USCIS Is Going Paperless (Someday): What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

They say the art of letter writing is dead, and yet every week we send carefully penned letters, laboriously printed on reams of dead trees and lovingly hand-signed in blue or black ink, a choice that can be surprisingly important to the receiving agent at US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS). Many US government agencies have implemented electronic forms for everything from paying your taxes to registering to vote. And, of course, many people have been conducting much of their personal business online for decades now—from ordering lunch to banking to managing their 401(k).

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NY TIMES: “Immigrants Aren’t Taking Americans’ Jobs, New Study Finds”

A new study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—private, nonprofit institutions that “provide expert advice on some of the most pressing challenges facing the nation and the world”—has found that immigrants’ long-term impact on overall wages and employment of native-born US workers is very minimal and that immigration has an overall positive impact. The non-partisan report includes research from fourteen leading economists, demographers, and other scholars, including those, such as Marta Tienda of Princeton, who believe immigration has positive effects and others who are skeptical of its benefits, including George J. Borjas, a Harvard economist.  

The report found that when measured over a period of ten years or more, the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers overall is very small, and any negative impact is most likely to be for native-born workers who have not completed high school—i.e., those who share job qualifications similar to that of many low-skilled immigrant workers. Specifically, the research finds that while immigration does not affect employment levels for native-born workers who haven’t finished high school it may reduce the number of hours worked for these same workers. Francine D. Blau, Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and professor of economics at Cornell University and chair of the panel that conducted the study and wrote the report, comments that there are many reasons why those who haven’t completed high school struggle to find work and there is no “indication immigration is the major factor.”

For the effect of high-skilled immigrants on native wages and employment, the report notes that several studies have found a “positive impact of skilled immigration on the wages and employment of both college- and non-college-educated natives.” These findings are consistent with the view that “skilled immigrants are often complementary to native-born workers; that spillovers of wage-enhancing knowledge and skills occur as a result of interactions among workers; and that skilled immigrants innovate sufficiently to raise overall productivity.”

While the report found that immigrants had minimal impact on the wages of native-born workers, in terms of fiscal impact, first-generation immigrants at the state and local levels are more costly to governments than the native-born, in large part due to educational costs, and that when compared with the native-born, first-generation immigrants contributed less in taxes during working ages because they were, on average, less educated and earned less. The children of immigrants, however, as adults are “among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the US population, contributing more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population.”

Immigration and the role of immigrants in the US has been a hotly debated topic this election season. Some American workers, still recovering from the recession, have blamed immigrants for lack of quality jobs. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has called for a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, saying they “compete directly against vulnerable American workers” while also proposing new controls on legal immigration to “boost wages and ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first.”

Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies and one of the outsider reviewers for the report (and generally a critic of favorable US immigration policies) notes: “Immigration is primarily a redistributive policy, transferring income from workers to owners of capital and from taxpayers to low-income immigrant families. The information in the new report will help Americans think about these tradeoffs in a constructive way.”  

Dr. Blau says: “The panel's comprehensive examination revealed many important benefits of immigration—including on economic growth, innovation, and entrepreneurship—with little to no negative effects on the overall wages or employment of native-born workers in the long term.”

Understanding

Understanding by Martin Creed

Understanding by Martin Creed

British interdisciplinary artist and musician Martin Creed's lastest piece, titled Understanding (as you might guess), is inspired by neon signs, Times Square marquees, and advertising logos. But instead of selling a product, Creed is proclaiming a word that is "fundamental to communication between people." These ten–foot–tall letters are mounted on a fifty–foot–long steel I–beam, and rotate 360 degrees, "constantly shifting perspective on the work." The letters spin at differing speeds according to a computerized program designed by the artist. Understanding is at Pier 6 at Brooklyn Bridge Park through October 23, 2016.

LA Times: "Arizona's once-feared immigration law, SB 1070, loses most of its power in settlement"

Arizona has announced an end to its practice of requiring police officers to demand the identification documents of people suspected of being in the country without legal documentation. The announcement is part of a settlement between the State of Arizona and the National Immigration Law Center and other immigrants’ rights groups that sued six years ago just after passage of the controversial Senate Bill (SB) 1070.  

This decision concedes a key point of arguably one of the nation’s most aggressive immigration bills, Arizona’s SB 1070, formally titled the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” signed by then-Governor Jan Brewer in April 2010. This bill was an “omnibus of Arizona anti-immigration measures, collecting a decade’s worth of fears of Mexican drug cartels, competition for jobs and the state’s rapidly expanding Latino population into one piece of legislation.”

Specifically, SB 1070 contained elements designed to decrease the number of undocumented immigrants in the state by compelling police to ask for identification and permitting officers to make arrests without a warrant if the officer believed the individual had committed an offense that made them deportable. The law also made it a crime to fail to carry registration papers and for undocumented immigrants to solicit work.     

As part of the settlement, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued an informal opinion instructing police officers to “ignore the provision in the law that requires them to investigate a ‘reasonable suspicion’ that a person is in the country" without proper documentation, which immigrants’ rights groups warned would lead to racial profiling. “Officers shall not prolong a stop, detention or arrest solely for the purpose of verifying immigration status,” Brnovich wrote. “Officers shall not contact, stop, detain or arrest an individual based on race, color, or national origin, except when it is part of a suspect description.” Additionally, Brnovich issued a statement assuring Arizonans that elements of SB 1070 would remain valid. “We have succeeded by keeping the key provisions of SB 1070 in place,” Brnovich says. “Our goal while negotiating this settlement was to find a common-sense solution that protects Arizona taxpayers while helping our great state move forward.”

Immigration advocates are claiming the settlement as a win for immigrant rights. “For the very first time since May 2010, there will be clarity to every law enforcement officer in the state that the only way to follow SB 1070 is to make sure no one is detained on their immigration status alone,” Karen Tumlin, legal director of the National Immigration Law Center, tells the Los Angeles Times.

This SB 1070 settlement comes as a group of advocacy organizations is filing a new federal lawsuit claiming that those who qualify for Arizona driver’s licenses have been illegally denied the chance to obtain them. This latest suit comes less than two years after a federal judge forced the state to grant driver’s licenses to recipients of the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Then-Gov. Jan Brewer had issued a directive banning them from getting licenses, claiming the decision grew out of “liability concerns and the desire to reduce the risk of the licenses being used to improperly access public benefits.” Victor Viramontes, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the groups filing the lawsuit, says the state should have allowed all deferred action recipients to get licenses following the federal court ruling. “They should have stopped discriminating the minute this policy was declared unconstitutional, but they keep doing it,” he tells CBS News.

Hello from Vermont!

Lake Champlain

Lake Champlain

Matt and I traveled up to beautiful Vermont for the annual stakeholder’s event at the Vermont Service Center (VSC) of US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS). These annual stakeholder events provide a valuable opportunity to meet officers of the VSC and fellow practitioners and discuss immigration issues and topics. (Okay, and also ask about that case that has been pending for way beyond the processing times.) At these stakeholder events, the VSC typically hosts roundtables and informational sessions related to business, family, and student-based immigration case types as well as customer service issues and concerns. The highlight is a tour of the VSC itself, but for security reasons, the VSC doesn't allow photos of their buildings. That's okay, though. This beautiful sunset on Lake Champlain will do!

The Washington Post: "Appeals court strikes down proof-of-citizenship voting requirement in 3 states"

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has reversed a prior ruling that allowed certain state US election agencies to require a proof-of-citizenship for a mail-in federal voter registration form used for November’s election in Kansas, Alabama, and Georgia. To date, Kansas was the only state to actually enforce the rule, and in oral arguments, civil rights groups claimed that if permitted the ID provision could potentially disenfranchise tens of thousands of US citizens applying to vote in Kansas without required papers. 

The requirement entailed a “demand to show documentation such as a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers instead of accepting signed and sworn affirmation of citizenship to register to vote in federal races.” Two US Appeals Court judges, Judith W. Rogers and Stephen F. Williams, granted a preliminary injunction and the case will go back down to the district court.

For native and naturalized citizens, one of the greatest rights one possesses is the right to vote for public officers; however, voter requirements, including providing a state-issued ID or proof of citizenship, have been considered by some an undue burden and discriminatory. The Obama administration has waged ongoing battles with conservative lawyers and Republican lawmakers over voter requirements and who will be eligible to vote in this year’s presidential election, and the administration has asked federal appeals courts to repeal new voting laws passed in Texas, North Carolina, and other states. Chris Carson, president of the League of Women Voters, who brought the suit in this case, says voting should be made easier, not harder: “We are grateful to the court of appeals for stopping this thinly veiled discrimination in its tracks,” she tells The Washington Post. “All eligible Americans deserve the opportunity to register and vote without obstacles.”

In this case, voter groups sued after what they called an “unauthorized and unilateral decision” earlier this year by Brian D. Newby, executive director of the US Election Assistance Commission, to grant the three states’ requests to change the federal registration form to include new ID requirements to reportedly combat voter fraud. In the 2-1 ruling, US Appeals Court Judge A. Raymond Randolph, disagreed with his fellow judges and agreed with Newby stating that it would “raise serious constitutional doubts” if the federal elections assistance body prevented a state from “enforcing its voter qualifications.” Kansas Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach, who defended the voter ID requirement in court, claimed that “any harm to potential voters was speculative.” The final result of this case remains to be seen as it is now back with the district court, though Kobach stated previously that if the state were to lose it would retroactively allow voters to cast ballots in federal races if their applications were canceled solely because they did not document citizenship.