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].
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."
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."
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