Associated Press: “US colleges court foreign entrepreneurs who need visas”

Summer can be a difficult time for H-1B applicants. For those lucky ones who were selected in the lottery, they are nevertheless nervously awaiting the results of their H-1B petition. Those who weren’t selected in the H-1B lottery are most likely busy scrambling to come up with alternatives to possibly allow them to work in the US. As Liz has pointed out, it is frustrating for both foreign nationals and immigration practitioners since the H-1B is the perfect fit for so many people, and the only thing stopping them is that they were not selected in the random lottery.

But there is finally some positive news for certain rejected H-1B applicants. Certain universities in the US are now stepping up to provide solutions to the unreliability of the H-1B lottery process. Since employees of universities—or workers who provide services to universities—are exempt from the H-1B cap and thus can apply for an H-1B at any time and are not subject to the random lottery, schools are creating “global entrepreneur in residence" programs to allow entrepreneurial foreign nationals who qualify for an H-1B to work part-time on campus, often as mentors, while they develop their businesses.  

"This movement came about because of challenges that student visa holders were beginning to face when they had completed a program," Bill Stock, a Philadelphia attorney and the current president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), tells the AP. "There really aren't a lot of other visas that would allow someone to work temporarily."

One such school to offer this program is University of Massachusetts. Created as part of a 2014 Jobs Bill, the program, called the “Global Entrepreneur in Residence Pilot Program,” aims to “attract and retain more qualified entrepreneurs and their growing companies within Massachusetts” by providing “valuable, relevant part-time work opportunities which will initiate a cap-exempt H-1B visa application process.” The end goal for this program is to encourage and allow new high skill jobs to develop in Massachusetts. To be eligible, candidates must be a start-up entrepreneur in a leadership position (CEO, co-founder, or similar position) within an early-stage venture, have a master’s degree or above in a STEM or related business field, and the candidate’s start-up venture must be headquartered in Massachusetts and able to affiliate with a venture center within UMass Boston or UMass Lowell. Since it started in 2014, the AP reports that the UMass program has helped twenty graduates obtain H-1B visas, and their businesses have created 260 jobs, according to the school.

Critics accuse the universities of exploiting a legal loophole in filing these H-1B petitions, since Congress created the exemption partly to help colleges hire researchers. The AP reports that in a February letter to US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa called the practice a "backhanded attempt" to skirt federal rules and a "seemingly unlawful" interpretation of the law.

College officials say they are operating within the law and they’re only addressing the problems created by the H-1B lottery system. As more international students come to US schools—and more schools recruit international students—many of these students who want to stay in the country are instead forced to leave the US due to limited H-1Bs. "Massachusetts says goodbye to over 1,000 graduate students who otherwise want to stay and start a company," William Brah, who leads the global entrepreneur program at the UMass Boston campus, tells the AP. "I mean, it's stupid. You couldn't come up with a more flawed immigration system if you tried."

Along with UMass, smaller entrepreneur programs have recently formed at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Alaska-Anchorage, and Alaska Pacific University, which accept a combined six graduates per year. Babson College is now taking applications for up to ten entrepreneurs, and the City University of New York is looking for eighty business owners from around the world for their program. "We wanted to try to find some way that would make it possible for an entrepreneur to come to the country, without us having to pay them to do it," Andy Holtz, chief of the program, tells the AP.

At Babson, master’s graduate and entrepreneur Abhinav Sureka and his company's two co-founders—both international students—are considering applying for the college's new program. They've raised $73,000 for their company, and are working on plans to produce a high-tech portable tea brewer. "What if we don't get a visa?" Sureka tells the AP. "We can't continue work in the US, and the amount of time we have spent on this project is all wasted."

Morphous

Morphous, a bronze sculpture in Union Square Park by South African artist Lionel Smit, features the conjoined heads of two outward-gazing young women. The sculpture, on display through April 2017, "evokes the question of time, of past and future" and is "a societal commentary without judgment." The work explores hybrid identity and the ever-changing nature of South African's social landscape, both in the future and the past. The faces have a great deal of expression and emotion, and I recommend anyone passing through the Union Square area to take a look at this impressive work, which is the artist's first public installation in the United States.

The Guardian: “Theresa May says she will make success of Brexit as prime minister”

Home Secretary Theresa May will be the next prime minister of the United Kingdom reportedly as early as Wednesday this week, bringing a fast resolution to the dramatic events surrounding last month’s “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union and the subsequent resignation of current Prime Minister David Cameron. May’s candidacy for prime minister is uncontested after Andrea Leadsom, Britain’s energy minister, dropped out of the race; Boris Johnson, former London mayor, declined to run; and Michael Gove, who with Johnson was a prominent proponent of the Leave Campaign, failed to attract enough support for the position.

The most pressing issue facing the incoming prime minister, of course, is overseeing the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union as part of the Brexit vote. In a statement, May says she would provide “strong, proven leadership to steer…through what will be difficult and uncertain economic and political times” and also to “negotiate the best deal for Britain in leaving the EU, and to forge a new role for ourselves in the world.”

While many voters have expressed regret for their Brexit votes after the sudden economic downturn that happened immediately post-Brexit referendum, May left no room for a second referendum, saying: “Brexit means Brexit, and we are going to make a success of it.” What success that might be is difficult to tell, as she has not released any specifics about how she will negotiate UK’s departure from the EU. May says that “her priority would be reclaiming greater power for Britain to control immigration, even if it meant sacrificing access to the Continent’s single market for goods and services.” As Home Secretary since 2005, Ms. May has overseen some controversial immigration initiatives and programs:

• One of her most controversial policies to drastically reduce immigration from outside the EU was a new rule barring British citizens from bringing their spouses or children into Britain unless they earned more than £18,600, no matter how much their non-British spouse earned. Critics say this law is causing families to be split apart. The law is being challenged in the UK Supreme Court;
• She also was responsible for the widely criticized “go home vans,” which drove around the country offering undocumented immigrants assistance in returning to their home countries. Plagued with hoax calls and texts and widely mocked, the program resulted in just 11 people leaving the country.

Despite all this, she says she will be a unifier and bring together a wide variety of people in the UK, saying “we need a strong, new positive vision for the future of our country, a vision of a country that works not for the privileged few but that works for everyone of us.”

The whirlwind of events culminating with this new prime minister without a general election—which was originally scheduled for 2020—has led some to call for a popular vote. Tim Farron, the head of the Liberal Democrats, is objecting to Ms. May’s becoming prime minister, saying on Twitter: “With @TheresaMay2016’s coronation we need an early General Election. The Tories now have no mandate. Britain deserves better than this.”

Sunset at Wimbledon

As the sun sets at the AELTC (All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club), only the last few matches of the tournament remain to be played. The incredible Serena Williams is set to play Angelique Kerber in the women's final. For the men's final, Andy Murray is playing Milos Raonic (who broke my heart in beating Roger Federer). What a great tournament it's been. Good luck to all these players, and see you next year!

The Nation: “The Deportation Machine Obama Built for President Trump”

While Obama’s executive actions announced in November 2014 were seen as a step forward for many immigrants (even though these actions have stalled in a variety of lawsuits) and his administration has crafted an image as being “smart” on deportation policy and advocating for comprehensive immigration reform, nevertheless Obama will leave his successor the “most sophisticated and well-funded human-expulsion machine in the history of the country.”

When President Obama took office in 2009 he inherited a burgeoning deportation apparatus from President Bush who had created the Office of Homeland Security in 2001 (which subsequently become the Department of Homeland Security) with the “War on Terror” in mind. Tom Ridge, then Director of the Office of Homeland Security, expanded his department to include an immigration enforcement plan that aimed for a “100% removal rate” of undocumented immigrants in the US, a vision encapsulated in a document titled “ENDGAME Office of Detention and Removal Strategic Plan.” With Obama in office, the Nation reports, this went on:

Instead of reversing that architecture and disavowing that plan, President Obama turbocharged it. To pay for the ballooning enforcement-first approach, the budget for immigration enforcement grew 300 percent from the resources given at the time of its founding under Bush to $18 billion annually, more than all other federal law-enforcement agencies’ budget combined.

Before the end of his first term in office, the Obama administration had taken a small program developed in George W. Bush’s last days that aimed to turn local police into “force multipliers” and expanded it by about 3,600 percent.

Two years after being elected, President Obama had doubled the number of people being prosecuted for unauthorized entry into the US by expanding Bush’s border-court system, Operation Streamline, which tries up to 70 people per day. What started out as an experiment in three jurisdictions in 2008 expanded to every single border sector except California by 2010, eventually sending 209,000 individuals, over a period of four years, to serve federal prison sentences for the sole reason of crossing the border without documentation. To implement the strategies of ENDGAME, DHS has become the largest law-enforcement agency in the country, with more than 48,000 personnel dedicated to immigration enforcement alone (up from 26,000 agents in 2002).

Although the Obama administration has promoted prosecutorial discretion to target immigrants who commit crimes and also provided resources for the temporary relief program and deferred action, it does not alter the massive deportation net the president has constructed.  

By April 2014, immigration authorities scanned a total of 32 million sets of fingerprints, a number three times the undocumented population and equivalent to 10 percent of the entire US population. In fiscal year 2012, the height of its deportation quota pursuit, ICE processed 9 million prints, matching 436,000 submitted by local law enforcement, and issued detainers (a practice largely abandoned now due to constitutional concerns) for over a quarter-million of those it identified.

Not all agree that Obama is a hardliner on immigration. “There’s no question that there’s been a record number of formal removals, no question that enforcement has not tailed off,” Marc Rosenblum, a deputy director at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, tells The Daily Beast. “But [Obama] is exercising a lot of discretion in the interior, a lot of people are coming across ICE’s radar and not being put through removal.”

In the end, what happens to this deportation machine is up to the next president. With the possibility of presumptive Repubilcan nomineee Donald Trump—who has repeatedly made far-reaching claims about deporting all undocumented immigrants—being elected as the next president, with this well-functioning deportation apparatus, the Nation believes he may have the necessary tools to beat Obama’s reputation as the “deporter-in-chief.”