - it
could also turn into the largest family-separation operation in American
history." 

**BOUNCING BACK** - This story is from last week, but it's a
must-read: In a New York Times
 interview, Annie
Correal speaks with New York City's recently retired chief
demographer Joseph J. Salvo - the son of Italian immigrants
in the Bronx - on why immigration is the key to the city's recovery
and resurgence post-pandemic. Salvo points to NYC's population
changes in the 1970s as an indicator of the path forward: "From 7.9
million people it went all the way down to 7.1 million people in the
course of a single decade. At the same time, 800,000 immigrants came to
the city. It was true that New York City was in terrible shape, but it
also offered a lot of opportunities. The city rose up and prospered,
largely on the backs of immigrants. ... Our growth is going to depend
on giving support to these immigrants, many of whom suffered and lost
family members." 

**GROWTH** - If the U.S. doesn't welcome more immigrants, China
is poised to overtake it as the world's largest economy, Jordan
Fabian reports in another piece for Bloomberg
. A new
report  from FWD.us
and George Mason University projects that the American economy will
only be three-quarters the size of China's by 2050 if current
population trends and immigration levels continue. As the U.S.
population ages, the report argues, "[t]he expense of entitlements
for those older Americans, such as Social Security and Medicare, risks
outpacing taxes paid by younger workers." (This is also the focus of
the Forum's Room to Grow
 paper,
published in February.) "Immigration has basically become the fulcrum
of nativist and nationalist politics, which is really about a concern
for putting America first," said Justin Gest, the study's co-author
and associate professor at GMU. "If you look at the numbers here, the
best way that we can put America first is by welcoming newcomers."   

Thanks for reading, 

Joanna  

 

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