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Brazil’s Election and South America’s Looming Migration Woes
The second round Brazil’s presidential election, to be held 30 October, might plunge the highly polarized country into a political chaos. One side-effect would be the mass migration of Brazilians fleeing instability, exacerbating the hectic state of migration at the U.S. southern border. Brazilian migrants will join the growing number of migrants from Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela in reshaping migration trends.
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Processing Backlogs in the U.S. Immigration System: The Scale of the Problem
Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. immigration system is broken – but the issue is not who should be admitted legally, for how long, and what about their families. Rather, a defining way in which the system is broken is that the current system is unable to implement the policies that Congress and the administration have already chosen. This article summarizes the basic facts about the immigration backlogs, which comprise roughly 24 million cases across the U.S. government.
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DHS Revokes Trump-Era Asylum Reforms That Were Tied Up in Court
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently canceled reforms made in 2020 to modernize the asylum system. DHS should have at least considered lawful alternatives before revoking.
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Will DHS Again Leave H‑2B Winter Industries Short Workers?
The H 2B program allows employers to hire foreign workers for seasonal or temporary nonfarm jobs. USCIS recently announced that employers had already reached the H 2B cap of 33,000 visas for the winter months before the start of the season. The H 2B program is filling jobs in relatively niche areas or positions where the shortages are most severe. DHS should immediately raise the cap to allow more H 2B workers to enter these positions.
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Human Trafficking’s Newest Abuse: Forcing Victims into Cyberscamming
Tens of thousands of people from across Asia have been coerced into defrauding people in America and around the world out of millions of dollars. Those who resist face beatings, food deprivation or worse.
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Importing Even More Crime
The number of encounters with illegal immigrants recorded by the Border Patrol in FY2020 was 458,088. In FY22021, that number increased to about two million. The number of encounters with illegal immigrants who already had criminal records in FY2020 was 2,438. In FY2021, it rose to 10,763.
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To Out-Innovate Global Competitors, the United States Should Embrace Immigrant Talent
Immigration barriers for entrepreneurs and U.S.-educated STEM graduates hurt American innovation.
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Cost of Providing for Illegal Aliens Released into the U.S. Since Jan. 2021: $20.4 Billion Annually
According to a new analysis by FAIR, a nonprofit organization calling for reducing overall immigration levels, the cost of providing for the needs of illegal aliens who entered the country under since January 2021 adds an additional $20.4 billion annually.
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Legal Work-Related Immigration Has Fallen by a Third Since 2020, Contributing to U.S. Labor Shortages
The gap between the demand for labor and its supply was already forming in 2017. By July 2022, as the pandemic’s effects on the workplace were easing, the U.S. had 11.2 million job openings but only 5.7 million unemployed workers who might fill them. The trend that’s driving labor shortages: declining numbers of immigrants allowed to legally work in the U.S.
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Unaccompanied Child Imposters Identified in El Paso
U.S. Border Patrol agents in the El Paso Sector recently identified ten adults posing as unaccompanied minors while in custody. So far in FY 2022, nearly 700 adult migrants were discovered to be posing as minors.
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How Have Attitudes Towards U.S. Immigration Changed?
Hostility to immigrants isn’t new to the United States. From the Know Nothings in the 1850s, to Henry Cabot Lodge in the 1890s, to Donald Trump, there were political movements and leaders who demonized immigrants. Are the Know Nothings, Cabot Lodge, or Trump representative of the broader opinion of their times? A new study that uses artificial intelligence to chart the tone of more than 200,000 congressional and presidential speeches on immigration since 1880 provides a surprising historical perspective.
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Supreme Court: Biden Can Terminate “Remain in Mexico” Program
Almost a year after the Supreme Court allowed a federal judge in Texas to order the Biden administration to restart the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) policy, also known as the “Remain in Mexico program, the Supreme Court on Thursday, 30 June, ruled in the Biden administration’s favor, allowing President Biden to end MPP.
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Migration to the U.S. Is on the Rise Again – but It’s Unlikely to Be Fully Addressed During the Summit of the Americas, or Anytime Soon
Migration in the Americas has dramatically increased over the past decade due to deteriorating political, economic and humanitarian conditions in several countries, particularly in Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti. High rates of crime, corruption, poverty, environmental degradation and violence all influence people’s decisions to migrate. The power of drug cartels, which can be embedded in government institutions like the police, also plays a key role in prompting migration.
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Debunking Defining Myths About Immigration in American History
A new book traces millions of immigrant lives to understand how they – and their children – thrived in the United States.
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Immigrants in the U.S. Are More Likely to Start Firms, Create Jobs: Study
Compared to native-born citizens, immigrants are more frequently involved in founding companies at all scales. A new study finds that, per capita, immigrants are about 80 percent more likely to found a firm, compared to U.S.-born citizens.
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More headlines
The long view
Social Acceptance of Immigrants Working as Politicians or Judges Is Low
Often, the dominant society develops negative attitudes towards immigrants and their descendants because their integration is too successful – and not because they are unwilling to integrate. A possible explanation for negative attitudes towards successful immigrants could be the dominant society’s fear of immigrants occupying influential and value-based occupations. This applies, for example, for immigrants working in local politics or law.