NOORANI'S NOTES

 

 

Danae King of The Columbus Dispatch
 reports this
morning on the urgent need to evacuate Afghan nationals who have
worked alongside the U.S. military and government. Time is of essence as
the U.S. is slated to complete the withdrawal of U.S. troops as early
as July. Advocates say the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV)
program alone isn't enough to save our allies threatened by the
Taliban.  

"This is a life or death situation," said Rick "Ozzie" Nelson, a
Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan and former director of
the National Security Council's Office of Combating Terrorism under
President George W. Bush. 

In Congress, the bipartisan Honoring Our Promises Working
Group recently wrote a letter to President Biden
 with
a similar sentiment: "The current SIV process will not work. It takes
an average of 800+ days, and we plan to withdraw in less than 100
days. ... It is clear that the process will not be rectified in time
to help the 18,000+ applicants who need visas before our
withdrawal."  

David Zucchino and Najim Rahim at The New York Times
 home
in on the palpable fear among interpreters
- and as our press call
 yesterday with Upwardly
Global  made clear, many others have
helped us and now are threatened. 

Welcome to Friday's edition of Noorani's Notes. I'm Dan
Gordon, the Forum's strategic communications VP, closing out my
week filling in while Ali has been out. If you have a story to share
from your own community, please send it to me
at [email protected] .

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**TEXAS POLICE** - Police chiefs in Texas border towns say that
although the situation at the border has affected them, their
towns are still safe, report Julia Ainsley, Kenzi Abou-Sabe and Didi
Martinez of NBC News
. "[Outsiders
are] thinking the sky is falling here," said Victor Rodriguez, chief of
police in McAllen. "The reality has been that we've been decreasing
crime that same period of time, as opposed to increases in crime." The
chiefs say the mere perception of a "lawless border" could be having a
negative impact on local economies. Likely to reinforce that erroneous
perception: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced plans Thursday for
the state to build its own border barrier and
arrest single-adult migrants on private property, among other
initiatives, report Rosa Flores and Rosalina Nieves of CNN
. 

**CANADA** - Canadian Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino
says Canada is willing to take in some Central American migrants to
help the U.S., reports Anna Mehler Paperny of Reuters
.
Central American migration was among the issues Mendicino and U.S.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas discussed last
week. "By having a plan as ambitious as we do around this, what we're
signaling not only to the Americas but the world, is, Canada will
continue to play a leadership role when it comes to resettling
refugees," Mendicino said. Overall, Canada aims to resettle
 36,000
refugees this year; last year the country took in about 40% of the
total number of resettled refugees globally.  

**MIGRANT PARISHIONERS** - In a previously reported
meeting earlier this month, Cardinal Michael Czerny asked
bishops to think of migrants as "parishioners" and expand
their ministry to them, reports Rhina Guidos of Catholic News
Service
. As
undersecretary of the Section for Migrants of the Dicastery for
Promoting Integral Human Development, Czerny addressed
the emergency virtual meeting of bishops from the U.S., Central
America and Mexico, including heads of major U.S. Catholic organizations
that aid migrants. "I hope that, after this meeting, you can call your
priests together and consider the pastoral task incumbent on us all: to
welcome, to protect, to promote and to integrate," Czerny
said. "Migration is not first a problem to be managed, or a phenomenon
to be feared, but a sign of relationships to be established, reconciled,
healed, and a possibility for mutual transformation ..."  

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**NEW STUDIES** - According to a new study
 from New
American Economy, the U.S. is facing a shortage of high-skilled
workers for computer-related jobs due to COVID-19 - and employers
are seeking immigrant talent to fill the gap, Hannah Miao reports
for CNBC
. The
study found that in 2020, the ratio of job openings to unemployed
workers in the field was more than 7:1. "More nuanced and responsive
policy around employment-based immigration could be one way to help the
U.S. more quickly and more robustly bounce back from the Covid-19
[pandemic] and future economic disruptions and crises," it
concludes. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also highlighted
 this
shortage last week. Meanwhile, a National Foundation for American
Policy (NFAP) study
 released
Thursday suggests that highly educated immigrants do not threaten the
wages of native-born workers in information technology, NFAP Executive
Director Stuart Anderson writes in Forbes
.  

**LATINO VISIBILITY** - I'm looking forward to getting back to a
movie theater - perhaps for the much anticipated "In the
Heights" movie adaption by Lin-Manuel Miranda and playwright Quiara
Alegría Hudes, which debuts today. As Nicole Acevedo of NBC News
 reports,
the movie "tells the stories of generations of residents and business
owners in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of New York City's
Washington Heights," who are fighting to stay together
amid displacement and gentrification. "Even though everyone has a
different path in this movie, they are connected by similar questions
- especially as immigrants, as migrants," Hudes said. "Is over there
home? Is here home? Is there only one home or can we carry many homes
within us? What about when we love this home, but we have dreams to go
beyond it?" 

Thanks for reading, 

Dan

 

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