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]."