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Washington, October 15

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has vowed to provide citizenship to 11 million illegal immigrants if voted to power in the November 3 presidential elections.

Biden identified this as one of his priorities in addition to beating the virus, rebuilding the economy and figuring out how to restore American leadership around the world.

Responding to a question at a virtual fundraiser on Wednesday, Biden said there is a need to deal with what's going on at the border.

We're going to have to deal with the immigration crisis we have. I'm going to send the House and Senate an immigration bill that's going to provide access to citizenship to 11 million people, he said.

According to the campaign, there were 37 attendees and the event was hosted by Jane Hartley, former US Ambassador to France and Monaco and current Chairman, Sesame Workshop; Blair Effron, Founder & Partner, Centerview Partners; Indian American Deven Parekh, Managing Director, Insight Partners and Roger Altman, Founder & Senior Chairman, Evercore.

When asked how he would envision his first 30 days in office in terms of both domestic and foreign policy, Biden said: A lot more can go wrong between now and January 21, and I'm not being facetious. Four more years, we're not going to have the country we have now.

If the American people elect me, we're going to have an enormous task in repairing the damage he's done, he added of Trump.

We have to be beating the virus, rebuilding the economy and figuring out how to restore American leadership around the world, Biden said.

Biden said he would move to quickly implement his plan to deal with the pandemic and reopen safely.

The Democratic presidential candidate also made a note of the challenges facing the so-called Z Generation, the very young.

They've really gotten screwed since they got out of school, Biden said.

The jobs aren't there, he said.

But guess what? They're the most open, progressive and the brightest generation we've ever had, he added.

And we have to embrace them. They know the change we need to make and how we need to be much more, much more integrated in everything we do, he said.

Biden was critical of the policies of President Donald Trump.

The rest of the world is wondering, what in the Lord's name is happening? What we're living through today is not normal, he said.

He reiterated his attacks on Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, noting more than 215,000 Americans have died and criticised the president for backing away from stimulus talks.

He didn't walk away. He never was part of em, Biden said.

Three days later, after he said he was walking away, he said he's coming back One day, he's tweeting that the relief package is too big next day it's too small. The longer he's president, the more reckless he gets, he added.

While talking more broadly about the stakes of the election, Biden noted he just got off the phone with Warren Buffett.

"We have to refuse to postpone what America has to do, the work we have to do. There's nothing beyond our capacity for God's sake, Biden said.

Just got off the phone with Warren Buffett and talking about how we're in a position, unlike we were 50, 70, 80 years ago, to lead the whole damn world in a way that no one else can. There's no limit to America's future. The only thing that's going to tear America apart is America itself," he said. PTI

See the original post:
Will provide citizenship to 11 million illegal immigrants if voted to power, says Biden - The Tribune India

As tragic as the shooting and death of Kate Steinle was, it was one of the 13,455 murders that year in the United States and it does not tell us how many of those victims were murdered by illegal immigrants. The most important measure that matters when judging the crime rates of illegal immigrants is how likely they are to be criminals compared to other subpopulations. If illegal immigrants are more likely to be criminals then their presence in the United States would raise crime rates, supporting Trumps assertions. But if illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crime then they would lower the nationwide crime rate.

Politically, this debate spills over to evaluating whether domestic immigration enforcement policies reduce crime. Illegal immigrant crime is also central to the debate over sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse to turn over many illegal immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the effects of aborder wall, and whether Border Patrol requires more resources to counter crime along the border. Answering whether illegal immigrants are particularly crime prone is essential to addressing these concerns and setting efficient anticrime policies.

See the rest here:
Illegal Immigration and Crime in Texas - Cato Institute

President Donald Trumps hard line on illegal immigration may come back into sharper focus during the final weeks of his re-election campaign.

For months, Trump has been at the center of disputes over his response to peaceful social justice protests and violent demonstrations, handling of the coronavirus pandemic, efforts to raise doubts about the validity of the November election, and reluctance to condemn White supremacy.

Now his own COVID-19 diagnosis and his nomination of federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court have overshadowed all of that.

Meanwhile, the crackdown on illegal immigration, Trumps signature policy and political prescription, had lost its high profile, at least temporarily no doubt in part because of all the other controversies.

But also, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency ratcheted back its operations in March due to safety concerns amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Though the deadly virus is continuing to spread, ICE is ramping up its activity.

U.S. immigration officials quietly announced they would resume regular apprehension and detention practices, an apparent reversal from an earlier temporary suspension of non-criminal enforcement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Miami Herald reported in late September.

The effort isnt so quiet anymore. ICE is openly targeting sanctuary jurisdictions, which generally prohibit local law enforcement agencies from coordinating with federal immigration enforcement actions.

Last week, ICE announced 128 arrests have been made in California under Operation Rise with 24 of them in San Diego County, according to Kristina Davis of The San Diego Union-Tribune. The operation spanned the region, from Encinitas and Escondido to San Diego and Spring Valley.

Other areas targeted included Los Angeles and San Francisco. Some 80 percent of the arrests involved people with prior criminal convictions or pending criminal charges beyond immigration violations, including sex acts with a minor, domestic violence, drug possession, vehicle theft, burglary and DUI, authorities said.

A state law prohibits local law enforcement from notifying ICE when people arrested for certain crimes are about to be released, although notifications are allowed when it comes to about 800 serious crimes. That means ICE must pick up many of those people elsewhere.

When you make arrests out in public, things can go wrong, Gregory Archambeault, director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in San Diego and Imperial counties said Thursday.

Neither the city nor county of San Diego has declared itself an immigration sanctuary, as Los Angeles, San Francisco and other California jurisdictions have. However, San Diego must abide by sanctuary laws passed by the state.

Davis noted that San Diego law enforcement leaders over the years have said they do not intend to enforce immigration laws, in part because that could shake the trust of immigrants, making investigations of crime and keeping communities safe more difficult. But she added some local agencies, including the Sheriffs Department, have said the state laws have gone too far.

Earlier, ICE said it was confident its officers can conduct operations safely amid the continuing pandemic, and no longer talked about using more discretion about arresting non-criminal undocumented migrants, according to the Miami Herald.

The Washington Post said the so-called sanctuary op is a nationwide effort aimed at more than immigration enforcement.

Two officials with knowledge of plans for sanctuary op described it as more of a political messaging campaign than a major ICE operation, the Post said.

ICE may have downshifted some since the spring because of COVID-19, but the agency said it continued to focus on immigration violators with criminal records.

At the beginning of September, ICE announced it had arrested 46 people around San Diego County as part of a monthlong, nationwide operation.

A New York Times review of government data of that operation found ICE arrested a large number of immigrants who had committed minor crimes or no crimes at all other than immigration violations.

Overall, Trump has continued his pursuit of restrictive immigration policies during the pandemic. He greatly limited asylum, blocked refugees from entering the country, closed borders for most nonessential crossings and built hundreds of miles of border wall, though most of it to replace existing fencing.

How hard the administration will target sanctuary jurisdictions is unknown. Last year, an operation aimed at those jurisdictions came up short of administration expectations. Trump actually mentioned the raids ahead of time on Twitter.

Some ICE officials privately attributed the operations underwhelming results to Trumps boasting and indiscipline, the Post said.

The president also has threatened to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities, similar to the subsequent threat he made to large Democratic-run cities over civil unrest. His lawsuit to overturn Californias sanctuary law, which was supported twice by a divided San Diego County Board of Supervisors, was unsuccessful.

The lawsuit was largely dismissed by a federal judge and the ruling was upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case.

For years, Trumps policies have been accompanied by the presidents harsh rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, which has further inflamed passions.

Layered on top of that are his broader views and actions regarding issues affecting people of color. Among other things, he has called the words Black Lives Matter a symbol of hate, criticized a federal housing rule that seeks to do away with racial segregation, and declined to strongly condemn White supremacists and other extremist groups.

Whether all of this has reached a critical mass that will affect his re-election prospects is an open question. And it remains to be seen if rebooted immigration enforcement will rise to the top of the issues involving the president.

Theres a lot of competition.

The rest is here:
Column: Trump expands crackdown on illegal immigration as early ballots are cast - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Judging by the news reporting about the freshly released U.S. Department of Homeland Security's first annual "Threat Assessment", the most important takeaway was that white supremacists pose the "most persistent and lethal" domestic terrorism threat to America.

That may well be true, as I testified before Congress last year, and it is worth noting that no one has attacked the credibility of the DHS report that pegged white supremacy as such a prominent threat, coming as it did from the Trump administration. However, traditional media overlooked what this same very credible report said about other important homeland security threat matters that Americans also care about, such as the increasing likelihood of another swamping mass-migration crisis at the southwest border in 2021.

The DHS outlook is as dire as it is newsworthy. The collaborative intelligence community assessment, written by career analysts, sees an increasing likelihood that a new mass migration wave will come out of the Caribbean and Central and South America, especially Cuba and Haiti, next year. Two main push-pull factors will converge to cause this: A) lifting of pandemic-related border restrictions among Latin American countries, which will release postponed, pent-up plans to cross the U.S. border; and B) economic distress from the pandemic coupled with a resurgence in the American economy. Here's how DHS puts it, on p. 25:

Since 2014, DHS has experienced repeated illegal immigration surges at the Southwest Border. DHS anticipates that the number of apprehensions at the border will significantly climb post-pandemic, with the potential for another surge as those who were previously prevented from seeking entry into the United States arrive at the border and as poor economic conditions around the world fuel migration. This high volume of illegal immigration, including unprecedented numbers of family units and unaccompanied alien children arrivals, stretch government resources, and create a humanitarian and border security crisis that cripples the immigration system.

It also predicts surges in migration from outside the Western Hemisphere, among them unspecified national security "threat actors", a likely reference, in part, to terrorist travelers who would stand a better chance of disappearing in a huge, smothering crowd. (See CIS's video report on "extra-continental migration".)

"Although the majority of migrants do not pose a national security or public safety threat, pathways used by migrants to travel to the United States have been exploited by threat actors," the DHS report states. "As a result, surges of migrants could undermine our ability to effectively secure the border."

Most interestingly, the report names a third factor likely to drive the next mass migration event along with economic and pandemic ones: migrant "perceptions of U.S. and Mexican immigration and enforcement policies" due to ongoing "inter-governmental division and inconsistent messaging".

This last factor, left unexplained but repeated elsewhere in the document, probably references the coming election where the likely outcome is a rise in Democratic Party power over immigration policy that would be viewed by aspiring migrants around the world as a green light to largely unimpeded passage over the southern border and then successful resettlement.

As I have explained recently in predicting a new mass migration, a phenomenon I call "The Biden Effect", aspiring border-crossers around the world will rush the border if Biden wins because they have heard his promises to end deportations, limit detentions, reopen the asylum system and its loopholes to all comers, end all Trump-era asylum initiatives, provide free healthcare, and prioritize a "pathway to citizenship" for millions of illegally present people already in the country or who can get here in time to get it.

The DHS report issues a general observation about the present state of political affairs as a contributing factor the coming crisis:

DHS projects that until fundamental changes are made to the immigration enforcement process, including legislation that addresses current legal loopholes that incentivize high levels of illegal immigration, the United States will periodically experience additional humanitarian and border security crises.

In predicting the next one, DHS describes the consequences of past crises where mass migration events overwhelmed immigration enforcement agencies and systems, the most critical of these being the asylum and detention systems. The report predicts that the coming wave of illegal immigrants who will claim asylum will once again swamp U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency charged with processing credible-fear-of-return claims, which are prerequisites for asylum applications.

The report says the crush of people would exacerbate an already vast backlog of cases, which, coupled with filled-up detention centers, in the past resulted in mass releases of border-crossing strangers, criminals among them.

Continuing disagreement about whether illegal immigrants should be detained has prevented investments in bed-space expansions needed to cope with mass migration events, leading to mass releases into the public when they happen. The DHS report noted this ominous consequence:

Lack of bipartisan support of detention measures continues to lead to the release of dangerous criminal aliens and absconders who may then commit additional crimes when they might otherwise have been expeditiously detained and removed from the United States.

Alluding to the probable next mass migration event in 2021, the DHS report reminds its readers of past times when "record migration" distracted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from their duty to arrest fugitives and criminal aliens and "resulted in decreased interior arrests".

White supremacy is a serious threat and deserves time in the spotlight, as well as resources. But in terms of priorities, the nation need not be forced to choose one over any other threat problem. The U.S. homeland security establishment is big enough to handle more than one threat at any given time.

The American media is, too.

Excerpt from:
New DHS Threat Assessment: Expect a Mass Illegal Migration Crisis Next Year - Immigration Blog

Border Patrol made 405,036 apprehensions of approximately 324,029 unique individuals in the 2020 fiscal year, down from 859,501 apprehensions of approximately 799,336 unique individuals in 2019. In 2020, Border Patrol arrested 2,438 criminal aliens convicted of 3,150 crimes. Of those 3,150 convictions, 40 percent were for immigration offenses while the remainder were for more serious crimes. Thus, approximately 1,463 of the 2,438 criminal aliens arrested for Border Patrol had committed nonimmigration crimes. Of the 324,029 unique individuals apprehended by Border Patrol, the 1,463 criminal aliens with nonimmigration crimes accounted for about 0.45 percent of all aliens apprehended by Border Patrol in 2020. In other words, less than onehalf of one percent of the illegal immigrants apprehended by Border Patrol had committed nonimmigration crimes and about 0.75 percent had committed acrime including immigration crimes (Figure 1).

Criminal aliens apprehended as apercent of all apprehended illegal immigrants are up slightly in 2020 because the number of all people apprehended has roughly halved in the last year, but the total number of criminals apprehended is the lowest recorded. The number of criminal aliens apprehended is 43 percent lower than in 2019 and 87 percent lower than in 2015. In 2015, each Border Patrol agent apprehended one criminal alien on average. In 2020, only 1in 8Border Patrol agents apprehended acriminal alien on average. Either criminal aliens found away to cross the border undetected, which is unlikely, or many fewer are coming.

By comparison, about 8percent of the U.S. adult population had been convicted of afelony. Although its not an applestoapples comparison as the U.S. adult felony conviction rate includes immigrants who have alower criminal incarceration and conviction rate, we can confidently estimate that nativeborn Americans have arate of felony conviction about 10 times higher than that of illegal immigrants apprehended by Border Patrol in 2020.

In 2020, convictions for driving under the influence accounted for about 12 percent of the convictions , drug crimes accounted for 12 percent, 7percent for assault, battery, or domestic violence, 5percent for property crimes, 5percent for sexual offenses, 2percent for weapons charges, 18 percent for other crimes, and 0.1 percent for homicide and manslaughter (Table 1).

The difference above between the number of apprehensions and individuals apprehended is due to the recidivism rate. Many illegal immigrants get caught, are returned or removed from the United States, and try again. That recidivism rate has trended downward over time because the government imposed harsher penalties on illegal border crossers. However, the government has been quickly returning illegal immigrants apprehended along the border without consequences since March 2020in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As aresult, the recidivism rate has shot up in 2020 for the reasons Istated here.

How much has the recidivism rate shot up? It was 7percent in 2019 and 20 percent for the entire 2020 fiscal year. In September 2020, the recidivism rate was ashocking 37 percent.

Nick Miroff of the Washington Post wrote an excellent piece about the skyrocketing recidivism rate wherein he quotes Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott as saying: Were returning people very, very quickly, but our ability and willingness, if you will, to prosecute people, to have aconsequence to the illegal activity of crossing the border, has been reduced. Most of those being apprehended are single Mexican adults, adramatic turnaround from 2019 when only 20 percent were Mexicans.

Returning illegal border crossers immediately combined with other restrictions on asylum and Mexican enforcement policy may have dissuaded many Central Americans from trying to enter unlawfully or to seek asylum, but it has helped shift it back toward Mexicans. The Trump administrations cancellation of H-2B visas for seasonal nonagricultural work, primarily used by Mexicans, has likely also contributed to the surge of Mexicans.

Read more:
Criminal Border Patrol Apprehensions Are Down Along the Border - Cato Institute