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Posted: Feb 25, 2017 12:01 AM

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and Senator David Perdue (R-Georgia) unveiled a bill titled, "the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act," on February 7th. This bill seeks to limit legal immigration to "637,960 in its first year and to 539,958 by its tenth year-a 50 percent reduction from the 1,051,031 immigrants who arrived in 2015." According to Senator Cotton's officialwebsite,the Act aims to achieve the reduction of legal immigration by doing the following:

Other than eliminating the visa lottery program, which I support wholeheartedly, the bill does nothing new to fundamentally change our legal immigration system (restricting the number of visas isn't a new approach). For example, it seeks to reform family-based immigration by maintaining some preference while eliminating other preferences. The question we should ask is: why does the government need to set preference categories at all?

The preference system was first installed through the immigration Act of 1952 and further enhanced by the Immigration Act of 1965,which gave preference to family-reunion for relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents (a.k.a.green card holders) in the order of unmarried children under 21 years of age, spouses, parents, children older than 21, siblings and extended family members. One obvious flaw of thishierarchyis that itfavors the old (parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents) and the young (children younger than 21 years of age) but discriminates against the most likely productive ones (people 21 years old or older, and siblings of U.S. citizens and permanent residents). Thus, thissystem gives preference to people who are more likely to become financial dependents rather than economic contributors. Empirical evidence shows that after we started admitting immigrants mainly on a family reunification basis in 1965, wealsoopened up the welfare system to immigrants.By keeping the preference for children younger than 21 while eliminating preference for siblings, the RAISE Act does nothing to fix this problem.

The right approach is to totally eliminate the preference hierarchy. U.S. citizens and green card holders should have the freedom to decide which family members they want to bring to the U.S. We should make it clear that the sponsors themselves have to be financially responsible for whomever they bring into our nation for at least 5 years (after 5 years, a green card holder can apply for U.S. citizenship) and restrict access to social welfare benefits to U.S. citizens only. As long as we "build a wall" around our welfare system, we as nation shouldn't dictate which family members that the U.S. citizen and green card holders want to bring.

The RAISE Act seeks to codify the number of refugees we bring in on annual basis to 50,000. Historically, the quota for refugees has been set by the U.S. president on annual basis and hasfluctuated from as low as 30,000 to as high as 200,000. It gives the executive authority and flexibility to react to refugee crises as the result of world events on a timely basis. If we codify the refugee quota in an immigration law, we will lose such flexibility. Therefore, I'd rather see the power of determining the annual quota of refugees remain with U.S. president.

Let's not forget that in addition to the refugee program, our current immigration system has a separate category for asylum-seekers.There is noquotaon the number of individuals who may be grantedpermanent residency throughasylum in a given year, and there is no clear definition of what constitutes persecution.Asylum seekers have been subjected to far less scrutiny than refugees.Consequently, this is a program thathas been riddled with fraud and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)has called for additional actions from the Department of Homelandto address the fraud risk in the asylum program specifically.Yet, the RAISE Act fails to address it. The right approach is tocombine refugees andasylum seekers into one humanitarian program under one quota that set by U.S. President on annual basis and is subjected to a uniform screening standard. This willallow immigration agents to focus on vetting security threats among applicants.

What I found the most troubling with the RAISE Act is that it assumes it will "help raise American workers' wages" by reducing legal immigration drastically. This is an old and beaten- path that we as a nation tried and failed. The last time the United States severely limited its legal immigration was through the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, which capped legal immigration to 350,000 annually.In 1922, the U.S. received only 309,556 new immigrants, compared with 805,228 the prior year.other more influential causes that have had held American workers back, which have nothing to do with immigration.

For example, automation is a far bigger threat to American workers than immigration. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, recentlypointed outhow automation has already disrupted car-based transportation and he relayed concerns that autonomous technology will have severe impact on American workers--"Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12-15 percent of the workforce be unemployed." He said.

To truly help American workers to get employed and have better wages, Senator Cotton and Senator Perdue need to focus on issues such as education reform, which will help Americans equip themselves with knowledge and skills that employers desire. If the Senators want to eliminate something, let's eliminate ruinous and job-killing laws and regulations such as the minimum wage requirement and occupation licensing requirements.

While I believe the RAISE Act is a flawed bill, I do share bothSenator Cotton and Senator Perdue's concern for the legal immigration system. A good immigration reform bill should focus on simplification and emphasize skill-based immigration sowe will ensure a win-win situation for both our nation and the new immigrants. If they are willing to listen, there aregood ideasout there on how to fix our broken immigration system.

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The RAISE Act Takes a Flawed Approach on Immigration Reform - Townhall

This is no time for wide-eyed idealism. Many of our community's ideals are being challenged and we need to defend them with verifiable facts and unwavering commitment.

Those efforts must include everything from ensuring local immigrants have a clear path toward legal employment to protecting the hard won gains made by the LGBT community.

It requires paying close attention to state and federal lawmakers who are attempting to dismantle decades of progress in environmental regulation and financial reform and who would spend money on lawsuits to undo federal land protections while stripping funding from the arts.

So it is imperative to base our convictions on fact, not fiction.

Park City's support for local immigrants in the face of the recent Immigration Customs and Enforcement arrests is an example of the need for clear communication and unbiased analysis in these troubling times of upheaval in Washington, D.C. It is the same high wire we ask our local law enforcement officials to walk every day.

Several residents at Thursday's meeting about immigration enforcement concerns asked what they could do to protect their Latino friends and employees from potential deportation. Their questions were sincere and well founded, based on longtime relationships with loyal, if not quite legal, employees. But their well meaning efforts would be better spent pressuring legislators to enact meaningful immigration reform with rules that lower the barriers to legal residency.

Thursday's crowded meeting was an admirable display of compassion from a community that values diversity and equal rights. But in addition to making a strong statement opposing enforcement of harsh federal immigration rules, motivated residents should focus on specific initiatives within the system that would give immigrants the peace of mind and equal status they crave.

While we can and should ask our police officers and sheriff's deputies to differentiate between local and federal enforcement responsibilities, we cannot ask either to turn a blind eye to criminal activities. We can, however, demand that our state and U.S. elected representatives dial back their misguided anti-immigrant crusade and get to work on reinforcing the compassionate principles that turned America's melting pot into a strong and prosperous nation.

Here are some things you can do: -Become informed about immigrants' rights and actively ensure they are honored. This site will help: https://www.ilrc.org/conozca-sus-derechos Do not imperil immigrants by hiring them to work illegally. Instead, help them obtain the proper permits. -Call on your senators and representatives in Congress to oppose draconian immigration enforcement and instead support constructive reform: https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

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Park City, energized, need to push for compassionate immigration reform - The Park Record

People deported from the United States arrive on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight on Feb. 9 in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

John Moore/Getty Images.

Tax-cutting, government-shrinking, regulating-shredding immigration enthusiasts such as Alex Nowrasteh, a researcher at the Cato Institute, are all for opening Americas borders if immigrants and their families are denied access to safety-net benefits such as Medicaid and SNAP. Well, we absolutely shouldnt be paying welfare benefits, Nowrasteh said on a recent appearance on Fox News Tucker Carlson Tonight. I don't want to pay welfare benefits to anybody. And we definitely shouldnt be paying them to immigrants, illegal or otherwise.

Immigration advocates on the left, in contrast, believe that mass less-skilled immigration can benefit the country if taxpayers provide immigrants and their children with the government support they need to lead dignified lives. Thats why they champion causes like providing unauthorized immigrants with subsidized medical care and generous wage subsidies and expanding access to early education programs for the children of poor immigrants who start life at a serious disadvantage relative to their better-off peers. To the pro-immigration left, support for high immigration levels goes hand in hand with support for other egalitarian causes, like a cradle-to-grave welfare state and generous foreign aid.

For years, libertarian activists have provided much of the intellectual firepower for the pro-immigration cause. The pro-immigration left routinely parrots arguments originally made by libertarians who quite literally want to eliminate the welfare state, and many pro-immigration liberals in Congress have signed on to legislation that would go dangerously far in this direction. But ultimately, the pro-immigration right and the pro-immigration left have goals that are utterly incompatible. This is a strange sort of bipartisanship. Its as though immigration advocates on one side of the ideological divide believe that they can fleece advocates on the other: I think youre a useful idiot, and you feel the same way about me, so lets join forces! In the long run, though, one side or the other is going to be proven wrong. For the sake of our nation, I hope its the libertarians who lose this argument. As much as I might disagree with the liberals on the wisdom of increasing less-skilled immigration, they at least appreciate that zeroing out the safety net would be a humanitarian disaster for the millions of poor immigrant families who live among us.

The contradictions at the heart of the pro-immigration coalition are all very amusing until you realize the extent to which immigrants depend on the welfare state. As of 2010, the per-person median household income of immigrants was $13,961, about one-third lower than the $20,795 per-person median household income of natives. To a well-off person, this income gap might not sound like a yawning chasm. But it can mean the difference between being poor enough to qualify for food stamps or not.

In a comprehensive report on the economic and fiscal impact of immigration, the National Academy of Sciences found that 45.3 percent of immigrant-headed households with children relied on food assistance as compared to 30.6 percent of native-headed households with children. Taking food assistance away from these families wouldnt just mildly inconvenience them. One influential study by economists Hilary Hoynes of UCBerkeley, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern University, and Douglas Almond of Columbia University found that access to food stamps has long-lasting effects on the well-being of children raised in low-income households, including significant reductions in obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetesserious chronic illnesses that can reduce earning potential and generate significant medical costs.

We already limit the extent to which legal immigrants can access the safety net. In his Fox News appearance, Nowrasteh correctly observed that legal immigrants are barred from accessing safety-net benefits for their first five years in the country. There are a number of exemptions from this five-year waiting period, however, and it doesnt apply at all to humanitarian immigrants, who represent about 15 percent of all legal immigrants.

But the waiting period is having an impact all the same. Arloc Sherman and Danilo Trisi of the left-of-center Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have observed that the five-year waiting period has contributed to a sharp rise in food insecurity and deep poverty rates for noncitizens and children living with noncitizen parents. Thats despite the fact that only about one-sixth of legal immigrants have been in the country for five years or less. If you believe that these programs really do help people, as Sherman and Trisi do, it stands to reason that if all legal immigrants were barred from access to safety-net benefits, the consequences would be far worse. So its worth noting that in a 2013 paper, Nowrasteh and Sophie Coleleading thinkers on the pro-immigration rightexplicitly call for doing just that, an approach they refer to as building a wall around the welfare state.

What would be the likely result of building a wall around the welfare state? For one thing, large numbers of noncitizens would naturalize. The sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen Pren have observed that in the wake of the 1996 welfare reforms limits on noncitizens access to safety-net benefits, many immigrants embraced defensive naturalization to ensure they would continue to receive public assistancea perfectly sensible thing for poor immigrants to do. Nowrasteh and Cole acknowledge this likelihood, which is why they conclude on the following note: Instead of trying in vain to halt immigration, we should turn our energy toward reforming welfare, making it less accessible to all, eliminating it altogether, or lowering the benefit levels. Judging by Nowrastehs remarks on Fox News (I dont want to pay welfare benefits to anybody), eliminating safety-net benefits altogether is his preferred option.

How is it that liberals wound up making common cause with libertarians who want to shrink the welfare state until its small enough to drown in a bathtub? Theres a simple explanation. Comprehensive immigration reformincreasing immigration levels and granting unauthorized immigrants a path to citizenshipis the mother of all bipartisan causes. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both favored it, and a comprehensive immigration reform bill (the gang of eight bill) came extremely close to getting signed into law in 2013. While most of the great and the good in both parties see comprehensive immigration reform as the only sensible way forward, forging this bipartisan alliance hasnt always been easy. To get Republican lawmakers on board, they had to be convinced that the gang of eight bill wouldnt lead newly legalized immigrants to start accessing the safety net. Thats where the libertarians came in.

Among immigration wonks, there is an ongoing debate about how to think about the net fiscal impact of immigration. That is, when we sum up all the taxes that immigrants pay and then sum up the cost of the various benefits they receive, is the number were left with positive or negative? The aforementioned National Academy of Sciences report concluded that highly educated immigrants will on average pay much more in taxes than theyll receive in services while the least-educated immigrants tend to receive more in services than they pay in taxes. Much depends on the assumptions we make about how generous we will be going forward to the poorest of the poor.

As a general rule, restrictionists want to raise the average skill level of future immigration flows, to ensure that high-income immigrants greatly outnumber low-income immigrants. Pro-immigration liberals are less interested in improving the net fiscal impact of immigration because they understand that the whole point of income redistribution is to transfer resources from the rich to the poor, which by definition means making the net fiscal impact of low-income immigrants worse. The more you cut taxes on poor immigrants, the more you provide them with high-quality medical care and education regardless of their ability to pay, the more dollars youll wind up transferring to them on a net basis. That is the price thoughtful liberals are willing to pay to achieve what is essentially a humanitarian goal. Libertarians split the baby in a different way: They seek to improve the net fiscal impact of immigration by slashing the services available to low-income immigrants and by making the tax burden less progressive. Problem solved!

Which leads us back to comprehensive immigration reform. The gang of eight bill granted unauthorized immigrants who met certain requirements registered provisional immigrant status. Influenced by libertarian thinkers, the bills architects barred RPIs from accessing federal means-tested programs, including Medicaid and SNAP. RPI status would last for a decade, at which point RPIs could apply to become lawful permanent residents. Then theyd have to wait another several years to access safety-net benefits. Altogether, unauthorized immigrants legalized under the gang of eight bill would have had to wait 13 to 15 years before they could rely on programs designed to help poor people stay healthy.

If were going to have an amnesty of some kind, we need to face the fact that most unauthorized immigrants have low market incomes.

Wouldnt unauthorized immigrants be better off as RPIs, even if they were denied access to safety-net benefits, than if they were subject to deportation, as they are now? Its a fair point. If cutting a deal with people who want to dismantle the welfare state had been the only way for liberals to shield long-settled unauthorized immigrants from deportation, that might be a deal worth taking. But Im not sure thats the best deal on table.

Mark Krikorian, head of the staunchly restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies, has argued for an immigration compromise that would couple an amnesty for long-established unauthorized immigrants with lower immigration levels. Even Donald Trump has hinted that he sees stepped-up enforcement as a prelude to some kind of amnesty. Liberals who want an immigration amnesty, then, have a choice of allies. They can join forces with libertarians who want to strip immigrants, and eventually everyone, of access to the safety net. Or they can work with restrictionists who are willing to accept an amnesty and to keep the safety net intact in exchange for a reduction in future less-skilled immigration.

If were going to have an amnesty of some kind, whether now or in the medium-term future, we need to face the fact that most unauthorized immigrants live in households with low market incomes. Thats not because unauthorized immigrants are lazynothing could be further from the truth. Rather, its because demand for less-skilled labor in general has been falling, and more than half of unauthorized immigrant adults have less than a high school education. In a 2013 profile of the unauthorized immigrant population, researchers at the Migration Policy Institute found that the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants lived in households with incomes that would qualify them for some form of public assistance. Does it really make sense to deny these people food stampsespecially when theyre our neighbors and when many of them will likely become our fellow citizens?

I can understand and appreciate thoughtful liberals who want America to serve as a refuge for people in need, even if that means that we might have to make sacrifices to better their lives. My own belief is that we should invest the resources necessary to help todays low-income immigrants and their children become full participants in American society before admitting many more. What I cant abide are those who speak of welcoming desperately poor people into our country while calling for the destruction of the safety net. Thats a solution that will create more problems than it solves and cause irreparable harm to some of Americas most vulnerable people.

Original post:
An Immigration Marriage Made in Hell - Slate Magazine

Sarah Jawhari, Columnist February 24, 2017 Filed under Columns, Opinion

Unless you are of Native American descent, you are a descendant of someone who did not originally inhabit the area that we now consider to be our nation. It seems this is a difficult truth to accept for conservative Americans touting immigration reform. The entitlement is not surprising, though it is frustrating. Before American borders expanded to California, there were people living on the land. Many immigrants in states like Texas and Arizona have family roots that run far deeper in America than the uprooted European lineage of their white counterparts.

Considering all that immigrants sacrifice to come to the United Statesas well as all they have contributed and continue to givewhy now are they receiving negative attention? We owe much of our diversity, our economic growth, our expansive infrastructure and our vast labor pool to immigrants and slavesforeigners who came to the U.S. because their own countries could not provide for them, or foreigners who were brought here by force to work and be sold as property.

Banning immigrants from the nation or threatening to deport those who are here wont do much to improve the U.S. In fact, their exclusion would quickly devastate the economy and cripple the diverse career fields of which they are a part.

If you dont believe me, or if youre still intent on ousting the immigrants who are stealing American jobs, well start at your breakfast table. Lets say the low-pay farmers that shipped those almonds to you are based in California. Unfortunatelyand expectedlytheres no accurate way to measure how many illegal aliens are working these jobs, but in September 2014, a massive study by the University of Southern California tried. The project found that undocumented Americans constitute up to 10% of the states workforce and contribute over 130 billion annually to Californias gross domestic product (GDP). Data was pulled and combined from the national census and other state logistics, including figures from the California Immigrant Policy Center. The same study found that undocumented Americans make up 38 percent of the agriculture industry, and nearly half of these immigrants have been part of the U.S. for over 10 years.

On the other side of the country, new economic data found that undocumented Americans contributed $588 million annually in state and local taxes in Florida. This figure was drawn from sales tax, excise tax and property taxes. Nationallyaccording to state and local tax data analyzed and published by the Institute on Taxation and Economy Policyundocumented immigrants contribute $11.6 billion to the economy annually.

The downside is that few studies can predict or name the total cost of undocumented Americans. And like all citizens, they do consume services and resources. Their native-born children will attend American public schools to learn, visit hospitals when they are sick and generally benefit from public servicesthe same programs whose existence has been a question for the Trump administration since the days of his campaign trail. But if we are to simplify the complex cost-benefit debate, the numbers tell a positive story: cost is offset by benefit. Its clear that undocumented immigrants are paying taxes, working low-pay jobs to reduce consumption costs for other Americans and contributing to the strength of our economy. At the end of the day, the main strain on the federal budget from undocumented migrants is the billions spent on enforcement including checkpoints, surveillance, Border Patrol weaponry and employees and private prisons; not to mention the border wall Trump has proposed and is currently planning, an unnecessary pressure on the American taxpayer that willaccording to expertsdo little to stop demonized illegals. We wont raise the question of priorities here for the sake of space.

In September 2016, the National Academy of Sciences issued The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration, a 508-page report which outlined the benefits and detriments of immigrants living in the U.S. Because the subject is complex at its core, the report made no attempt to simplify or condense, and for this reason the data was interpreted differently in opposing political spheres. Conservatives quoted lost wages as the price Americans pay for immigrants, though there is no agreement on the extent or value of these lost wages. But the same report lists businesses, landowners and investors as those who reap nearly all the benefits from immigrants, and it is these same benefactors that comprise the Republican party.

In terms of crime, several studies have concluded that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than citizens. So essentially, the radical vilification of immigrants makes no sense. They are benefiting your pocket directly, they arent committing all the crime you claim they are and they are directly contributing to the economy through taxes, which you would otherwise have to pay yourself.

This is why strict immigration reform has roots in xenophobia and racism, because objectively immigrants as a group serve us more than they hurt us. But it is easier to point a finger at those different than us than it is to hold up a mirror and ask what is lacking in ourselves and lacking in America.

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The Observer : Jawhari: Issues exist with modern immigration reform - The Observer

Media Matters for America (blog)

Facebook CEO's Immigration Reform Group Donated To Trump's Transition To Curry Early Favor With Administration Media Matters for America (blog) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's immigration reform lobby FWD.us, donated $5,000 to President Donald Trump's transition according to a report from Politico. Despite a contentious history opposing Trump's anti-immigrant policies, the group donated to ... Zuckerberg group donated to Trump transition | TheHillThe Hill (blog) all 4 news articles »

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Facebook CEO's Immigration Reform Group Donated To Trump's Transition To Curry Early Favor With Administration - Media Matters for America (blog)