Ahead of President Trump’s upcoming inauguration on January 20, 2025, some universities, including Harvard, USC, and Cornell are advising their international student body to prepare to return to campus from their winter breaks before Trump is sworn in to office. The warnings are a result of Trump’s expressed desire to reimpose a travel ban previously instituted during his first term as President and ended by President Biden when he took office.
Read moreThe Fabric of America
When Dreamers Find Themselves in Limbo
A decade ago, President Obama signed an executive order instituting The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) program, which protects undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors. This program acknowledges that the beneficiaries have been raised in the United States and “pledge allegiance to our flag. They are Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one - on paper.” The program was a temporary solution which does not provide a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship in the United States. Instead, it was intended as a “stopgap measure to protect some of the nation’s most vulnerable immigrants”, known as Dreamers, from deportation. The program also enabled beneficiaries to obtain work authorization and reside legally in the US in two-year intervals. DACA was created as a temporary measure until Congress passed new immigration legislation addressing the immigration status of certain undocumented minors.
Read moreA Lie Disguised as Protection
The 5 Biggest Immigration-Related Acts and Cases in US History
It’s November already, can you believe it? In addition to colder temperatures and the end of daylight savings times (hello, darkness!), it’s also time for the most “American” of holidays—Thanksgiving. While the history of Thanksgiving is much more complicated than what is commonly taught in schools, it’s nevertheless an opportune time to reflect on our presence in this country as immigrants, refugees, and, yes, colonizers, and also reflect on how we have historically treated other immigrants and refugees. To that end, we are looking back at five major acts and cases in US history that have shaped and influenced US immigration law and policy.
Read moreThe Washington Post: "U.S. will deploy 5,200 additional troops to the Mexican border, officials say"
Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon officials announced Monday that they will send 5,200 troops, military helicopters, and razor wire to the US/Mexican border in advance of the potential arrival of a large group of Central American migrants. This troop deployment, according to the Washington Post, appears to be the “largest U.S. active-duty mobilization along the U.S.-Mexico boundary in decades and amounts to a significant militarization of American border security.”
Read moreTogether We Stand
Bloomberg Businessweek: “Trump Booted Foreign Startup Founders. Other Countries Embraced Them”
As the Trump administration sought to end the International Entrepreneur Rule created by the Obama administration for immigrant entrepreneurs and has made obtaining H-1B visas more difficult, other countries have sought to attract tech talent and entrepreneurs. Although immigrants and children of immigrants have played critical roles in many of Silicon Valley’s top companies—including Google, Tesla, eBay, Stripe, Apple, Oracle, and Amazon—immigrants are now being drawn to visa programs with a range of perks in such countries as the UK, China, Japan, Israel, Germany, Estonia, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. “The fight over tech talent is not something that is coming in the future. It’s happening right now,” Kate Mitchell, founder of Scale Venture Partners in Foster City, California, tells Bloomberg. “And we are losing.”
Read morePolitico: “The Man Behind Trump’s ‘Invisible Wall’”
Lee Francis Cissna is the multilingual son of a Peruvian immigrant and son-in-law of a refugee from Palestine. He is also the Director of US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), and has overseen some of the Trump administration’s toughest immigration policy changes. Politico interviewed a selection of Cissna’s current and former co-workers, classmates, and friends, in order to obtain a better understanding of the man involved with many of the harsh Trump administration policy changes, including the recent “zero-tolerance” policy which resulted in thousands of family separations. “We’re pretty stunned that a guy who is compassionate, funny, proud of his immigrant mother from Latin America, that he would now be one of the key architects of the seemingly heartless policy of separating families,” Dan Manatt, a documentary filmmaker and former classmate of Cissna’s at Georgetown Law School, tells Politico.
Read moreNational Foundation for American Policy: “H-1B Denials and Requests for Evidence Increase Under the Trump Administration”
H-1B denials and Requests for Evidence (RFEs) increased dramatically in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2017 soon after President Trump took office, according to a report by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) that used data from US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS). The report by NFAP, a non-profit and non-partisan public policy research organization, includes data showing that H-1B petition denials increased by forty-one percent from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of the 2017 fiscal year. Additionally, RFEs issued in the first three quarters of the 2017 fiscal year came to 63,599 combined, almost equaling the total number of RFEs—63,184—issued in the fourth quarter of the 2017 fiscal year.
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