Week of December 26–31, 2021

CLEVELAND — Jenika Gonzales said she didn’t initially understand the bigger picture behind her family’s immigration story.

What You Need To Know

Jenika Gonzales' family immigrated to the United States from the Philippines

Her story is featured in the OPAWL Love Has No Borders campaign

OPAWL stands for Ohio Progressive Asian Women’s Leadership

The campaign encourages support for immigration reform that allows families to stay together

“I think our immigration story started, at least for me, when I was 8 years old. This was is in 1998, when my mom left me to move to the states,” Gonzales said looking back at old family photos.

Gonzales said her mom left her and her siblings in the Philippines to provide a better life for them by working in America.

She said the separation wasn’t always easy.

“I didn’t see her for eight years until I reunited with her in 2006,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales shared her experience in the Love Has No Borders Digital Immigration Storytelling Campaign to offer a different perspective of how the immigration system affects families.

“The biggest thing that I’m always trying to make people understand is (that) when a person immigrates to the states, it’s often that the only focus (is) on the arriving here and the building (of) the new life here. But it’s never really highlighted the life that they’ve left in their home country,” Gonzales said.

The campaign is run by an organization called Ohio Progressive Asian Women’s Leadership. It features several experiences like Gonzales’ to encourage support for immigration reform that allows families to stay together.

“Through OPAWL, they’ve really given me not only the power back but also like the knowledge and the ways in which I can change and help other people who are my age at the time when I moved here to also navigate and understand their way through this really complicated system,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales said that her last sibling was able to come to the United States in 2018.

On the way to her mom’s house, she imagined what a reformed immigration system might look like.

“Currently, the Senate has a chance to actually change the immigration policy where it could look a little more focused on the human aspect of immigration and actually helping the hundreds and millions of families that are currently waiting and hoping for a more humane system,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales said she cherishes the time that she can spend with her family now that they are all together in the states.

“It’s really a good, like, almost like, an ending to a story. Like we’re all together and my mom’s reaping the benefits of her sacrifice,” Gonzales said.

Now that she understands years later why her family had to be separated, she has one thing to tell her mom:

“Thank you ... It’s been hard, but rewarding, yeah,” Gonzales said, sitting next to her mom and niece.

YUMA, Ariz. - Illegal immigrants regularly use Uber to travel from the border to destinations within the interior of the United States, two drivers in the border town of Yuma, Arizona, told Fox News.

One driver said the riders confirmed to him that they were in the U.S. illegally. Another said he deduced their immigration status based on the circumstances, such as getting picked up with bags alongside large groups in remote locations near the border with destinations at hotels. Fox News granted both anonymity so they could speak freely.

"I just will get a notification of a pickup, head down to the location and there will be a group of 20 plus immigrants standing on the corner, waiting for Ubers," one driver told Fox News. "It’s legit in the middle of nowhere."

The drivers told Fox News that many of the illegal immigrants ask to be dropped off at local hotels in the Yuma area.

Fox News asked Uber a series of questions, such as whether the ride-share company was aware that illegal immigrants were using its services to travel to the U.S. interior or what it had done to assist its drivers. An Uber spokesperson's response didn't answer the questions, besides indicating that drivers can cancel rides if they feel unsafe and can call the police to report suspicious activity.

But a second Uber driver pointed out that he won't know whether riders are illegal immigrants when he accepts the trip. He said law enforcement gave him a warning for transporting illegal immigrants.

"Technically it’s illegal to transport illegals," the driver told Fox News.

Instead, the Uber spokesperson detailed efforts the company took to combat human trafficking, saying the company provided its drivers with educational tips.

The surge in Uber pickups began within the last several weeks, according to the drivers, just as the Biden administration announced a plan to reimpose the "Remain in Mexico" policy, which requires asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting immigration court dates in the United States.

Yuma Mayor Doug Nicholls said he'd heard that illegal immigrants were receiving rides from Uber drivers.

"This is new. This is not something that is a normal, standard operating procedure," Nicholls told Fox News. "The MPP [Migrant Protection Protocols], or the ‘Remain in Mexico’ program, coming back online is correlated to roughly where this happens."

He said the latest surge overwhelmed Border Patrol for a few days, causing a backlog that led illegal immigrants to give up on waiting for agents to apprehend them after a few hours and instead continue on their journey through Uber.

Nicholls also told Fox News that Uber has not reached out to his office about illegal immigrant pickups.

The second driver told Fox News that he believes most of the illegal immigrants he picks up are asylum seekers. He said riders sometimes ask to be delivered to U.S. authorities, where they can then be processed and given a court date.

"They … just set the destination to the Border Patrol headquarters," he said.

"We’re kind of put in between a rock and a hard place, because it’s coming through the app, and then we don’t know that they’re illegals until you start talking to them," he continued. "You find out and it's like, too late now, I'm not just going to drop them off somewhere."

He said one group he drove had little kids with them and another included an elderly woman who couldn't walk well.

"You feel bad for them," he told Fox News.

Ever since she was a high school junior, Manasvi Perisetty knew she wanted to be a computer engineer. So when her acceptance letter came last month from University of Texas’ Cockrell School of Engineering, Manasvi should’ve been ecstatic. Instead, her anxiety stirred. Her family’s pending green card application means she might be forced to move back to India before graduating college.

“I have a lot of negative thoughts,” she told the editorial board. “It’s not healthy.”

Manasvi moved to Houston with her parents from southern India when she was 3, as a dependent on her father’s long-term work visa. Now 18, she and her family are still waiting for a green card that would allow them to live and work here permanently. Manasvi is allowed to stay in the country as part of her parents’ visa application, but on her 21st birthday she will age out of her parents’ application and will be forced to self-deport to India.

The uncertainty clouds Manasvi’s otherwise typical American teenage life. Senioritis is hardly an option when she has to spend an extra three hours at the bank getting her college residency affidavit notarized. Her mornings are preoccupied by anxious scanning of news articles about the dim prospects for federal immigration legislation.

“I grew up here, this is my home, I’m very much as American as everyone else,” Manasvi said. “Going back to India, I just don’t think I would survive as well. My parents would have to stay here. It would be me by myself going to a place that I’ve only lived a year or two of my life.”

Skilled Indian workers such as Manasvi’s father, an engineer at Intel, currently make up 75 percent of the roughly 1.2 million immigrants waiting for an employment-based green card, with some Indians facing a waiting period of up to 84 years. Around a quarter of those applicants are “documented dreamers” such as Manasvi, dependents of visa holders who eventually will age out of their place in line. For every new green card made available, two petitions are added to the line. By 2030, the already insurmountable backlog is expected to double.

Immigration law allows 140,000 employment-based green cards every year — spouses and children count against the cap — but only 7 percent of those can go to individuals from a single country annually. If the number of people sponsored from a single country is greater than 7 percent annually, they are placed in the backlog and not considered until a visa becomes available. There is no good reason why these caps remain in place. The limits are arbitrary and inherently unfair — a vestige of an immigration system that historically gave preference to European migrants — with no regard for the size of country or demand for visas. A Norwegian national, for instance, will wait a much shorter period for a green card than the 74,000 Indian and 23,000 Chinese individuals mired in immigration purgatory.

Calling for comprehensive immigration reform has been the familiar refrain of this editorial board for years. In a perfect world, a wholesale revamp of our immigration laws would include aligning the federal supply of green cards with the demand for permanent residency among temporary workers. Getting rid of per-country immigration caps for employment-based visas would break the logjam of applicants, to the great benefit of our national economy. Alas, while such bills exist, there is virtually no momentum for a bipartisan grand bargain to move these policies forward.

A more politically feasible solution would be for Congress to simply recirculate old permission slips. In some years, the number of green cards issued in family- and employment-based visa categories fell below the per-country caps. A provision of the U.S. Citizenship Act, a comprehensive reform bill proposed by President Biden on his first day of office, would “recapture” nearly 1 million of these unused family- and employment-based green cards dating back to 1992 and make them immediately available to individuals in the backlog. The Niskanen Center estimates that passing that provision alone would contribute $815 billion to the national gross domestic product over the next decade.

While Congressional Democrats attempted to shoehorn green card recapture into the $1.8 trillion Build Back Better bill, the Senate parliamentarian rejected all immigration provisions in the bill last week. With the future of Build Back Better now in doubt, Congress may look to break up the omnibus legislation into smaller bills that can gain broad support. Green card recapture has historically attracted Republican votes — the first successful green card recapture was a Republican-sponsored bill — with even John Cornyn, Texas’ senior senator, indicating months ago that he’d support a standalone bill. U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, introduced a bill in September that would recapture a smaller number of unused visas from 2020 through 2021, opening a potential pathway for compromise legislation with Democrats.

Recapturing old green cards is hardly a panacea for legal immigration. The backlog will still exist, and per country caps will remain in place until Congress decides to do something about them. But it would be a tremendous help for the thousands of immigrants who have built a life here, paying taxes and contributing to the economy despite having limited upward mobility in the workforce and few labor rights. These individuals have gone through the system the right way and filed their petitions for permanent residency, only to become casualties of Congress’ decades-long failure to overhaul our immigration system. It’s time we did right by them.

Signed into law with the purpose of changing the level and preference system for admissions of immigrants into the U.S, the act of 1990 became the first major act to overhaul the immigration system in a quarter century.

The Immigration Act of 1990 overhauled the legal immigration system by outlining three different paths by which people could immigrate to the U.S.: family sponsored, employment based and diversity based.

Signed into law by former President George H.W. Bush, the act was meant to “change the level, and preference system for admission of immigrants to the United States and to provide for administrative naturalization.” It became the first major restructuring of the U.S. immigration system in a quarter century.

The act established new family-based and employment-based preference systems.

The family-based route

The family-based route allows U.S. citizens to sponsor their spouses, children and parents, while legal permanent residents may sponsor their spouse and unmarried children.

First preference: unmarried children of U.S. citizens

Second preference: spouses and unmarried children of lawful permanent residents

Third preference: married children of U.S. citizens

Fourth preference: siblings 21 years old or older of U.S. citizens

Also read: I-9, the Purpose of Employment Eligibility Verification

The employment-based route

Employment-based immigration system allows petitioners, most commonly sponsored by a U.S. employer, to apply to one of five different visa categories:

First preference: individuals with extraordinary ability, outstanding professors or researchers, and multinational executives or managers

Second preference: professionals holding an advanced degree or individuals with exceptional ability

Third preference: skilled workers, individuals holding a bachelor’s degree, or unskilled workers in sectors with a shortage

Fourth preference: broadcasters, religious workers, medical graduates, and certain government employees

Fifth preference: investors creating employment at a specified minimum number of new jobs

The diversity-based route

Finally, the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program makes 50,000 visas available to citizens from the six continents via a lottery based system that randomly selects individuals to apply for a diversity visa. The countries selected must have had fewer than 50,000 immigrants entering the United States in the previous five years, and no country can get more than 7% of the available visas.

The new law instituted an annual cap on immigration, limiting the number of available immigration-based visas. It largely did not affect asylum and refugee immigration pathways.

Biden’s first weeks in office were filled with executive actions, but policy has moved little.

(Harrisburg) – A throng of immigrants, their families and advocates demonstrated outside the state capitol earlier this month.

They spent the day walking the halls to lobby for two specific changes to state law to make the commonwealth more incluse to immigrants, regardless of their status.

One would allow people to obtain a driver’s license with a Tax ID number rather than a social security number. The other would allow students who have attended school in the commonwealth for the past two years to pay in-state tuition.

Eva Bravo, who has college-aged children, was among the demonstrators.

“I’m here to fight for licenses for Pennsylvania and also here for a worthy education for [undocumented or DACA recipient] children,” Bravo said in Spanish. “In reality, paying for out-of-state tuition is so expensive that many times, they can’t study.”

Immigration advocates have said they are refocusing their efforts to help immigrants on the state level due to a lack of progress made on the federal level.

Developments in Pennsylvania have shown how immigration enforcement has changed, if only slightly, under a new president and administration.

Cautiously optimistic

Entering 2021, immigration advocates had reason to be hopeful.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned on sweeping changes to immigration and a “humane” enforcement policy.Andrew Harnik / AP Photo

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a drive-in campaign stop at Bucks County Community College in Bristol, Pa., Saturday, Oct. 24, 2020.

With Biden’s victory and Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress, albeit by a slim margin, some said they saw a ray of hope for comprehensive immigration reform.

But advocates in the commonwealth, like Maegan Llerena with Latino advocacy group Make The Road, were wary.

“We can give anybody a break, because we have been living like this without a break,” Llerena said. “We need to make sure that we’re holding him accountable from day one, cautiously optimistic.”

President Biden issued a number of immigration executive orders when he took office, including protections for DACA and a 100-day freeze on deportations.

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, director of Penn State’s Immigrants’ Rights Center, saw the move as a significant change from the immigration policy of former President Donald Trump, who branded his term in office with restrictionist and punitive enforcement.

“I really see it as a signal to restore prosecutorial discretion and exercise immigration enforcement in a more humane way moving forward,” Wadhia said in January.

Biden’s administration faced challenges and backlash as a wave of asylum seekers arrived at the southern border.

Lopez-Mills / AP Photo

In this March 30, 2021, file photo, young minors lie inside a pod at the Donna Department of Homeland Security holding facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in Donna, Texas.

He has received opposition from multiple fronts for the crisis at the border, with conservatives saying he was too lenient and liberal factions noting much of Trump’s enforcement apparatus remained intact.

Detention expands in the commonwealth

Far from the U.S.-Mexico border, shifts in immigration enforcement in Pennsylvania illustrate how policies have only changed slightly.

Immigrant detention has increased by more than 50 percent under Biden, and three communities in the commonwealth dealt with the issue.

Under the Biden administration’s direction, immigration authorities released detained women and children from the Berks County Residential Center. The center is owned and operated by the county in a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

However, county and federal leaders were secretive about plans to convert the facility into an all-female migrant detention center.

Immigration lawyer and advocate Bridget Cambria in Reading has long called for the center to close completely.

“To choose women as their next fallback is sort of like a slap in the face,” Cambria said. “Those women need resources, not jails.”

ny ALDEA executive director Bridget Cambria reviews work of communications and intake assistant Nathalia Cruz in ALDEA’s downtown Reading office.

The other two family detention centers in Texas were used as “staging centers” for migrant families months after the administration said it would no longer hold migrant families. Earlier this month it was reported all former family detention centers are converting to holding single adults.

York County closed its immigrant detention center in August over financial issues.

Gabriela Martinez /The Carmonas hug after Alfredo Carmona, an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detainee at York County Prison, was released on humanitarian parole on Aug. 2.

The move opened the door for Clearfield County to contract with the federal government and a private prison corporation to house the largest detention center in the northeast.

Clearfield County Commissioner John Sobel said the project will support the school district and provide jobs.

“We just think that it will be a significant boon to the local economy, particularly the Moshannon Valley area of the local economy,” Sobel said.

‘The most basic’ needs

Desi Burnette is the statewide coordinator for the immigrant advocacy group Movement of Immigrant Leaders of Pennsylvania, or MILPA.

Burnette joined Eva Bravo and other members of the group for the day of action in Harrisburg this month.

Burnette says once-lofty promises from Biden and other national leaders for a pathway to citizenship have been stripped down with every passing month.

A comprehensive reform bill proposed by President Biden remained stagnant for much of the year. Then there was an initiative to squeeze reform into the Congressional budget reconciliation process, blocked for a second time last week by the Senate parliamentarian.

“It’s just been cut back further, further, further back all year long,” Burnette said. “Now we’re at a point at the end of the year, we don’t know if the 11 million undocumented in this country are going to be able to have any kind of relief at this point.”

In her role in the Senate, Harris has the power to overrule the parliamentarian, but has chosen not to.

Kimberly Paynter / WHYY

Members of immigrant advocate organizations rallied outside the ICE detention center in Philadelphia, demanding the release of detainees on Aug. 12, 2021.

“The Biden administration is not doing all that it can do to ensure that the most basic, that people have a pathway to citizenship is very basic,” Burnette said.

Immigrants and activists said they are thankful for the changes that have been implemented by the Biden administration. But they also expressed a deep disappointment in the scale and scope of those changes and how that is seen in the state.

With Congressional midterms coming next year, the Democrats’ precarious handle on power in Congress may slip. Biden still has three more years in office in a country as politically divided as ever.

From the vantage point of immigrants and advocates in Pennsylvania, comprehensive immigration reform still appears far from reach.

Anthony Orozco is part of the “Report for America” program — a national service effort that places journalists in newsrooms across the country to report on under-covered topics and communities.

The Department of Homeland Security has issued a request for proposals from contractors that gives us a sense of what DHS is worried about.

And it shows that high-tech concerns, some so high-tech that they are hard to understand, outweigh policy considerations by a ratio of ten to one.

I am not knocking the RFP. It would be good, for example, to pick the last item on the list of 11 topics, to know more about “reportable animal diseases, particularly those with zoonotic propensity”; such diseases are those that can move from animals to humans like Ebola and perhaps Covid-19.

But a department in charge of immigration law enforcement should also be curious about ways that innovation, both technical and procedural, can be deployed to reduce, for example, the number of illegal aliens in the country.

Here’s the shopping list announced by the government last week; it wants proposals in the following fields:

DHS221-001 - Automated Artificial Intelligence (AI) Distress Alerts and Monitoring

DHS221-002 - Rapidly deployable countermeasures at protected perimeters and structures

DHS221-003 - Non-Invasive and Real-time Detection of Counterfeit Microelectronics

DHS221-004 - Broadband Push-to-Talk Interoperability Platform

DHS221-005 - A Step Towards Agent Agnostic Detection of Biological Hazards

DHS221-006 - Streamlined Airport Checkpoint Screening for Limited Mobility Passengers

DHS221-007 - Mass Fatality Tracking System (MFTS)

DHS221-008 - Next Generation High-Performance, Low Cost, Semiconductor-Based Spectroscopic Personal Radiation Detectors (SPRDs)

DHS221-009 - Field Forward Detection Platform for High Consequence Toxins

DHS221-010 - Person Worn Detector for Aerosolized Chemical Threat

DHS221-011 - From Port-Side to Pen-Side: Low-Cost Detection/Diagnostics for High-Consequence Transboundary or Nationally Reportable Animal Diseases, Particularly Those with Zoonotic Propensity

Of these 11, only one seems to deal with a serious, but low-tech problem, that is 006, “Streamlined Airport Checkpoint Screening for Limited Mobility Passengers.”

In my dreams, I could see DHS funding studies of such matters as the following:

What strategies should field enforcement personnel and prosecutors use that will lead to the most prison sentences for employers of illegal aliens?

What are the profiles of the aliens (and their citizen spouses) in marriage fraud cases in which both agree to a pretend marriage so that the citizen gets money and the alien gets a green card? Are there patterns in terms of justice of the peace marriages vs. those in a church, or the clothes worn by the aliens (seen in photos of the wedding, often on file), or the nation of origin of the alien?

We are not the only immigrant-receiving nation in the world. What enforcement techniques are used in other prosperous countries to limit immigration fraud and illegal aliens generally?

What are the best methods for the U.S. field staff to infiltrate isolated H-2A (farm) and H-2B (non-farm) alien work forces that may be being exploited?

Are there clues that can be obtained, without field work, that would identify “pretend” employers of OPT workers from legit ones, a subject covered by my colleague Jon Feere. One such possibility would be to examine the address of the employer, using Zillow and other systems, to see the headquarters of the employer: Is it a house? Are there other patterns that could help identify such employers prior to field work.

What are the techniques used by other nations to purchase the refugee-blocking moves from third-party nations such as Turkey? Some may be worth copying, some not.

In real life, it is probably easier to admit to a lack of knowledge about high-tech solutions to problems, than to accept that the government has a blind eye about some policy matters, so my sense is that this kind of funding is rarely available.

Nostalgia. I do remember a brief period, long ago, when the old INS was under the Justice Department, and the attorney general was the late Elliot Richardson, that projects like the imagined ones were DOJ-funded. I ran a couple of them.

One of them was to design an experiment with the ports of entry: what difference would it make in terms of turn-backs of incoming aliens were the inspectors to be freed of time restraints, and were allowed to spend as much time as they felt necessary in the inspection of individual aliens? Such staffing patterns, we learned, would more than double the number of detected illicit entries. The inspectors doing this work also found out that by far most common reason for denying entry was not a high-tech one at all, it was that the inspectors found that the aliens were lying. Under a subsequent AG and a new INS commissioner, all of this was ignored.

Two Prospect writing fellows offer their best of 2021.

Prospect Writing Fellows Marcia Brown and Brittany Gibson wrapped up their fellowships in 2021, but not before delivering some excellent work. We asked Marcia and Brittany to share their favorites of the year.

Marcia Brown

Nearly a year into the Biden administration, Prospect readers may be eager to see Democrats turn to executive action to realize a progressive agenda. But that hasn’t totally come to pass.

“Still Stuck—and Endangered—on the Border”

Among the possibilities at the president’s fingertips are ending horrific and cruel immigration policies including “Remain in Mexico” and Title 42, a public-health order the Trump administration first introduced to close the border to immigrants and asylum seekers. President Biden has continued both policies, and indeed they are now Biden policies, not Trump policies. I wrote a story about how the end of those programs felt delayed in June, and it’s December and we’re still doing that.

“The One Union Biden Has Not Supported”

Also, the administration has not yet recognized the immigration judges’ union, an organization that had historically enabled immigration judges to push for a more independent judiciary less subject to anti-immigrant political whims. We wrote about that in March.

“Physical Mail Could Be Eliminated at Federal Prisons”

Similarly, the president could end a pilot program to eliminate physical mail in federal prisons. The justification for the program is to stop drugs from getting into prisons through mail laced with illicit substances. But the reality is that most drugs don’t enter prisons this way, and the program is instead one more way for private companies to profit and removes yet another connection incarcerated people have to their families and supporters on the outside.

“How the Supreme Court Protects Robinhood”

I’d also like to highlight my coverage of the brokerage app Robinhood’s forced arbitration clause, and the widespread use of such clauses across our economy.

“Did CNN Air a Staged Migrant Crossing of the Rio Grande?”

And finally, here’s my coverage of a CNN TV spot of migrants crossing the Rio Grande—footage which was not all that it seemed.

Brittany Gibson

What’s an elections reporter to do for the first half of an off-year? This year, there was no shortage of stories to tell.

“A Tale of Two Senate Rallies”

2021 started by finishing the 2020 cycle with two Georgia Senate runoff elections, where Democrats took both seats in competitive races. For TAP, I was on the trail throughout the state, and in this article I catalogued the differences between the Republican and Democratic rallies. The final days of all four campaigns were packed with campaign events where the candidates spoke to two very different sets of voter priorities. The rallies represented a division that’s continued throughout the state—and country—as election results continue to be doubted by a non-negligible portion of Republican voters.

“Trump’s Last Stand”

A fascinating tool of the Trump era was the Trump rally. In Dalton, Georgia, on the eve of the runoff elections, I spoke with rally attendees about their election fraud concerns and how they still thought Trump could win the November general election by mid-January. It was an issue that I didn’t think would persist well into 2021—let alone 2022. But I suppose that it just goes to show how wrong reporters can be sometimes. Case in point, this article is titled “Trump’s Last Stand,” and he held one of his most memorable rallies the day after it was published and has held many more rallies since.

“Republicans Work to Reverse Increases in Voter Turnout”

When the 2021 legislative sessions began, many GOP lawmakers took this opportunity to roll back access to the ballot that had temporarily been expanded because of COVID. More than 100 bills were introduced or rolled over that would limit voting options or increase the barriers to voting, either in person or by mail. And several of the bills passed, including bills in the battlegrounds Georgia and Texas. President Joe Biden’s response was to pass H.R. 1 and H.R. 4; both bills expand voting access uniformly across the country. But it’s still unclear when there’ll be follow-through on those ambitions.

“As Republicans Suppress the Vote, What Are Democrats Doing About Their Own Selection Process?”

While Republicans and Democrats alike were dealing with new voting laws introduced in state legislatures, as well as possible federal bills impacting voting rights, and drafting their postmortems on the 2020 cycle, the DNC was quietly missing its own deadline for reviewing its 2020 primary nomination process. It missed a self-imposed deadline in March of this year to hold public hearings about the 2020 process and begin to make improvements to the 2024 process. My only question is, will we ever find out who won the Iowa caucus?

“Big Tech Lobbyists Take Down Arizona’s App Store Bill”

While focusing on statehouses and election law this year, I also dove into another law that was circling the desks of state legislators around the country: an app store reform bill. The bill would have ended the practice of app developers being charged high fees for payment processing by Google and Apple, the two dominant cellphone operating systems. A basic story on monopoly power and control, the legislation had the best chance of passing in Arizona but ultimately failed to make it to the governor’s desk after an avalanche of corporate lobbying. But advocates of the legislation say it will be back.

I want to add a few notes to my Christmas weekend column on the Census Bureau’s July 2021 state population estimates and what stories they tell about growth and decline in the first 15 months of the coronavirus pandemic.

The immigration bust. The big news is about immigration. In the years from 2010 to 2019, the Census Bureau recorded an increase in “international migration” — immigration, in layman’s language — of 873,000.

For the 15 months from April 2020 to July 2021, the corresponding number is only 257,000 — down 71% from the average of the years from 2010 to 2019. Presumably, that does not include most of the additional illegal immigrants who have crossed the border and fanned out across the country due to Biden administration policies. The cutoff date is July 1, just five months into the administration.

The drop-off from the previous decade is enormous. It’s even greater if you look back to the peak immigration surge that started in the 1980s and ended abruptly with the housing price collapse and sharp recession in 2007.

And there’s also a big difference in immigrant destinations. In earlier decades, half of all immigrants typically headed to three states: California, Texas, and New York.

In the plague year, they’ve headed elsewhere. The highest immigration increase as a percentage of the preexisting population in 2020-21 was in two dissimilar states: Massachusetts and Florida, followed by Washington, D.C.

One can see in these numbers the increasing share of legal immigrants who are high-skilled people from East Asia and South Asia heading to university and medical school clusters in metro Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. But it is not so on the West Coast. Massachusetts’s immigrant increase (13,700) was essentially identical to California’s (13,900), even though Massachusetts has about 7 million people and California has about 39 million.

The No. 1 and No. 2 destinations for 2020-21 immigrants were Florida (41,200) and Texas (28,500). Together, these states account for more than a quarter of the nation’s immigration increase. Plague-year immigrants are evidently attracted by the same factors as plague-year domestic migrants: low taxes, vibrant private sector economics, and a relative lack of COVID-19 restrictions.

The pattern has political implications. Latin American and Asian immigrants from the 1982-2007 surge turned out to vote heavily Democratic, and high-skill Asian immigrants since 2007 have done so as well.

But Latino voters, especially but not only in South Texas and South Florida, have trended toward Republicans in the Trump era. Polling shows that Latinos in the Lower Rio Grande Valley resent rather than identify with the illegal immigrants surging across the border.

And Florida may be seeing an influx of high-skill and anti-socialist refugees from new leftist governments in Argentina, Peru, and Chile, as it already has from Venezuela and Cuba.

Where immigrants aren’t going is also significant. Only 5% of the 2020-21 immigrant inflow was to California, and only 2% was to Illinois. Los Angeles and Chicago have lost their allure. And immigrants added less than one-tenth of 1% to the populations of the fast-growing Carolinas and Georgia and the slower-growing Midwest.

The birth dearth. The number of births in the 12 months up through July 1, 2021, was 3,582,000 — 9% lower than the average in the years from 2010 to 2019.

You have to go back to 1979 to find a year with fewer births , and you can go back to the 1790 census and you won’t find a year with fewer births as a percentage of the population (1.1%).

Birth rates are lowest in the six New England states and New England-founded Oregon on the West Coast. They are similarly low in Florida and West Virginia, with their elderly populations. In recent years, only a few states, such as Maine and West Virginia, have registered more births than deaths. In the April 2020-July 2021 period, 25 states did.

What states have the highest birth rates? Not California or New York, whose pre-2007 immigrants were prolific in recent times. In the plague year, their birth rates were below the national average.

The most prolific instead are heavily Mormon Utah, three sparsely populated states with mining and financial sectors (Alaska and the Dakotas), and Texas.

The political impact. Politically, the 25 states carried by former President Donald Trump had 43% of the nation’s population in the 2020 census, which ended on April 1. But they produced 44% of the nation’s births and attracted 44% of its immigrants in the following 14 months, ending July 1, 2021. Even as Biden Democrats took over the government, the nation’s demographics shifted marginally toward Republicans in the plague year.

One male was riding inside of train car with unknown medical issue

BLOOMINGTON, Texas – On Thursday, Dec. 30, the Victoria County Sheriff deputies captured a Salvadoran migrant trying to enter illegally via train. The 20-year-old male called 9-1-1 for help due to an unknown medical issue. Since he was located outside of Victoria city limits, VCSO and EMS responded to his location near McFaddin. Where they were able to navigate from the phone he used to call. Deputies say the migrant claimed others left him behind on the train. After getting detained, he was then transferred to the Kingsville Border Patrol location. As a result, the train relocated to Bloomington for the removal of the subject.

Two of the immigrants had already left sanctuary, but one has been living at a Unitarian church for nearly three years.

(RNS) — Three immigrants who have resided in houses of worship to avoid deportation were granted one-year stays of removal this week, a move faith-based immigrant rights advocates framed as a “Christmas gift” years in the making.

Among the immigrants is Jeanette Vizguerra, who has resided at First Unitarian Society of Denver since spring 2019. According to a statement from the Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition, Vizguerra, who also briefly entered “sanctuary” in 2015, was notified of her stay of removal via a phone call from Rep. Joe Neguse earlier this month.

“These last two years and 9 difficult months inside the sanctuary became more difficult still when the pandemic began, the churches closed, and I felt forgotten and isolated,” she said in the statement. “Neither the pandemic nor my deportation process have ended, but knowing that I am going to have a Stay of Removal was the best Christmas gift that will make my life less difficult. With my freedom I will be able to continue fighting easier.”

Coalition organizers said Vizguerra is now transitioning out of sanctuary and will move out of First Unitarian, without being under imminent threat of deportation for at least one year.

Two other immigrants who had previously stayed in sanctuary — Sandra Lopez and Arturo Hernandez García — also announced they were granted stays of removal at a news conference convened at First Unitarian on Wednesday.

“For me it is like a Christmas and New Year gift,” Lopez, who left sanctuary in 2019, said in a statement.

García, for his part, left sanctuary in 2015 and received a two-year stay of removal in 2017. But he once again faced deportation in 2019 under former President Donald Trump’s administration, prompting Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet to advocate on his behalf.

For García and others, a new formal stay of removal offers much-needed peace of mind. In a statement, he said he was “surprised” to learn about the stay, but believes it will help all three immigrants “continue fighting our legal cases and be able to be together with our families.”

Vizguerra is founder of Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition, a local subset of the broader New Sanctuary Movement, which consists of faith communities that allow undocumented immigrants at risk of deportation to take refuge in their houses of worship. The tactic was used in the 1980s to aid Central American migrants who entered the U.S., but reemerged in 2014 under then-President Barack Obama, who deported around 3 million people during his presidency.

The approach exploded in popularity years later as part of a larger protest movement against Trump’s policies and rhetoric regarding immigration. It now encompasses hundreds of congregations nationwide and relies on an internal 2011 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo discouraging federal agents from raiding “sensitive locations” — namely, hospitals, schools and churches.

Churches and other religious groups that participated in the movement have attracted attention from various politicians: In January, Neguse sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to lift deportation orders on Vizguerra, Lopez and García, among others. It was signed by fellow Colorado representatives Diana DeGette, Ed Perlmutter and Jason Crow, as well as Sens. Bennet and John Hickenlooper.

“We believe you should use your legal authority to lift the deportation orders against Colorado’s sanctuary leaders — Ingrid Encalada Latorre, Jeanette Vizguerra-Ramirez, Rosa Sabido, Sandra Lopez, and Arturo Hernandez García — and exercise favorable discretion to grant stays of removal for these individuals so that they can keep their families intact, and be reunited with their neighbors and communities while Congress works with your administration on comprehensive immigration reform,” the letter read.

Other Democrats have drawn attention to the plight of people in sanctuary as well. Julián Castro visited a woman living in sanctuary at an Ohio church while running for president in 2019, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren also spoke at a church offering sanctuary to an undocumented immigrant during her own presidential run.

Similarly, New York’s Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined Neguse during a 2019 visit to Ingrid Latorre, an undocumented immigrant who was living in sanctuary in Boulder. Latorre was granted a stay of removal in her case in November of this year.

Amritsar: Two illegal immigration agents have been booked for duping a local resident of Rs 25 lakh on the pretext of providing him a work permit visa for Canada. The accused has been identified as Ajay Chopra and Rahul Chopra, both residents of Gopal Nagar in Jalandhar. The victim, Ashish Verma, stated in his complaint to C-Division police that the accused took Rs 25 lakh from him on the pretext of sending him abroad on a work permit visa. The accused neither arranged the visa for him nor returned his money. After an inquiry by ACP (South) Mangal Singh, the police have registered a case under Sections 420, IPC, and Section 13 of the Punjab Travel Professional Regulation Act. No arrest has been made so far. TNS

Abduction case filed after 2 mths

Tarn Taran: A resident (a labourer) of Khemkaran had to move from pillar to post for two months to lodge a complaint against the accused responsible for abducting his teenage daughter. The accused had been nominated as Gurlal Singh of Mehmoodpur village. He abducted the victim on October 25. The victims’ parents, who worked as labourers, had gone to work when the incident occurred. When they returned home, they were informed by the minor son that Gurlal Singh had abducted the girl. The victim’s father approached Khemkaran police who were not ready to listen to him. ASI Sunil Dutt , investigating officer of the case, said the accused had been booked under Section 346 of the IPC on December 28 (Tuesday). The ASI said the victim delayed reporting the matter to the police while the victim’s father alleged that the police harassed him. OC

Youth shot in Mianpur village

Tarn Taran: One person was shot dead over some dispute by his rival at Mianpur village here. The deceased has been identified as 23-year-old Shamsher Singh. He was returning home from Adda village when Amritpal Singh, son of the village sarpanch, shot him dead. DSP Barjinder Singh said after committing the crime, the accused fled the spot. The DSP said the victim was willing to contest elections for the post of the village sarpanch while the accused being son of the sarpanch was taking it a challenge for him. A case under Section 302 of the IPC and Sections 25, 27, 54 and 59 of the Arms Act had been registered by Sarai Ananat Khan police. OC

7 more contract Covid-19 in dist

Amritsar: The district reported seven fresh cases of Covid-19 on Wednesday with which the total count of cases increased to 47,466. Of the seven cases, three were reported from Army Hospital and one from the air force station. The Health Department also reported the recovery of two patients taking the tally of those cured to 45,854. At present, the district has a total of 13 active cases. Meanwhile, 10,268 residents were inoculated during the vaccination drive on Wednesday. Of these, 4051 received the first dose of the vaccine and 6,217 the second dose. TNS