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Northern Irish lorry driver Maurice Robinson, 25, who is accused over the deaths of 39 migrants, has pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey court in London to plotting to assist illegal immigration.

Appearing by video link from Belmarsh Prison in London, Mr Robinson, from Co Armagh, did not enter a plea to 41 other charges, including 39 counts of manslaughter.

The bodies of eight females and 31 males were discovered in the trailer attached to his Scania cab in an industrial park inEssex, England, early on 23 October.

The victims were later identified as coming from various provinces of Vietnam, with the youngest being two boys aged 15.

Mr Robinson, who is known as Mo, appeared at the Old Bailey via video link for theplea hearing.

Wearing a light blue sweater and tan trousers, he spoke to confirm his identity and British nationality.

During the hearing before Mr Justice Edis, he admitted conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration between 1 May 2018 and 24 October2019.

The charge states that he plotted with others to do "an act or series of acts which facilitated the commission of a breach of immigration law by various persons".

He also admitted acquiring criminal property - namely cash - on the same dates.

The defendant, of Laurel Drive in Craigavon in Northern Ireland, was not asked to enter pleas to other charges, including 39 counts of manslaughter.

He is charged with conspiracy to commit human trafficking offences between 1 May2018 and 24 October 2019.

The details of that charge state that he "arranged or facilitated the travel of other persons into the UK with a view to their being exploited".

He is also charged with transferring criminal property.

The defendant was remanded into custody until a further hearing on 13 December.

Meanwhile,another man from Northern Ireland has appeared in a UK court charged with human trafficking offences in relation to the Essex lorry container case.

Lorry driver Christopher Kennedy, 23, was arrested in the early hours of Friday morning on the M40 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire.

The defendant, from Darkley, Co Armagh, appeared before Chelmsford Magistrates' Court charged with conspiracy to commit a human trafficking offence.

Mr Kennedy was not asked for pleas during today's hearing.

He spoke only to give his name, age, address and to state his nationality as British.

He was remanded in custody to appear before the Old Bailey on 13 December.

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NI lorry driver pleads guilty over illegal immigration - RTE.ie

The Vitals

Ascertainingthe size of the undocumented population is difficult. Estimates vary accordingto the methodology used. While anti-immigrant groups maintain that the flow of undocumentedimmigrants has increased, estimates show that over a longer period the numberhas declined. An often-overlooked fact is that many illegal immigrants paypayroll taxes and sales taxes.

Estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. range from 10.5 million to 12 million, or approximately 3.2%3.6% of the population.

Immigrants from Mexico have recently, for the first time, fallen to less than half of the undocumented population.

In evaluating the cost of illegal immigration, both benefits consumed and taxes paid must be counted.

A Closer Look

Theissue of undocumented immigrants has been front and center in Americanelections since 2016; it has elicited passionate responses from all parts ofthe political spectrum. Here are a few facts voters need as they wade throughthe thicket of rhetoric on this issue.

How do we count people who are here illegally?

Ascertainingthe size of the illegal population is difficult because, as is obvious, peoplewho are here illegally dont always want to tell pollsters their legal status (orabsence thereof.) The first step estimators use is to take data from the CensusBureaus American Community Survey, or ACS, which interviews over 2 millionhouseholds a year. This survey asks people where they were born and whetherthey are U.S. citizens, but it does not ask if they are here illegally. Thisyields a total number for the foreign-born population.

The nextstep is to subtract from that total the number of foreign-born residents who weknow for certain are here legally. Among them are naturalized citizens, peoplewho have permanent resident status (green cards), and people who have beenadmitted as refugees. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) keeps carefulrecords of the first two groups and the Department of Health and Human Serviceskeeps careful records of the third. By subtracting the number of people who we know for certain are here legallyfrom the overall number of foreign-born in the ACS survey we can estimate thenumber of undocumented residents.

Ofcourse, not all undocumented people take part in surveys, and for good reasonthey do not want to be found out. So, mostestimates assume that there is an undercount. ThePew Research Center relies, in part, on survey and census data fromMexico. They estimate the undercount to be somewhere in the range of 5 to 15percent, which is then added to the number of undocumented immigrants. DHSbelieves that the undercount is 10% and adjusts its estimatesaccordingly.

The sizeof the undercount is a matter of controversy. Opponents of illegal immigration suchas FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) argue that theundercount is in fact much bigger. To get to their estimates they analyze otherdata such as the percentage of migrants who failed to show up for theirimmigration hearings and those who have overstayed their visas.

So, what are the numbers?

Thenumbers of undocumented vary according to the methodology used, and theresalso a lag in the estimates because it takes time for accurate data to becomeavailable. The last estimate released by the Office of Immigration Statisticsat DHS came in December 2018: As of January 1, 2015, there were 11.96 millionundocumented immigrants in the U.S. The most recent Pew Research estimate putsthe total number of unauthorized immigrants at 10.5 million in 2017. Overall,this represents a minority of the foreign-born population, which in 2017numbered 44.5million45% of whom are naturalizedcitizens, and 27% of whom are lawful permanent residents.

While anti-immigrantgroups maintain that the flow of illegal immigrants has increased, estimates showthat over a longer period the number of undocumented immigrants has declined,from 12.2 million in 2005 to 10.5 million in 2017 accordingto Pews estimates. DHS figures dont go beyond 2015, but they estimatethat the population of undocumented immigrants increased by 70,000 people peryear between 2010 and 2015, compared to increases of 470,000 per year between2000 and 2007.

Who are the undocumented?

Immigrantsfrom Mexico have recently, for the first time since 1990, represented lessthan half of the undocumented population. According to Pew, in 2017, about 4.95million of the 10.5 million undocumented population were from Mexico,1.9 million from Central America, and 1.45 million from Asia. About two-thirds ofundocumented immigrants have been in the U.S. for 10 years or longer. In 2017, just 20%of undocumented, adult immigrants had lived in the U.S. for 5 years or less.

Incontrast to the President Trumps rhetoric about building a wall at the Mexicanborder, illegal migration has shifted since 2010 from border-crossing to visaoverstaysthe latter share has been greater than border crossings since 2010. TheCenter for Migration Studies estimatesthat in 2016, 62% of the undocumented were here because they overstayed theirvisas versus 38% who crossed the border illegally.

Anothercontroversy is over how much illegal immigrants cost the system. An often overlookedfact is that illegal immigrants are taxpayers. The anti-immigrant lobby tendsto ignore the money the immigrants often pay in payrolland sales taxes while counting the money spent on educating children born inthe United States to immigrants. Numbers vary widely depending on the source,but undocumented immigrants are not eligiblefor most federal benefit programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition AssistanceProgram. In evaluating the cost of illegal immigration, the voter has to makesure that the argument takes in both benefits consumed and taxes paid.

What about the Dreamers?

DeferredAction for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was implemented by President Obama toallow manyundocumented individuals who came to the U.S. before their 16th birthday towork in the U.S. and defer any action on their immigration cases for arenewable two-year period. About 800,000immigrants have been covered by DACA at some point since it wasimplemented; 690,000 are currently in the program. According to Pew, the gapconsists of approximately 70,000 who were rejected for renewal or opted not torenew, and 40,000 who were able to obtain a green card. At present no newapplications are being accepted by USCIS, so the number of Dreamers is notlikely to grow.

What are the candidates saying?

In the2020 campaign, President Trump has continued his push for a wall at thesouthern border, on top of increased enforcement both at the border and in theinterior. On the Democratic side, all the candidates support a pathway tocitizenship for undocumented immigrants, which would require gettinglegislation through Congress. There are also shorter-term proposals that a newpresident could enact on their own, like Elizabeth Warrens plan to reinstateDACA and to expanddeferred action to include more than the Dreamers. Kamala Harris hassaid she would reinstate DACA and implement DAPA, the shelved policy to protectthe Dreamers parents. Pete Buttigieg has stated that he would restore the enforcementpriorities set by the Obama administration. A number of theDemocratic candidates have voicedsupport for repealing the law that makes it a crimeto cross the border without authorization.

As wehave seen during the Trump administration, the president can do a great deal evenabsent legislation to affect the situation of those seeking to come to theUnited States.

Dig Deeper

Donald Trump rode to the presidency on immigration issues. During the Republican primaries and then again during the general election campaign, Trumps most loyal followers erupted in cheers whenever he mentioned getting tough on unauthorized immigration.

Casting immigrants as violent criminals, refugees as terrorists, and the border as unsecured, President Trumps rhetoric on immigration has painted a grim picture.

Will the Congress manage to come up with an immigration deal that President Trump will sign? That is the question on everyones minds as negotiators in Congress work towards a deal that could avert a second government shutdown and/or result in an unprecedented presidential declaration of national emergency.

Link:
How many undocumented immigrants are in the United States and who are they? - Brookings Institution

Border authorities nabbed 42,250 illegal immigrants in October, a 15-month low that suggests the Trump administration has managed largely to solve the border surge that overwhelmed the country earlier this year.

But drug seizures at the border were up 45% in October, including an 84% spike in fentanyl, the deadly opioid synthetic thats blamed for taking tens of thousands of lives, said acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan.

He said the drug numbers show the smuggling cartels remain active and powerful, and he suggested the U.S. is considering designating the cartels, which control the illegal flows of people and drugs across the border, as terrorist organizations.

Cartels are alive and well, Mr. Morgan said in a briefing at the White House. Were having discussions on what we can do as a United States government approach.

Over the last year, those cartels enticed hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant families, mostly from Central America, to make the trip north across Mexico to try to enter the U.S. illegally.

Mr. Morgan said the Trump administration turned that tide by reaching deals with Mexico and Central American countries to do more to stem the flow.

One major move was the Migration Protection Protocol, under which some 50,000 people, mostly Central Americans, who crossed Mexico en route to the U.S. have been returned to Mexico to wait while their immigration cases continue in the U.S.

Mr. Morgan said those changes have helped cut the Central American flow so much that Mexico is once again the largest sender of migrants caught at the border, and most are now single adults.

That has been the normal historic pattern, but it had been upended over the last 18 months as the Central American families surged.

Fewer than 10,000 people traveling as families were arrested by the Border Patrol in October, the first time its been below that level since July 2018. The number of illegal immigrant juveniles apprehended traveling without parents is the lowest since July 2017.

Mr. Morgan, speaking to reporters at the White House, fended off questions about the Homeland Security Departments leadership, where all of the top immigration jobs is held by someone in an acting position including himself.

Mr. Morgan also defended President Trumps wall-building campaign, though he acknowledged no new miles of the border have been fenced in yet beyond what was there when President Barack Obama left office.

Right now the 78 miles that have been built have been built where there was an existing form of barrier, he said.

But he said he still considers it all new wall, because its such an upgrade over what was there before, some fencing or vehicle barriers.

Every mile of wall thats being built is a new mile of wall, he said.

He also said ground has finally been broken in Texas on a section of land where no barrier exists, becoming a brand new wall to protect a currently unfenced area.

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Illegal immigration down, drug trafficking up at southern border - Washington Times

Welcome to Poll Watch, our weekly look at polling data and survey research on the candidates, voters and issues that will shape the 2020 election.

It increasingly looks like the Supreme Courts conservative majority will allow the Trump administration to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, according to close observers of the court.

Legal arguments aside, polls show that DACA which has shielded from deportation roughly 700,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children enjoys overwhelming popular support. Allowing it to end would put the court out of step with trends in national public opinion, which has recently become more sympathetic to immigration than at any point in recorded history.

But the voters who pay the closest attention to immigration tend to be Republicans, and they hold much more conservative views on this issue. Just before the 2018 midterm elections, a Pew survey found that Republican voters were four times as likely as Democratic voters to say illegal immigration was a very big problem: 75 percent of Republicans said it was, compared to 19 percent of Democrats.

The publics views on immigration have gradually become more liberal over all in recent years, even as President Trump has made his opposition to immigration a central component of his political persona.

In the past two years, three quarters of Gallup respondents have said that immigration is generally a good thing more than ever before recorded. By a double-digit margin, Americans are more likely to say that immigrants help the economy rather than hurt it, Gallup found.

DACA enjoys broader consensus than almost any other proposed immigration policy. A Marquette Law School poll found in September that 53 percent of voters nationwide would oppose a Supreme Court decision to strike down the program, while 37 percent would favor it. Before the case reached the Supreme Court, 84 percent of Americans said in a March 2018 Politico/Harvard University poll that they generally supported DACA. And in another Politico/Harvard poll, from December of that year, 66 percent of respondents said it was extremely important that Congress renew the program.

All of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have expressed support for DACA. People who are sympathetic to the Dreamers undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children now make up a sizable chunk of the electorate in swing states like Arizona, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And the Hispanic population is climbing especially quickly in some competitive Southern states; it roughly doubled from 2000 to 2010 in North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia.

Most Americans seem comfortable with these developments. The share of the country that said immigration levels should be increased hit 30 percent earlier this year, the highest number since Gallup started asking the question in the 1960s. All told, more than three in five Americans now say that immigration levels should either rise or remain where they are.

Daniel Herrera, a communications consultant at the left-leaning Raben Group, said that if DACA ends, it could propel a youth mobilization campaign similar to the one that led to the programs passage in the first place.

Where DACA does come into play is: How well are Dreamers and Dreamer allies going to mobilize people who may not vote? he said.

Its about your traditional get-out-the vote operations, where Dreamers are the public face of a campaign to get the youth vote out, he added. Thats how youre going to mobilize youth voters, because theoretically theyll see themselves in those Dreamers and be more motivated to vote.

But there is a deeper partisan rift on immigration than on almost any other issue. Eighty-two percent of Democrats in a September Pew poll said it was important for the government to build a path to citizenship for immigrants who are currently in the country illegally, but just 48 percent of Republicans did.

While 58 percent of all Americans said in a CNN poll last month that they disapproved of Mr. Trumps handling of immigration, that number plunged to just 12 percent among Republicans. Eighty-six percent of Republicans approved of how he has handled the issue.

Immigration may be more of a motivating issue for the Republican base than the Democratic one. Forty-six percent of liberal Democrats rank building a path to citizenship as very important, but a larger share of conservative Republicans fully six in 10 say the opposite: that it is very important for the government to increase deportations of immigrants who have entered the United States illegally.

When you just look at conservative Republicans, you can see that a hard-line approach to immigration is broadly supported and conservatives make up two thirds of all Republicans, said Carroll Doherty, an analyst at Pew Research Center. That shows you how those issues have resonated with the Trump base.

Still, Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster, said that even many voters who support tough immigration policies often do not strongly favor ending DACA. The first step is to distinguish between attitudes about DACA and attitudes about immigration overall: Consistently, Americans on the order of 80 percent have supported allowing the DACA kids to stay, he said.

If the Supreme Court were to allow the Trump administration to end DACA, Mr. Ayres said, the focus would shift to the legislative branch. He argued that this could provide an opportunity for Republicans to push through one of their immigration-related goals,such as increased border security,in exchange for restoring DACA.

What it does is increase pressure on Congress to put DACA legalization together with border security, and pass a limited immigration reform with just those two components that gives something to both sides, he said.

Excerpt from:
The Supreme Court May Let Trump End DACA. Heres What the Public Thinks About It. - The New York Times

A new study finds that low-income, legal immigrants dont tend to move to states that offer them health insurance, suggesting that expanding their access to medical care wouldnt create a welfare magnet that could overwhelm public resources.

Using data from the American Community Survey capturing over 200,000 immigrants nationwide between 2000 and 2016, Stanford Universitys Vasil Yasenov, Duncan Lawrence, Fernando Mendoza, and Jens Hainmueller found that expanding public insurance offerings in certain states didnt have a discernible effect on immigrants who had already settled in the US choosing to relocate to those states.

The paper pushes back on President Donald Trumps rhetoric suggesting that immigrants take advantage of public health insurance and drain the social safety net. Trump has pursued several policies impeding immigrants access to health care, though for now they have been blocked in federal court.

Trump recently tried to prevent immigrants who do not have health insurance and cannot afford to pay medical care costs from entering the country as a way to cut costs for American citizens. And his public charge rule was estimated to cause tens of thousands of immigrants on Medicaid to drop their benefits.

The study could also inform debates about whether states should open their health insurance programs to more immigrants. Six states and Washington, DC, use state funds to offer Medicaid to unauthorized immigrant children, and California recently extended coverage to unauthorized immigrant adults, as well.

The researchers focused on specific categories of immigrants low-income pregnant women and children who had recently obtained lawful permanent residency and were below 200 percent of the poverty line who became eligible for state-level public insurance programs following a series of federal reforms in 2002 and 2009. They had been previously barred from participating in those programs if they had held green cards for less than five years under Clinton-era welfare reforms passed in 1996.

The 2002 reforms allowed states to provide prenatal care to immigrant women under the Childrens Health Insurance Program; in 2009, the Child Health Insurance Reauthorization Act allowed states to cover both immigrant children and pregnant women regardless of how long they had held green cards. As a result, the number of states offering them health insurance nearly doubled from 2000 to 2016.

Researchers thought immigrant mothers and children would be the most likely groups to make interstate moves due to expanded health care coverage, Yasenov said in an interview. But they observed no significant effect on their interstate migration rates.

Those results were surprising in light of prior studies about immigrants mobility and health care coverage: Immigrants tend to move around within the US more than their US-born counterparts, immigrants may choose to settle in areas with better public benefits, and substantially fewer immigrants have health insurance compared to US citizens.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, noncitizens are significantly more likely to be uninsured than citizens: among those under age 65, 23 percent of immigrants with legal status and 45 percent of unauthorized immigrants are uninsured.

All of those factors would point to immigrants seeking out better health care benefits by relocating. But in reality, thats not the case and that could assuage policymakers concerns about expanding public health care programs to immigrants.

Policymakers are often concerned with fiscal constraints when they extend public health care and other public benefits the concern that people might be moving from another country, from another state, from another city would lead to spiraling costs, Yasenov said. We hope our results are informative to policymakers who are looking for evidence in the health care world, especially in the context of legal immigrants.

There are some limitations to the paper: It doesnt speak to the effect of public health care offerings on unauthorized immigrants, a point of friction in the 2020 presidential race.

Nearly all of the Democratic candidates have backed the idea of providing immigrants health care coverage regardless of immigration status. Every candidate raised their hands when asked if they supported it at a debate in June. But Trump is trying to use it against his Democratic rivals.

As long as Im president, no one will lay a hand on your Medicare benefits, Trump told voters at a speech in Florida on Thursday. I will never allow these politicians to steal your health care and give it away to illegal immigrants.

Go here to see the original:
A new study finds immigrants arent drawn to states that offer them health insurance - Vox.com