Mediaboss Marketing

As it continues to ignore the wholesale breach of our nation's borders, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) just announced the launch of "Uniting for Ukraine," a historic effort to welcome 100,000 Ukrainians into the U.S. through various admission pathwaysmost prominently through humanitarian parole.

The full details have yet to be announced, but early indications are that this program will be yet another example of the Biden administration usurping congressional authority through an expansive and illegal use of humanitarian parole.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has continually abused the limited discretion delegated by Congress in order to run his own mass immigration and refugee program. His abuse of humanitarian parole, expansion of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), weakening of asylum standards and non-existent interior immigration enforcement all amount to a lawless destruction of our nation's immigration limits and controls.

We are a compassionate nation with the world's most generous immigration system. Granting temporary refuge to people whose country was invaded by a malevolent, expansionist neighbor is the right thing to dobut it must be done lawfully.

Statute requires that parole be used temporarily, on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons. In this case, humanitarian parole, rather an actual immigration status authorized by Congress, is being used to circumvent immigration caps that Congress established in order to move hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals into the United States.

By any measure, the United States has over the last two years done more than its fair share of worldwide immigrant and refugee admissions.

The Biden administration and lawmakers in both parties also continue to improperly frame the plight of displaced Ukrainians. The fact is, nearly all Ukrainian refugees are already being properly assisted in the region, and there are plenty of ways for us to assist with monetary aid to ease suffering, restore stability and ensure that they can easily return home once the conflict subsides.

In early March, the European Union generously granted three-year residency to all Ukrainian refugees to live, work and access health care in 27 of the world's most secure and developed countries. Why not assist this effort rather than ignoring our own laws to give Ukrainians one more option halfway around the world?

Of course, Ukrainians are a group with compelling humanitarian needs and we share the Biden administration's sympathy for their plight.

However, Congress created the refugee admissions process and authorized TPS specifically to address these types of humanitarian situations, and has repeatedly sought to rein in the executive branch's abuse of humanitarian parole.

Humanitarian parole is not the appropriate mechanism to help Ukrainian refugees. "Programmatic" or class-based parole is unlawful and being used to get around caps that may have required the United States to accept fewer refugees from other regions.

With Mayorkas continuing to improperly invoke parole authority, it raises the questionwho's next and how many? Congress, not the executive branch, has plenary authority over immigration. Americans must demand that their government respect its limits.

Dan Stein is president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in Washington, D.C.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

View original post here:
Destroying Immigration Laws Isn't the Way to Help Ukrainian Refugees | Opinion - Newsweek

Congressman Tom Tiffany should have resigned long ago. His latest stunt is only more evidence that he is hostile to American democracy and would support a coup to install an unelected authoritarian government if given the chance.

Already infamous for promoting an an effort to overturn the will of Wisconsin voters (through supporting a failed Texas lawsuit that sought to throw out certified vote totals from multiple states) and opposing a symbolic resolution to stand with NATO as it faces the war designs of Russias dictator Vladimir Putin, Tiffanys latest stunt is to sign on as a co-sponsor of a resolution to impeach one of President Joe Biden Cabinet secretaries, Alejandro Mayorkas of Homeland Security. The Hazelhurst Republicans well-known infatuation with demonizing immigrants shines through in a letter he co-signed Monday to Mayorkas.

Tiffany is part of the latest GOP effort to divert attention from the investigation of the attack on the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021joining other right-wing Trumpers at the US southern border this week to make loud noises about a genuine problem while rejecting the only workable solution: true immigration reform. The folly of a massive, wasteful wall is their Holy Grail. Failure to support it, they claim, is reason enough to impeach Mayorkas.

This is not new territory for Tiffany. Prior to his special election to Congress in May 2020, he took part in a stunt by Republican state senators who refused to confirm several of Gov. Tony Evers cabinet heads and other nomineesan unprecedented and now permanent stain in the history books of Wisconsin Republicans. So its only in character for Tiffany to now want to impeach someone in the line of succession to the US presidency for partisan purposes rather than actual crimes. The only impeachment of a Cabinet secretary took place in 1876 amid charges of bribery.

This is extremistand arguably treasonousbehavior: undermining election results and thwarting the will of duly-elected chief executives at the state and federal levels for the sake of creating instability that threatens democracy itself.

In more normal times we would warn Tiffany that this is a dangerous game he and former President Donald Trumps other sycophants are playing. But we no longer believe this is just another game. Crazy as it sounds, these people arent merely trying to make political hay out of creating a Constitutional crisis, nearly overthrowing election results, and aiding an attempted coup. They believe it needs to happen and are seeking just enough public support to give them cover.

Dont go there, Congressman. The country you profess to love is in trouble, but its trouble caused by your inability to be a patriot and accept that your party continues to lose nationwide and statewide races because it has lost its way. Instead of seeking to govern, your party seeks to rulethrough gerrymadering, voter obstruction, and stoking fear. Its an authoritarian flirtation that needs to end before you and other co-conspirators drag this nation into even darker places.

Read more here:
To Rep. Tom Tiffany, Co-Sponsor of Impeaching a Biden Cabinet Officer: Don't Go There - UpNorthNews

When the U.S. Congress passedand President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into lawthe Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, the move was largely seen as symbolic.

"The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants, lead supporter Sen. Edward Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) told the Senate during debate. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.

That sentiment was echoed by Johnson, who, upon signing the act on October 3, 1965, said the bill would not be revolutionary: It does not affect the lives of millions It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power.

But the actalso known as the Hart-Celler Act after its sponsors, Sen. Philip Hart (D-Mich.) and Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.)put an end to long-standing national-origin quotas that favored those from northern and western Europe and led to a significant immigration demographic shift in America. Since the act was passed, according to the Pew Research Center, immigrants living in America have more than quadrupled, now accounting for nearly 14 percent of the population.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Immigration Act of 1965 on Liberty Island in New York Harbor with a view of the New York City skyline in the background.

Corbis/Getty Images

In 1960, Pew notes, 84 percent of U.S. immigrants were born in Europe or Canada; 6 percent were from Mexico, 3.8 percent were from South and East Asia, 3.5 percent were from Latin America and 2.7 percent were from other parts of the world. In 2017, European and Canadian immigrants totaled 13.2 percent, while Mexicans totaled 25.3 percent, other Latin Americans totaled 25.1 percent, Asians totaled 27.4 percent and other populations totaled 9 percent.

The 1965 act has to be understood as a result of the civil rights movement, and the general effort to eliminate race discrimination from U.S. law, says Gabriel Jack Chin, immigration law professor at University of California, Davis and co-editor of The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act: Legislating a New America.

READ MORE: U.S. Immigration Timeline

President Lyndon B. Johnson shakes hands with Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) as the senator's brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) looks on after the signing of the newly enacted immigration reform bill at the Statue of liberty.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Scroll to Continue

Immigration reform was also a personal project of John F. Kennedy, Chin notes, whose pamphlet written as a senator was published after his assassination as the book A Nation of Immigrants, and argued for the elimination of the National Origins Quota System in place since 1921.

Ted Kennedy, along with Attorney General and Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.), were both proponents of the bill, in part to honor their brother and also because it was consistent with their general interest in civil rights and international cold war politics, Chin adds.

I think every sensible person in 1965 knew that the sources of immigration would change, Chin says. The more fundamental change, and the more fundamental policy, was the articulation by many legislators that it simply did not matter from where an immigrant came; each person would be evaluated as an individual. That kind of argument was novel, but consistent with the anti-racism of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The act, Edward Kennedy argued during the Senate floor debate, went to the very central ideals of our country.

Our streets may not be paved with gold, but they are paved with the promise that men and women who live hereeven strangers and new newcomerscan rise as fast, as far as their skills will allow, no matter what their color is, no matter what the place of their birth, he said.

Among the key changes brought by the Hart-Celler Act:

Comparing 1965 to 2015, the Hispanic population rose from 4 percent to 18 percent; and Asians grew from 1 percent to 6 percent. This fast-growing immigrant population also has driven the share of the U.S. population that is foreign-born from 5 percent in 1965 to 14 percent today and will push it to a projected record 18 percent in 2065, the report continues, noting that no racial or ethnic group will claim a majority of the U.S. population.

Read the rest here:
How the Immigration Act of 1965 Changed the Face of ...

While such sweeping reform remains unlikely, Ali Noorani, president of the National Immigration Forum, argues there are still legislative avenues Biden could pursue: Last year, Republican Senator John Cornyn and Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema introduced the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act, which aims to streamline border processing and improve access to legal services.

These types of reforms, paired with existing legislation that provides legal immigration pathways which address the growing labor shortage and permanent protections for Dreamers, farm workers, and Temporary Protected Status recipients, is smart policy and smart politics, Noorani wrote in The Daily Beast.

The Department of Homeland Security is bracing for up to 18,000 unauthorized migrants to cross the southern border per day once Title 42 is lifted next month. As midterms approach, the prospect of such an increase has prompted attacks from Republicans spotting an electoral opportunity and Democrats wary of an electoral liability.

In a highly publicized response to Title 42s planned phaseout, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, sent unauthorized migrants on a bus from Texas to Washington, D.C., and ordered more-extensive searches of all commercial vehicles crossing from Mexico. Like many other members of his party, Abbott has sought to draw a direct connection from Bidens immigration policy to the surge in U.S. drug overdoses.

Moderate Democrats are casting Title 42s end as a logistics issue, joining Senate Republicans in introducing a bill to keep it in place until 60 days after the end of the Covid-19 public health emergency has been declared. Even Beto ORourke criticized Biden for lacking a plan to help border communities prepare for the increase in migration.

Electorally speaking, You sort of have the worst of all possible worlds here, Blitzer, the New Yorker writer, said. If the Biden administration had stuck to its plan to roll back Title 42 and systematically build up asylum capacity back in 2021, it might have enjoyed wider leeway to break with the previous administrations policies. Now, a year later, he said, that kind of honeymoon period, such as it was, is over.

Another angle: The Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell argues that Democrats real political liability could be too little immigration. Last year, immigration fell by nearly 50 percent, which has deprived the tight labor market of much-needed workers. Democrats, Rampell writes, have been so fixated on bad-faith right-wing attacks that they have missed the bigger, and much more serious, immigration-related liability: the millions of immigrants whose absence from the U.S. work force is putting upward pressure on inflation.

Whatever immigration message Biden wants to push, he should start pushing it now, argues Glenn Altschuler, a professor of American studies at Cornell. More than half 55 percent of Americans now disapprove of Bidens handling of immigration, he notes. Turning their assessments around presents a daunting challenge. With the midterms less than seven months away, the clock is ticking.

Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.

Go here to see the original:
Opinion | Is Bidens Immigration Reform Too Little Too Late? - The New York Times

WASHINGTON House Republicans are planning to use an oversight hearing next week to attack the Biden administration on its immigration policies, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times that offers a road map for how the G.O.P. intends to further weaponize an issue that is already a main thrust of their midterm campaign message against Democrats.

The detailed, 60-page guidance memo includes misleading and provocative talking points that seek to portray migrants and refugees as perpetrators of gruesome crimes, especially those involving sexual assault, echoing the language that former President Donald J. Trump used to denigrate immigrants. It also argues that the Biden administration has been lax on illegal immigration, seeking to put Democrats on the defensive on the issue.

It comes as Democrats are growing increasingly concerned that President Bidens immigration policies, including the recent decision to lift pandemic-era border restrictions next month, could pose a political liability for them ahead of the midterm elections.

The memo which is marked CONFIDENTIAL FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY repeatedly insinuates that immigrants could be sex offenders, highlighting a handful of arrests at the southwestern border and of Afghan evacuees. It also misrepresents a Biden administration policy designed to humanely enforce immigration laws as one that would bar law enforcement from surveilling sex offenders near schoolyards.

Studies show that the estimated 40 million immigrants living in the United States commit crimes at rates far lower than native-born Americans.

Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security, is set to testify Thursday for the first time in front of the House Judiciary Committee, just as the administration is bracing itself for a surge of migrants expected to make asylum claims at the border in late May. That is when a public health rule limiting border crossings because of the pandemic, known as Title 42, is scheduled to be lifted, unleashing a two-year backlog of claims on top of the high volume of migrants who typically come to the southwestern border in the spring.

The memo for Republicans, prepared by Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking member on the committee, details how the right plans to use the hearing to portray Democrats as pushing far-left policies that seek to abolish all immigration enforcement and even encourage illegal immigration.

While Mr. Jordans memo was circulated confidentially among Republicans, he posted on Twitter that he planned to grill Mr. Mayorkas on Title 42 and other immigration issues.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment about the upcoming hearing or the outlined lines of attack.

Republicans continue to use immigration as a political cudgel to scare voters at every turn, knowing they have killed serious immigration reform at every turn, said Kerri Talbot, deputy director for the Immigration Hub, a pro-immigrant organization. She ridiculed Republicans immigration agenda, charging that they want to build a $15 billion wall that a $15 handsaw can cut through.

And she defended Mr. Bidens handling of the issue, saying his administration has a plan to manage the migration spikes safely and in an orderly fashion.

Many of the attack lines previewed in the memo are not new. Rather, they appear to be pulled from the same political playbook that Republicans have used in recent election cycles. In 2018, Mr. Trump embraced a dark, anti-immigrant message to energize conservative voters ahead of the midterm elections, raising concerns about caravans of migrants he claimed were dangerous making their trek to the southern border. The method yielded mixed results: Democrats retook control of the House that year, while Republicans gained seats in the Senate.

But Republicans have continued to hammer on an issue that not only instills fear but has the added appeal for them of causing a split within the Democratic Party. According to Mr. Jordans memo, he plans to accuse the administration of prioritizing illegal aliens over American citizens by ending Title 42.

More than 100 mostly progressive Democrats have demanded that Mr. Biden lift the border restrictions, which they say his administration has used to abuse Black migrants, while centrist Democrats, including nearly a dozen in the Senate, have called for the restriction to stay in place.

White House officials have noted that ending the restriction simply means reverting to a standard immigration processing system that has been in place across multiple administrations. They have also pointed out that the result will be that more people are deported.

Still, the decision to end the pandemic-era border restrictions has sown worry among many Democratic lawmakers running for re-election in competitive districts. They have warned the administration that a surge in border crossings could feed voter anxiety in their districts about crime and chaos at the border.

Progressive Democrats counter that any effort to further extend the restrictions could depress turnout among Latino voters. In a recent poll conducted by the Immigration Hub, about 20 percent of Latino respondents said that immigration was the issue that would decide their vote.

Even in a political environment dominated by concerns about inflation and the rising price of gas, immigration remains a potent issue for voters across the board. Forty-one percent of Americans said they worried a great deal about illegal immigration, according to a recent Gallup poll.

At the same time, Mr. Biden and Democrats are dealing with pent-up anger among liberals about Mr. Trumps hard-line immigration policies, and pressure to reverse them at every opportunity.

The same Democrats who conditioned their voters that stronger border protections were immoral now have little room to maneuver as progressives lash out, said Jack Pandol, communications director for the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC that aims to build a Republican majority. Its an inescapable trap of their own creation.

White House officials said they see no option but to lift the pandemic-era restrictions, unless Congress passes legislation to extend them. But with Democrats divided over whether to do so, it is not clear whether there would be enough support for such a bill to pass, and party leaders are reluctant to bring up a measure that would infuriate their progressive supporters.

Efforts to pass a broad immigration overhaul that would legalize the status of millions of undocumented people have stalled amid Republican opposition, leaving few options for lawmakers to act.

There are a range of other ideas of reforming our immigration system, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday, conceding that the immigration system in the United States is broken.

This would all require congressional action, she said. Were happy to have that conversation with them.

But Mr. Jordans document shows why such discussions have gone nowhere in Congress. It suggests that just months after Republicans joined Democrats in pushing for legislation to help rush to the United States thousands of Afghans who were facing retribution for having helped American troops, the G.O.P. is demonizing such refugees.

Excerpt from:
G.O.P. Memo Shows Plan to Attack Democrats on Immigration - The New York Times