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Only 60 people have received Windrush compensation payments during the first year of the schemes operation, with just 360,000 distributed from a fund officials expected might be required to pay out between 200m and 500m.

There has been rising concern among support groups working with those affected by the Home Office scandal about the slowness of compensation offers, and about the difficulties experienced by those trying to claim.

One individual has received a payment of more than 100,000, which suggests the other 59 people who have been granted compensation will have received relatively low payouts averaging 4,400, according to figures released on Thursday. The Home Office has stressed that many of these are interim payments, and people will likely receive further instalments at a later date.

By the end of March, 1,275 people had applied under the scheme. Many of those who are still waiting for compensation remain in difficult financial circumstances, as a direct result of their treatment by the Home Office when they were mistakenly classified as being in the UK illegally, as a result of the hostile environment against illegal immigration introduced by Theresa May, when she was home secretary from 2010 onwards.

Who are the Windrush generation?

They are people who arrived in the UK after the second world war from Caribbean countries at the invitation of the British government. The first group arrived on the ship MV Empire Windrush in June 1948.

What happened to them?

An estimated 50,000 people faced the risk of deportation if they had never formalised their residency status and did not have the required documentation to prove it.

Why now?

It stems from a policy, set out by Theresa May when she was home secretary,to make the UK 'a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants'. It requires employers, NHS staff, private landlords and other bodies to demand evidence of peoples citizenship or immigration status.

Why do they not have the correct paperwork and status?

Some children, often travelling on their parents passports, were never formally naturalised and many moved to the UK before the countries in which they were born became independent, so they assumed they were British. In some cases, they did not apply for passports. The Home Office did not keep a record of people entering the country and granted leave to remain, which was conferred on anyone living continuously in the country since before 1 January 1973.

What did the government try and do to resolve the problem?

A Home Office teamwas set up to ensure Commonwealth-born long-term UK residents would no longer find themselves classified as being in the UK illegally. But a month after one minister promised the cases would be resolved within two weeks,many remained destitute. In November 2018 home secretary Sajid Javid revealed that at least 11 Britons who had been wrongly deported had died. In April 2019 the government agreed to pay up to 200m in compensation.

Many were sacked, and subsequently found themselves ineligible for unemployment benefits despite having paid taxes for decades. Some people were evicted from their homes because they built up arrears as a result of being sacked. More than 160 people were mistakenly detained or removed from the country, and sent back to countries they had left as children decades earlier. Many are waiting for compensation payments, so they can repay debts accrued during that period of enforced unemployment.

Some applicants have described being asked to provide very high levels of documentary evidence proving their right to compensation. While there is an understanding of the need to prove eligibility, some have felt the process echoes the original scandal, when they struggled to persuade Home Office staff that they were living in the UK legally, and were asked for large quantities of difficult-to-find documentary proof, showing they had arrived as children in the 1950s and 1960s.

Support groups helping claimants to fill in the application forms say many people have yet to submit their claims, because they are still gathering evidence to prove eligibility. Since the government first apologised for its mistakes two years ago, more than 12,000 people have received documentation from the Home Office confirming they are living in the UK legally a figure that offers an indication of the number of people who may eventually claim compensation.

The home secretary, Priti Patel, said: By listening to feedback from community leaders and those affected, we have begun to put right the wrongs caused to a generation who have contributed so much to our country.

The Windrush compensation scheme has been developed to ease the burden from the unacceptable mistreatment some have faced, which is why it is so important that people continue to come forward.

The Home Office said a further 280,000 of compensation had been offered to claimants, but not yet paid out, possibly because applicants felt the offer did not reflect the extent of the difficulties experienced.

Twenty-three people have been told they are not eligible for any payment and 27 have asked for the payments offered to be reviewed by the Home Office. While the scheme is making good progress and continues to process claims as quickly as possible, the Home Office is committed to getting more people to come forward and claim, a spokesperson said. Many of the payments made are interim, which means people will get a far greater award.

Elwaldo Romeo received a letter in 2018 from the Home Office telling himhe was liable to be detained because he had not been given leave to enter the United Kingdom and offering support on returning home, despite the fact he had moved to the UK from Antigua 59 years earlier, aged four. He coordinates the group Windrush Action, made up of people who were affected by the scandal. He said he was very disappointed by the slow progress of compensation payments, but urged people who have been affected to come forward and make claims.

Judy Griffith was told by a jobcentre employee that she was an illegal immigrant, 52 years after moving to the UK from Barbados. She could not travel, so was unable to see her mother before she died. As a result of being unable to work she got into significant arrears on her flat. She is waiting for compensation so she can pay back the arrears and repay friends and relatives who helped her when she was classified as an illegal immigrant. She applied for compensation more than six months ago and is still waiting.

I understand that they have to verify everything but I am still in arrears, still trying to keep my head above water, still getting calls from the council about the arrears. Were still suffering and they dont seem to understand how badly it has affected our lives, she said.

Link:
Windrush scandal: only 60 victims given compensation so far - The Guardian

Five Mexican citizens apprehended this week after illegally entering the United States in remote northern Maine were returned to Canada within hours under a rule put into place as part of the U.S. government response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A similar policy by the Canadian government allows the return to the United States of most people seeking asylum in Canada.

While the restrictions haven't ended illegal immigration into the United States from Canada, the emergency policy has all but ended the use of Roxham Road in Champlain, New York one of the most well-known routes used by people fleeing the U.S. to seek asylum in Canada.

For more than three years, Janet McFetridge, a humanitarian activist from Champlain, helped the northbound asylum seekers.

It makes me wonder where they are and whether they are safe, she said of their absence.

Prior to COVID-19, depending on the circumstances of the individual border crosser, the five people apprehended in Maine on May 12 could have been charged with a federal crime in the United States or quickly processed for deportation to their home country.

President Donald Trump closed the borders with Mexico and Canada to all-but-essential traffic in March. For those entering illegally or seeking asylum, the administration has suspended immigration laws on public health grounds, giving border officials authority to rapidly expel them.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's order allowing rapid expulsions along the Mexican and Canadian borders is set to expire May 21, but administration officials have said it could be extended.

The vast majority of the expulsions have been on the southern border. CBP statistics show that between the time the rule was implemented and the end of April, 20,860 people were returned to Mexico. On the northern border, there were 27.

One of the first instances of returning northern border crossers came on March 21, the day the policy was implemented, when Border Patrol agents in Richford, Vermont, apprehended six individuals who had just illegally entered the U.S. from Canada. They were returned to Canada the same day.

Justin Mohammed of Amnesty International Canada, which is party to a pending Canadian lawsuit challenging the safe third country agreement that allows the northbound migrants to seek asylum in Canada, said his organization was extremely concerned by the Trump administration's summary expulsion of migrants back to Canada, including people who could possibly seek refugee protection.

The terms of the arrangement between Canada and the U.S. have never been publicly disclosed, and thus it is unclear how Canada is ensuring that it will not be complicit in any violations committed by American authorities, he said Friday in an emailed statement.

But Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for tight restrictions on immigration, said Friday the immigration crackdown is having the desired effect of reducing illegal immigration.

Its pretty clear the main reason for this is the policies, Vaughn said. They are not going to get away with making asylum claims, they are not going to be able to game the system.

Since around the time Trump took office, tens of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. who despaired of finding a permanent safe haven began crossing illegally into Canada to seek asylum. Many of those asylum seekers used Roxham Road, a back road in Champlain that ends at the Canadian border.

There, they would cross the border and be arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but were allowed to file an asylum claim. In most cases, they were released while their applications were pending.

After the pandemic hit, the Canadian government implemented its own border restrictions that allows it to return most asylum seekers to the United States. The current order is now scheduled to expire June 30.

In an email response to questions, the Canada Border Services Agency said that between March 21 and May 13, 26 asylum seekers were returned to the U.S., including 21 irregular border crossers 14 in Quebec and nine in British Columbia. The other three asylum seekers presented at a port of entry in southern Ontario and were sent back to the U.S.

Two other asylum seekers were allowed to enter Canada under exceptions to the rule that include being an unaccompanied minor or a U.S. citizen seeking to make an asylum claim in Canada.

In the Maine case, Customs and Border Protection says the immigrants were apprehended May 12 near the St. Juste Port of Entry in Maine's Big 10 Township, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) southeast of Quebec City.

They were spotted by a local resident emerging from brush near the border. The local then gave the five people a ride to the nearby border crossing, where they were taken into custody by the Border Patrol.

Later that same day they were returned to Canada at the Armstrong, Quebec, port of entry.

More:
Virus rules tighten illegal immigration on northern border - ABC News

Identifying illegal aliens in Census Bureau data is a challenging task. Researchers must gather the limited amount of outside information they have about the illegal population, then make educated guesses about the legal status of non-citizens in the data. Given all the uncertainty, it's important to assess the face validity of the results in other words, are they plausible?

That's where a new Cato Institute analysis went wrong. Intending to demonstrate the importance of immigrants to the healthcare system, Alex Nowrasteh and Michelangelo Landgrave reported that over 42,000 physicians in the United States are illegal aliens.

Take a moment to consider the implausibility of that number. The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) estimates 7,427,035 illegal immigrants in the labor force, based on the same 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) data that Cato used. If Cato's illegal-physician count is correct, then about 0.6 percent of all illegal workers are doctors. But only 0.5 percent of natives in the labor force are doctors 653,865 native-born doctors out of 135,783,619 workers. In other words, illegal workers are supposedly more likely to be physicians than native workers!

Here is another way to look at it: The 2018 ACS shows a total 66,065 non-citizen physicians who arrived in the United States since 1980.1 This is around the earliest time that any current illegal alien could have arrived due to the IRCA amnesty.2 Nowrasteh and Landgrave would have us believe that nearly two-thirds of them are here illegally.3

Their illegal counts for some other healthcare occupations also constitute an implausibly high share of post-1980 non-citizens. In the table below, the first three columns are from Cato's Table 1, and the last two columns (in red) are our calculations from the same data. For example, 88 percent of all post-1980 non-citizen nurse-anesthetists are supposedly illegal, as are 71 percent of physician assistants.

Source: Columns 1, 2, and 3 from are Table 1 of "Immigrant Health Care Workersby Occupation and State", by the Cato Institute, which is based on the 2018 AmericanCommunity Survey. Columns 4 and 5 are our calculations from the same data.

In addition to obtaining an advanced education that is out of reach for most illegal aliens, doctors and other health care providers also need to be licensed, yet few states offer licenses to people who are not authorized to work in the country. Moreover, like doctors, many of these occupations (e.g. nurse-anesthetists, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants) typically require Drug Enforcement Agency registration so they can dispense drugs. In short, many of Cato's numbers do not just stretch credulity, they break it.4

The licensing requirement is the primary reason both Pew and the CMS, which produce the two leading demographic profiles of the illegal population, automatically count physicians as legal.5 CIS follows the same rule, and it is why we do not report an estimate for illegal doctors and other highly regulated medical professions in our analysis of occupations. This is not to say that the number of illegal alien doctors or other high-skilled medical practitioners is exactly zero. Surely there are some, but no probabilistic method will be able to count them reliably.

1 Cato includes in their numbers those employed, those unemployed, and those totally out of the labor force (neither working nor looking for work). The ACS reports occupations for those not working if they were employed in the prior five years. Though it impacts the numbers only slightly, the inclusion of those totally out of the labor force is surprising since these individuals are by definition not practicing medicine. Nonetheless, the post-1980 non-citizen figures we report follows Cato's definition of healthcare professional.

2 The Cato healthcare report links to another Cato report to explain how they determine legal status. That report states that they followed the method of another researcher, Christian Gunadi, and the Cato authors "identified an immigrant as lawfully present if he or she met any of the following criteria: the immigrant arrived after 1980." This must be a typo as "after" should read "before". Gunadi is certainly clear in his report that he considers anyone a legal immigrant if they arrived before 1980.

3 Cato did not adjust upward the number of illegal immigrants identified in the data. We know this because the number of legal and illegal immigrants they report separately add up to the total number immigrants in the ACS.

4 There are occupations, such as medical assistants, that typically require only modest training and no licensing, where significant numbers of illegal immigrants do work. So their numbers in that category are not unreasonable.

5 Robert Warren of the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) noted in an email on May 13, 2020, that the estimates developed by CMS employ "logical edits" to the ACS data that exclude doctors as possible illegal immigrants. The lack of logical edits in the healthcare field is presumably the main reason Cato came up with implausible numbers.

View post:
Are There Really 42000 Illegal Immigrant Doctors? - Immigration Blog

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the $125 million coronavirus disaster relief fund last month to support undocumented immigrants who were ineligible for federal stimulus checks and unemployment benefits due to their immigration status.

It's the first state funding effort directed at helping undocumented immigrants as the coronavirus pandemic causes financial hardships and spurs unemployment across the nation.

Applications will be accepted until June 30 or until funds run out.

Undocumented workers are essential, Newsom said

Undocumented workers are overrepresented in many of the sectors deemed essential and that are keeping the state afloat, including health care, agriculture and food, manufacturing and logistics and construction, Newsom said in his initial announcement.

About 10% of California's workforce is undocumented, he said. And though they paid over $2.5 billion in local and state taxes last year, they benefit from neither unemployment insurance nor the $2.2 trillion stimulus signed by President Trump.

Private donors to the $50 million philanthropy effort include the Emerson Collective, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, James Irvine Foundation, California Endowment and Blue Shield Foundation.

"I'm not here to suggest that $125 million is enough. But I am here to suggest it's a good start, and I'm very proud it's starting here in the state of California," he said.

The measure is likely to draw criticism from groups that oppose illegal immigration, who argue that it is unfair to offer financial support to immigrants who have broken the law.

While some argue that it is not the government's responsibility to support those undocumented when American citizens are hurting financially, immigration advocates say the disproportionate effect on undocumented workers is a wider problem.

CNN's Madeline Holcombe and Catherine Shoichet contributed to this report.

See the article here:
California is now offering support to undocumented immigrants, in the first relief fund of its kind - CNN

While California Gov. Gavin Newsom and many of his fellow Democrats continue to push for open borders, COVID-19 cases are increasing along our southern border, straining local medical facilities in Southern California and beyond.

The respected Wall Street Journal reported last week that hospitals in the border city of Chula Vista, Calif., are struggling to cope with a large number of COVID-19 patients, an influx they attribute to legal crossings from Tijuana, one of Mexicos cities hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Although the medical crisis along the border isnt attributed to illegal immigrants excuse me, undocumented workers you can understand how open borders would exacerbate the problem. In March, before the U.S. closed the border to non-essential travelers, more than 531,000 pedestrians and some 1.6 million vehicle passengers crossed the border into San Diego County at San Ysidro.

Scripps Health says it is near capacity for patients with COVID-19 at its Chula Vista hospital, the Wall Street Journal article continued. Sharp HealthCare, which owns Chula Vistas largest hospital, had to turn away ambulances during some busy days in April, the Journal added, describing Tijuana as a magnet for Mexican and foreign migrants seeking to enter the U.S Is it ever!

San Diego County has the third highest number of coronavirus cases in California, behind only populous Los Angeles and Riverside counties, the Journal continued. Chula Vista and nearby communities have the highest rate of infections per 100,000 people and the number has been rising The crisis south of San Diego illustrates a new threat: that Mexicos struggles to tackle the pandemic could spill over into the U.S. Apparently, however, it already has.

Meanwhile, Newsom and open borders advocates want to roll out the welcome mat for millions of illegal immigrants, and give them millions, or even billions, of taxpayer dollars worth of free benefits, including health care, not to mention sanctuary city policies that encourage more illegal immigration. President Trump has threatened to withhold federal aid from sanctuary cities and I think he should because those cities are openly violating our immigration laws.

States and cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland that welcome illegal immigrants should pay the price for doing so and not look to the federal government for multi-million or billion-dollar bailouts. Carlos Mora, founder of the Migrant Affairs Council in Baja California, Mexico, told the Journal that some migrants deported from the U.S. have tested positive for COVID-19. My guess is that some could mean hundreds, or even thousands of illegal immigrants.

In a joint statement issued in March by the Mexican and U.S. governments, both governments recognized the need for a dedicated joint effort to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus and address the economic effects resulting from reduced mobility (that is, tougher border controls) along our shared border. That sounds fine but Im pleased that construction is moving forward on Trumps big, beautiful border wall that Mexico was going to pay for. Remember that whopper?

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf visited Arizona last week to check on border wall construction. He found that 181 miles of walls ranging in height from 18 to 30 feet have been erected along our southern border since Trump took office in January, 2017, and 190 miles more are currently under construction. Thats good news for those of us who believe in secure borders and the Rule of Law.

Im glad the federal government is paying attention to our southern border during the coronavirus crisis because public safety is a top priority.

Guy W. Farmer is the Appeals senior political columnist.

Read the original post:
Guy Farmer: COVID-19 on the U.S.-Mexico border - Nevada Appeal