CNN: "1 in 10 eligible voters in 2020 are immigrants. That's a record high"

As voters go to the polls today to vote in the “Super Tuesday” democratic presidential primary, many of those voters could be immigrants. More than 23 million US immigrants will be eligible to vote in the 2020 presidential election, a record high, according to a Pew Research Center report based on Census Bureau data. The report, released last Wednesday, notes that the size of the immigrant electorate has nearly doubled since 2000 with immigrants making up roughly 10% of the nation’s overall electorate. The report notes that most immigrant eligible voters are either Hispanic or Asian with immigrants from Mexico making up the single largest group with sixteen percent of foreign-born voters.

The increase in immigrant voting population coincides at a time when immigration policy issues are a key consideration for many voters. "Many of the administration's proposed policy changes, such as expanding the U.S.-Mexico border wall and limiting legal immigration, have generated strong, polarized reactions from the public," the Pew Research Center says. "These proposals may also affect how immigrants see their place in America and the potential role they could play in the 2020 presidential election.”

Can I Freelance on My Nonimmigrant Visa? Limitations and Opportunities in the US Immigration System

It is more and more common for people to want to structure their careers free from the ties of a standard employer/employee relationship. What used to be the standard nine-to-five job with the same employer is becoming less and less suited to the new ways that people work. For many people who work in the arts especially, working on projects for multiple employers is the best way to structure their work. However, doing myriad projects for multiple clients or employers can be challenging under the current immigration system and visa structures. While the US has a clear interest in protecting US workers and ensuring foreign nationals do not come to the US without actual work lined up, the immigration system fails to properly allow for the increasing trend of people working under a freelance model.

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NY Times: “U.K.’s New Immigration Rules Will Restrict Low-Skilled Workers”

The UK government last week announced plans to block low-skilled workers in order to cut overall immigration from Europe and elsewhere. Under a new post-Brexit points-based immigration system starting January 2021, immigrants to the UK will have to meet certain criteria to qualify for a work visa, including having specific skills, the ability to speak English, and having a job offer with a minimum salary threshold of £25,600 (about $33,300), with only some exceptions.

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The New Yorker: “How the Trump Administration Uses the 'Hidden Weapons' of Immigration Law”

Isaac Chotiner, a staff writer at The New Yorker, interviewed Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, about President Trump’s impact on American immigration policy, from travel bans to changing how asylum claims are made at the US-Mexico border. Reichlin-Melnick says that the Trump administration has had success in finding “the hidden weapons in existing immigration law” and using “them to the full extent, which no one had ever imagined would ever be done.”

In the interview, Reichlin-Melnick covers a variety of topics, including the international agreements that the Trump administration has made with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which have re-shaped who is arriving at the US-Mexico border; the travel bans, which are essentially nationality-based immigration restrictions; the child separations that are still ongoing; and, in particular, the “humanitarian catastrophe” happening at the U.S.-Mexico border because of the so-called “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP).

As Reichlin-Melnick explains, the MPP program is supposedly to increase access to court hearings but “what it is doing is forcing sixty-two thousand-plus asylum seekers to wait in appallingly dangerous conditions with no hope that they’ll ever have the opportunity to get a lawyer and virtually impossible chances of ever winning asylum, regardless of the strength of their claims.” Because of MPP, migrants have been subject to kidnapping and serious crimes like rape and torture. Reichlin-Melnick notes: “I often like to say the Trump Administration realized that Americans would rise up in anger when it saw our own government officials doing horrific things to people at the border, so what they did is they exported that—they outsourced the violence, and the crime, and the danger to the cartels in Mexico and let the cartels do the deterrence work that our agents were no longer able to do.”