Tuesday, March 8
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NOORANI'S NOTES

 

As the flow of Ukrainian refugees reaches 2 million people
,
Google is among the corporations stepping forward.  

On top of $25 million in aid, including $10 million for local
organizations helping Ukrainian refugees in Poland, and helping guard
against cyberattacks, Google is offering office space to local
organizations to provide legal and psychological services to refugees. 

According to CNBC's

Sarah Alessandrini, Google said in a statement, "As the needs of those
affected by the war change, we will be looking at other ways in which we
can help." 

Remember, Sergey Brin
,
co-founder of Google, was 6 years old when he was a refugee escaping the
Soviet Union and was resettled by HIAS.  

Meanwhile, Ben Fox at the Associated Press

is out with an explainer of what the U.S. is doing to help Ukrainians
and Ukrainian refugees. That includes $54 million in food and other
assistance to people still in Ukraine and granting Temporary Protected
Status to Ukrainians in the U.S.

Of course, there is more the U.S. can and should do, including
expediting "the processing of several thousand members of religious
minority groups, including Jews and evangelical Christians, who have
family in the United States and have already applied to come under
what's known as the Lautenberg program." 

But in the U.K., Reuters'

Muvija M and William James report, "Prime Minister Boris Johnson
rejected calls on Monday for Britain to ease visa requirements for
Ukrainian refugees fleeing conflict, saying Britain was a generous
country but it needed to maintain checks on who was arriving."  

A real profile in courage.  

Finally, I loved this op-ed by attorney Mo Goldman in the Tucson
Sentinel
.
"Who is a deserving migrant?" he asks, then answers: "You cannot pick or
choose which immigrant or migrant is more deserving. Every immigrant
deserves a fair process and an opportunity to be heard. If you support
displaced Ukrainians, you should be supporting a system that provides
this opportunity for any immigrant." 

Welcome to Tuesday'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]
.   

**RULE CHANGES** - Migrant children who were the victims of
trafficking or certain other crimes, or who were abandoned or neglected
by their parents, are eligible for special kinds of immigration relief,
including T visa status
 and Special
Immigrant Juvenile Status

(SIJS). Roll Call's

Caroline Simon reports on new guidance from U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services that enable grants of deferred action to minors
waiting for green cards through SIJS and unable to get a visa because of
backlogs. Separately, a new final rule clarifies SIJ eligibility
criteria and updates requirements used to grant SIJ status. "These
policies will provide humanitarian protection to vulnerable young people
for whom a juvenile court has determined that it is in their best
interest to remain in the United States," USCIS Director Ur Jaddou said
in a statement Monday.  

**ECONOFACT** - At Econofact
(great name),
Tara Watson with Williams College and the Brookings Institution finds
that the decline in U.S. net migration has "implications for the number
of workers available and for fiscal sustainability at a time when the
national debt relative to GDP is the highest it has been since World
War II
."
That doesn't seem great. Watson writes, "[T]he financial health of
Social Security and Medicare, as well as capacity for caregiving of the
elderly
,
will be strained without continued positive growth in the U.S.
population." Meanwhile, The Economic Times'

Priyanka Sangani cites a new report from the National Foundation on
American Policy showing that "The number of Indian students opting for
Master's and Engineering programs in the US dropped by nearly 40%
between 2016 and 2019, while the overall number of Indian students in
Canadian colleges and universities increased by 182% over the same
period." Again, not great.  

**ANKLE MONITORS** - Instead of detaining immigrants in large
detention facilities, there has been a steady growth in "alternatives to
detention" such as ankle monitors. The Guardian's

Johana Bhuiyan digs deep into the workings of the only private
contractor operating this program: "BI, a little-known company founded
in 1978 to monitor cattle
 and
acquired by private prison corporation the Geo Group in 2011." Bhuiyan
found that case managers were monitoring as many as 300 people at once,
the ankle monitors have shocked people, and BI's app frequently
malfunctions, causing immigrants to miss required check-ins. And yet,
"In 2020, the company signed a new five-year contract with [ICE] for
nearly $2.2 [billion]."

 

**INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY** - As we celebrate International
Women's Day, CNN's

Ryan Bergeron writes, "It's women like [Bibi] Bahrami whose work
strives to make life better for women." After fleeing the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and reaching the U.S. as a refugee,
Bahrami started a foundation after Sept. 11 that initiated projects in
her native village, including a maternal and child health center. After
the Taliban regained control, Bahrami turned her attention to helping
Afghan women being resettled in her adopted hometown of Muncie, Indiana.
The all-volunteer Muncie Afghan Refugee Resettlement Committee helps
refugees - about 28 families so far - "find housing, jobs and
support."  

Elsewhere locally:  

* A media and apparel company, a faith-based nonprofit and a church
teamed up to organize "Cleveland For All," an event that offered
Clevelanders the opportunity to welcome and learn about the more than
600 Afghan refugees who have resettled in the city. (Jessi Schulz, News
5 Cleveland
) 

* Wakil Qazizada and his brother Wali Khan, along with their families,
had a choice: leave Afghanistan or die. Now they have started new lives
in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they have been received warmly. (Tim Stanley,
Tulsa World
) 

* In Kansas City, "the goodwill of ordinary Kansans and Missourians has
flourished, growing to meet the needs of our new community members,"
Sofia Khan, a doctor and founder of KC for Refugees, writes in the
Kansas City Star
.  

Thanks for reading, 
Ali

 

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