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Iowa knows better than perhaps any other state in the union the tendency of politicians to talk about one of the most pressing issues immigration just once every four years. Then the issue fades away, with little meaningful action taken, until the next election. In the meantime, our outdated immigration system hampers our nations economic opportunity, preventing Iowa businesses from reaching their full potential.

To draw attention to the economic benefits immigrants provide, the Ames Chamber of Commerce is joining the New American Economy (NAE) and thousands of business and community leaders across the country. Armed with critical data to support our cause, we are making a case for common-sense immigration reform.

Iowa is home to more than 150,000 immigrants, a population more than twice the size of the city of Ames. In our congressional district alone, immigrants paid $205.4 million in state and local taxes in 2014. Of that, over $135.1 million went to mandatory spending programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Statewide, immigrants have $3 billion in spending power. These financial resources are reinvested into our communities, our small businesses, our schools and our public infrastructure. Additional revenue is not the only reason immigration reform is necessary and right for Iowa.

The single biggest issue for our employers is workforce availability and finding a steady, reliable source of employees to fill the growing need for qualified labor across all sectors of Iowas economy. This is especially true in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. In 2014 alone, 32,697 STEM jobs were advertised online in Iowa. At that time, there were only 628 unemployed STEM workers to fill the positions. This translates to a staggering 52-to-1 employment gap.

At that time, students on temporary visas made up roughly one out of every four students earning a STEM masters degree at an Iowa university, and 48.6 percent of students earning a Ph.D.-level degree in STEM. The bad news? Even after receiving their degree, many of these promising students struggle or are unable to remain in the country after graduation. In 2014, Iowa State University had 4,802 foreign-born students, 58.2 percent of whom were enrolled in a STEM field. Unfortunately, due largely to outdated immigration policies, only 28.9 percent of these highly-skilled students were able to stay in Ames and Story County upon graduation.

Our antiquated immigration system makes it difficult for STEM employers to sponsor the high-skilled workers they need to fill key positions. This is problematic as it slows business growth and expansion, and limits the employment opportunities firms can provide for foreign and U.S.-born workers alike.

What is especially troubling is that STEM fields continue to expand at a record pace and are helping the economy grow by continually adding promising job opportunities to the market. NAE estimates that there will be 800,000 new STEM jobs created nationwide by 2024. These are lucrative careers in innovative fields, and attracting an educated workforce to fill these positions will allow us to capitalize on this growth and seize this opportunity.

If Iowa truly wants to reach its economic potential, we must be able to recruit, and more importantly, retain the workforce our local employers need. We must stop allowing bright, highly trained individuals, educated at American institutions of higher education, to go out into the world and compete against us, rather than working with us.

The longer we allow our current immigration system to remain unchanged, the easier we make it for competing nations to attain the highly-skilled and talented individuals we are denying. That is why the Ames Chamber of Commerce stands with the New American Economy in strongly encouraging our elected officials to implement a responsible, pro-growth immigration reform that will allow us to retain the best and brightest and give our employers the help they need.

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Letter: The state of Iowa needs responsible, pro-growth immigration reform - Iowa State Daily

Northwest University, a private Christian college in Kirkland, is hosting a symposium of immigration experts in hopes of finding common ground across political divides.

Were living in a country of uncompromising division. It seems that just about every issue demands alignment with a political party or ideology and none more than immigration.

But local conservative leader Joseph Castleberry disagrees.

Castleberry is president of Northwest University, a private Christian college in Kirkland. An evangelical and a Republican, he also identifies as pro-immigration and thinks more religious conservatives should do the same.

The most-often repeated ethical injunction in the Old Testament is the injunction to be kind and to be just with immigrants, says Castleberry. In the New Testament, there are many scriptures that call on us to be hospitable to foreigners and strangers.

Whats more, immigrants are the source of a red-hot religious revival in Christian communities in America, says Castleberry, who wrote about this phenomenon in his recent book The New Pilgrims: How Immigrants are Renewing Americas Faith and Values.

But he says religion isnt the only reason conservatives should soften their stance toward immigrants including those who live here illegally and support comprehensive immigration reform.

He says immigrants provide needed labor in our state. They also pay taxes, create jobs through entrepreneurship and represent billions of dollars in spending power. And research released this week by the New American Economy, a bipartisan coalition of business leaders and politicians for comprehensive immigration reform, agrees.

The report, Map the Impact, explores the economic role of immigrants across the United States. It confirms that Washington state boasts the 10th-largest immigrant population in the country, and that our region benefits from their contributions in sectors such as technology, agriculture, service, education and tourism.

Republicans, naturally, normally, would be pro-immigration because of the economic benefits, says Castleberry, who believes this natural alliance has been further obscured by a bitter election year.

In an attempt to start a dialogue exploring those similarities, Northwest University is hosting a symposium Friday, Feb. 24, titled Immigration in Uncertain Times: Goals for a New Immigration System. The event brings together immigration experts from around our region and Mexico.

Jorge Madrazo is an organizer of and speaker at the symposium. Hes a former attorney general of Mexico and current director of a local satellite of UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He says his first concern is preserving the civil rights of Mexicans living in the United States and planning for how Mexico might respond to mass deportations.

Unfortunately, our people are living in fear. Children not going to school; people of faith are not going to church, says Madrazo, explaining the community impact of threatened deportations. He hopes Fridays event will help provide a road map for moving forward.

What is our common ground? Do we have common ground? he asks, urgency in his voice. Can we work to realize that common ground?

Castleberry believes we can, and he spends much of his time propagating that belief on conservative talk-radio shows around the country.

He is a proponent of an expanded guest-worker program to help meet labor needs in sectors like agriculture, as well as the legalization of people living illegally in the U.S. and expanded quotas to allow more people to enter legally.

But Castleberry says compromise is the key to moving forward on immigration reform.

To that end, he says he supports increased border security, believes immigrants living here illegally should pay a fine that covers the cost of their legalization and agrees that immigrants who are violent felons should be deported (though he disagrees with the deportation of people guilty of minor infractions).

Not everyone will be happy, says Castleberry, referencing the compromise required to reach a new agreement about immigration. But there needs to be a rational process for providing for our labor needs and providing a safe haven for people who literally are fleeing for their lives.

So is compromise possible in todays political climate?

Its a complex problem, but were Americans, says Castleberry with a smile. Were problem-solvers.

Lets hope thats enough common ground to get us started.

See the original post:
Can religion bridge the divide over immigration policy? - The Seattle Times

Its been a long and winding road, this journey to craft effective immigration policy in the U.S., and one that has encountered not a few dead-ends along the way.

Experts say the modern debate over immigration has its roots in a 1986 law signed by President Ronald Reagan, which enabled 3 million people in the country illegally to attain legal status. It became known as the Reagan Amnesty.

There were promises of a new era of enforcement, and strict adherence to a law barring employers from hiring workers who didnt have permission to work in the U.S. But they were never fully realized.

Revisions were completed in 1990 under PresidentGeorge H.W. Bush and in 1996 under President Bill Clinton. Still there was dissatisfaction.

In the 2000s, Republican President George W. Bush proposed a comprehensive immigration reform package. That went nowhere. Democratic President Barack Obama also tried and failed to steer something through both houses of Congress.

In the absence of reform, there have been persistent cries that the system is broken. Against that backdrop, Donald Trump road a tidal wave of discontent all the way to the White House. And on Tuesday, the president gave the clearest indication yet where he is going on immigration, when it was announced federal authorities would deportanyone convicted of any criminal offense, whether serious or minor.

Trump is not only different from Obama, he is very different from George W. Bush, saidKarthick Ramakrishnan, UC Riverside professor and associate dean of the universitys School of Public Policy.

Experts suggested that both Bush and Obama were tough in their approach to enforcing immigration laws. Deportations reached 2 million under Bush and exceeded 2.5 million the most of any president under Obama.

Obama was not called the deporter-in-chief by accident, saidRamakrishnan, who authored a book titled, The New Immigration Federalism.

Yet, said Jack Pitney, a government professor at Claremont-McKenna College, They were both broadly sympathetic to immigration and not wanting to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

Manuel Pastor, USC professor of sociology and director of the universitys Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, saidBush set the stage for Obama tried to do later.

Bush was a border governor and had a great deal of familiarity with immigrants in his own state, Pastor said.

At the same time, Bush sought to bolster the GOPs outreach to Latino voters, he said.

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But then something called 9/11 happened. The response to the nations deadliest terror attack consumed Bushs agenda, and immigration became predominantly a national security issue.

When youre worrying about whether your gardener is illegal, thats different than worrying about whether the person sitting on the airplane next to you is illegal, Pastor said.

In his second term, Bush circled back and tried to push forward a program for immigration reform.That ran into a buzz-saw of opposition from conservatives and also from trade unions who were worried about competition, he said.

Then, when Obama leaped onto the scene, Pitney said, he vowed to deliver comprehensive immigration reform as well. But, like Bushs, Obamas plan was abruptly reshaped by a earth-shattering event early on: the worst economic crisis to hammer the country since the Great Depression, he said.

Pastor saidObama was absorbed with trying to rescue the economy, expand health care and reform immigration.

He focused on the first two and squandered a lot of political capital, Pastor said.

Meanwhile, Obama stepped up deportations, he said.

Pastor said Obama believed that, if he signaled he was tough on enforcement, hed garner political support to pass reform legislation. And he managed to persuade the Senate to pass a bill in 2013.

It got bottled up in the House, he said.

Frustrated with the roadblock in Congress, Obama signed an executive order in 2014 providinga legal reprieve for undocumented parents of U.S. citizens.

And here we are today.

What Trump is doing now is dramatically increasing the number of people who are going to get targeted for deportation, Ramakrishnan said.

He said the president set the stage for many more deportations than were processed under either Obama or Bush.

Ramakrishnan said the stepped-up enforcement comes when the undocumented population is stable: There are an estimated 11 million living in this country, as many as were here a decade ago.

The Pew Research Center and the Public Policy Institute of California say more than 10 percent 1.3 million reside counties Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Because the population is stable, Pastor said, todays community is different than a decade ago. In 2008, he said, 40 percent of undocumented immigrants had been here a decade. Today, 60 percent have been here that long.

And, he said,Heavy removal is much more likely to affect a family now someone who has kids, someone who has a home, someone who is a neighbor, someone who has had a job for a very long time.

Pitney it is unclear how the administrations policy will play out.

With Donald Trump, the one certainty is that what he says and what he does is not always the same thing, said Pitney. But already he has taken a tougher approach to immigration than his predecessors.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read this article:
Immigration reform failures set stage for Trump's strategy - LA Daily News

President Trump is gambling on his immigration policy. But its a risky bet.

The president is going full-steam ahead with the hard-line approach that his team believes fueled his election win last year. Whether he can bring the country with him is another matter.

On Tuesday, the administration announced a host of changes to immigration enforcement. The shift includes the hiring of thousands of new Border Patrol officers, a major expansion in the number of people subject to expedited deportation and the establishment of a new office focused on immigration crime.

The announcement came in two memos from the Department of Homeland Security. The documents reiterated Trumps plan to press ahead with his famous promise to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico, and underlined his administrations opposition to the policies of so-called sanctuary cities.

Meanwhile, a new, revised version of Trumps earlier executive order suspending travel from seven majority-Muslim nations is expected soon though that release has been delayed until next week.

Trump has asserted that he is a standard-bearer for the forgotten men and women of America who feel that their nation has changed for the worse.

Weve defended other nations borders while refusing to defend our own, Trump said in his inauguration address.

Earlier this month on Twitter, hewrote, The crackdown on illegal criminals is merely the keeping of my campaign promise. Gang members, drug dealers & others are being removed!

Trump aides make no bones about their belief that his immigration stance was fully endorsed by the electorate last November.

White House spokesman Michael Short told The Hill, He campaigned hard on this issue and won 306 electoral votes the most for a Republican nominee since 1988.

Short also noted a Harvard-Harris Poll survey, exclusively provided to The Hill, which found that 80 percent of voters believe cities that arrest illegal immigrants for crimes should turn them over to the immigration authorities.

Trump himselftweetedabout that pollon Tuesdayafternoon a sign that the presidents political antennae are closely tuned to public opinion on the issue.

Advocates for stricter immigration policies also believe Trump is on the right side of public opinion.

This is one of the reasons why he is president, said Ira Mehlman, the media director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that seeks to stop illegal immigration and reduce legal immigration.

Improbable as it was, he ended up winning the election based on addressing the real concerns that the American public has had over immigration, as well as some other things, Mehlman added.

The polling on the issues is not so clear-cut, however.

Trumps election win could just as easily be seen as coming despite his immigration stance, rather than because of it.

Election Day exit polls showed that a clear majority of voters 70 percent believed illegal immigrants should be offered some form of legal status. Only 25 percent favored deportation.

Those same exit polls showed Trumps proposed border wall with Mexico was supported by 41 percent of voters but opposed by 54 percent.

Findings like that bolster liberal confidence that Trump is making a political misjudgment in pressing ahead.

People roundly reject the idea of mass deportation, said Tom Jawetz, the vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal group. The American public does not support building his border wall. The American public does not support, and is increasingly opposed, to his Muslim ban.

Trump supporters would contest that view. Polling on the travel ban is inconclusive so far. The most recent major poll, from the Pew Research Center,showed a very clear majority against it: 59 percent to 38 percent. But three other surveys not long before, from Quinnipiac University, CBS News and CNN respectively, showed a closely divided public.

Debate will also rage for years about how big a part Trumps immigration stance played in his election victory especially when it comes to the key Rust Belt and Industrial Midwest states that sealed his win.

In Ohio, a full 36 percent of voters believed illegal immigrants should be deported, compared to just 25 percent nationwide. In neighboring Pennsylvania, the figure was 31 percent. But Trump also won Wisconsin and Michigan, where the pro-deportation vote was almost indistinguishable from the national norm, at 26 percent and 27 percent respectively.

Terry Madonna, a public affairs professor and polling expert at Pennsylvanias Franklin and Marshall College, argued the importance of immigration as a primary factor in the election is overstated. He asserted that the economy, jobs and wage stagnation were more potent.

But he added that immigration played into a broader picture of cultural anxiety among Trump supporters.

For many, many voters in small-town and rural America, they wake up and think they are living in a strange land a land of immigration, of gay marriage and of the people who want to take my guns away, he said. That side of it played a role too.

On Wednesday, Speaker Paul RyanPaul RyanCornyn: Border wall 'makes absolutely no sense' in some areas CNN to host town hall featuring John McCain, Lindsey Graham GOP senator won't vote to defund Planned Parenthood MORE (R-Wis.) toured a section of the border with Mexico for the first time. In a statement, he promised that the Republican Congress would work with Trump in securing the border and enforcing our laws.

Whether that approach bears political dividends or extracts a price remains to be seen.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage, primarily focused on Donald TrumpDonald TrumpCompanies stuck in crossfire between Trump and his critics Bannon rips 'corporatist, globalist media' DNC candidate Harrison drops out, backs Perez for chairman MOREs presidency.

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THE MEMO: Trump's big immigration gamble - The Hill

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Donald Trumps executive order travel ban met with predictable resistance from the activist judiciary, whether the US District Court judge in Seattle or the far-left Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Despite being called a Muslim ban by the purveyors of fake news and useful idiots in the GOP establishment, there is no mention of religion in Trumps executive order. Instead it simply identifies 7 countries, already labeled as countries of concern by the Obama administration and temporarily halts unfettered travel from these countries to the US until a proper vetting system can be implemented.

Trump can certainly fight the Ninth Circuit, taking his case to the US Supreme Court. The four liberal justices are likely to side with the Ninth Circuit and there is no guarantee that Justices Roberts or Kennedy wouldnt side with the four black-robed progressives, striking down the executive order. Even a tie vote would be a loser for Trump as the original Ninth Circuit decision would stand.

Wisely President Trump has decided to reword his executive order, excluding green card residency holders and those already in transit to the US. This should address the concerns of the Ninth Circuit. Key word is should. As the Ninth Circuit has its rulings frequently overturned by the Supreme Court, there is no guarantee that they will not block Trumps new and reworded travel ban order. Ditto for the Supremes. Remember how Justice John Roberts twisted himself into a legal pretzel, basically rewriting the Obamacare statute to find it constitutional?

I have an additional recommendation for the Trump administration. It follows along the lines of a constitutional amendment introduced by Senator Rand Paul that could be called the Whats good for the goose is good for the gander amendment. The amendment wording is simple. Congress shall make no law applicable to a citizen of the United States that is not equally applicable to Congress.

Why not apply the same reasoning to illegal immigration? Start with sanctuary cities. There are about 300 jurisdictions in the US that have, a policy that is non-cooperative and obstructs immigration enforcement. The map of these cities, not surprisingly, is remarkably similar to the red-blue electoral map of the 2016 presidential election. Any guess as to how most sanctuary cities voted on November 8?

Until Trumps travel pause is in place, refugees continue to stream into the US. The State Department doubled the rate of refugees from the seven targeted countries since Judge Robarts February 3 ruling. 1,100 refugees and counting in one week.

The Trump administration should settle all of these refugees in sanctuary cities, specifically in the most progressive neighborhoods, whose residents so vehemently oppose anything and everything Trump, including his travel restriction.

In Judge Robarts turf, settle the nice young men from Syria and Somalia in Bellevue or Mercer Island. In the back yard of the Ninth Circuit, place the refugees in Nob Hill or Berkeley. Dont forget college towns like Boulder, Ithaca and Cambridge. Include Manhattan and the tony Washington, DC suburbs, home to the deep state bureaucrats and #NeverTrumpers.

Apply the NIMBY principle, not in my back yard. Those favoring a feckless, open border immigration policy should live with the consequences of such a policy. In their back yard.

Remember how ten years ago Ted Kennedy, staunch environmentalist, blocked a wind farm in the Nantucket Sound because it cluttered the view from the Kennedy vacation home in Hyannis Port? A perfect example of NIMBY.

Lets see how the progressives in Westchester County or Santa Cruz enjoy becoming Germany with Angela Merkels open-arms refugee policy. Gangs of violent men roaming the streets, harassing and raping women, defecating in public pools, forcing women to cover their heads and bodies. How will this go over in these uber-tolerant enclaves? Im sure the Ninth Circuit judges wont mind a refugee resettlement home in their neighborhoods, along the route that their kids or grandkids walk to school.

Its easy to be compassionate, open-minded and welcoming when ensconced within a gated community, country club and private school. Not so much from the real world of Kate Steinle and others terrorized or killed by unvetted or illegal immigrants.

No executive order is needed for this. Simply a memorandum from the director of Homeland Security as to where the refugees should be settled.

Just as Congress needs to reap the misery of their legislation, liberal activists and politicians should practice the tolerance they preach regarding illegal immigration.

I wonder how long my home town of Denver would remain a sanctuary city if a few refugee boarding houses popped up in the Bonnie Brae or Hilltop neighborhoods?

After all, whats good for the goose is good for the gander.

Brian C Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Read the original:
The Missing Piece From Trump's Immigration Reform - Daily Caller