Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, issued the following statement in response to the Biden administration’s move to lift Affordable Care Act restrictions for DACA recipients:
“We are thrilled that that DACA recipients will finally be able to access health care through the Affordable Care Act. We commend the Biden administration for taking this important step for health equity and immigrant justice.
The murder of Laken Riley took center stage during Thursday night’s State of the Union address. Riley was a 22-year-old student who was killed last month at the University of Georgia. The suspect in her murder is a Venezuelan migrant whom officials say was illegally in the U.S.
During the Republican rebuttal, Riley’s murder was brought up by Alabama Sen. Katie Britt. “She was brutally murdered by one of the millions of illegal border crossers President Biden chose to release into our homeland. Y’all … as a mom, I can’t quit thinking about this. I mean, this could have been my daughter. This could have been yours.”
The claim that immigration brings on a crime wave can be traced back to the first immigrants who arrived in the U.S. Ever since the 1980s and ’90s, this false narrative saw a resurgence.
Congress and the Biden administration are currently considering restrictive immigration policies in an effort to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the number of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border seeking protection and safe haven. The proposed policies include raising the standard to access the US asylum system; creating a new executive authority to close the border; expanding the detention of asylum-seekers, including families and children; and extending expedited removal throughout the country, among other items.
The Journal on Migration and Human Security (JMHS) is a peer-reviewed, open-access publication, which seeks to feature cutting-edge, evidence-based public policy papers. Its human security rubric is meant to evoke the widely shared goals of creating secure and sustaining conditions in migrant sending communities; promoting safe, orderly, and legal migration; and developing rights-respecting immigration and immigrant integration policies that benefit sending and receiving communities and allow newcomers to lead productive, secure lives. JMHS papers are published online as they become available and compiled in hard-copy volumes each year.
A humanitarian crisis has pushed more than 7 million people to leave Venezuela over the past decade, some settling in South and Central America and others coming to the US. Those who arrive here have often found themselves in desperate circumstances.
In October 2015, Princeton economist Angus Deaton got an early-morning call from Sweden that most scholars can only dream of. Groggy and bleary-eyed, Deaton learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in economics “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.”
For most award winners, the storm of media coverage following the Nobel announcement is unlike anything they’ll ever experience. But, Deaton writes in a new book, the publicity about his award was quickly overshadowed “by an order of magnitude” when he published an academic paper a few weeks after his Nobel win.
The immigrant population in the U.S. is growing again.
The number of people born somewhere else climbed by nearly a million last year, reaching a record high of just over 46 million, according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The increase isn’t huge for a country the size of the U.S. But it’s significant, as growth had slowed sharply in recent years because of Trump administration policies and the pandemic.
“The foreign-born population zoomed up,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “The gain in 2022 was as big as the previous four years put together.”
On August 3, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, 2-1, that the Biden administration could keep its restrictive asylum policy in place as it considers its appeal to a reversal of the policy by a federal district court. The Biden rule, known as the “transit” or “asylum” ban, denies asylum to anyone who failed to seek asylum in a transit country. While the judges on the appeals court stated that it would expedite its consideration of the case, which was brought by immigrant rights groups, it will likely take until September before there is a final resolution.
Texas has separated at least 26 migrant family units on the southern border since July 10 under Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border initiative, according to Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid immigration attorney Kristin Etter.
“This is just a very harsh and cruel detour from the asylum process,” Etter told CNN in an interview Wednesday.
A few Republican members of Congress are threatening to reduce or eliminate funding for Catholic Charities and other faith-based groups that offer aid to immigrants at the U.S. southern border.
The lawmakers, who are echoing the campaigns of conservative Catholic groups that vow to “#defund the bishops,” have already succeeded in inserting their agenda into legislation passed by the House this year. Another attempt to zero-out appropriations for a key Department of Homeland Security program supporting faith-based border efforts is awaiting a vote in Congress.