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UTAH AND TEXAS — Even before Friday’s DACA ruling, Utah business leaders, Republican state lawmakers and immigration advocates were calling on Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Mitt Romney to pass bipartisan legislation on immigration reform, reports Ivana Martinez of KUER. "As we try to address some of these struggles that we're seeing in our economy, the solution that I see is increased immigration," state Rep. Robert Spendlove (R) said at a meeting in Salt Lake City’s World Trade Center Wednesday. "Immigrants play a vital role in the Utah economy. They help fill in many of those essential roles where we need more people and where we have a high demand for jobs." The same goes for Texas: In May, foreign-born workers accounted for nearly 23% of the state’s nonfarm workers — almost 6 percentage points higher than the share nationwide, Mitchell Schnurman reports in The Dallas Morning News. "If we want to fill all these jobs in restaurants, hotels, construction, landscaping — then immigration is the solution," added Texas restaurateur Jim Baron. IN BETWEEN — The immigration challenges President Biden is facing have him "caught between the costly reality of a historic border influx and supporters who erupt in anger when his administration hints at tighter controls," report Nick Miroff and Sean Sullivan of The Washington Post. They note that Americans want limits on immigration alongside humane treatment of immigrants, but also that following Trump, who inflamed passions on both sides of the spectrum, this presents a "unique challenge" for Biden. Said Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), "I don’t want to beat up on the administration, but we have to make decisions that are not easy and soft. We need to be humane and treat people with dignity, but we have to have orderly process on the southern border." A.B. — In June, we applauded Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to undo Trump administration policies that limited access to asylum for those fleeing gang- or gender-based violence. The Trump administration’s chosen case when toughening restrictions was that of A.B., a domestic abuse survivor from El Salvador. Last Wednesday, seven years after first applying, A.B. was granted asylum, Tanvi Misra reports for The Fuller Project. "So many women have died at the hands of their ex-partner," A.B. said via a translator. "They are not here now to tell their stories of what they lived through." The case "reveals the extent to which top political appointees in former President Donald Trump’s administration controlled life-and-death immigration court decisions," Misra reports.
RESETTLEMENT — Houston-based refugee support organizations Houston Welcomes Refugees and The Alliance are gearing up to welcome a large number of Afghan nationals as the U.S. withdraws troops from Afghanistan, Courtney Carpenter reports for KTRK-TV. "When there was the war in the Balkans, we figured out, as a nation, how to welcome those individuals and help take care of things. We can do this," said Dan Stoecker, CEO of The Alliance. "... once they are brought in and getting their culture orientation, they are going to be your neighbors that are working hard and caring about the exact same things you do." (Related: Neil Schoenherr at The Source reports on the Self-Reliance Index, a tool developed by researchers at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis to track the long-term progress of refugees and displaced populations over time.) MORE THAN PUSHBACK — Thousands of migrants are attempting the sea crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands, but Greece keeps illegally pushing migrants out, reports Carlotta Gall of The New York Times. Just recently, Turkish Coast Guard officials rescued a 7-year-old girl and an older woman — two of 20 asylum seekers from Afghanistan — who were left drifting in the dark after Greek police officers confiscated their documents and other items. "They kicked us all, with their feet, even the children, women, men and everyone," said Ashraf Salih, 21. "They did not say anything, they just left us. They weren’t humane at all." Greece denies such actions, though it "has struggled to handle the influx of more than 100,000 asylum cases and overcrowded refugee camps on its islands," Gall writes. Thanks for reading, Dan |
