Social Issues

Immigration and Migration

United States
Seeking Protection: How the U.S. Asylum Process Works

Backgrounder by Diana Roy

Record numbers of migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border are challenging the Joe Biden administration’s attempts to restore asylum protections. Here’s how the asylum process works.
Jun 4, 2024
Record numbers of migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border are challenging the Joe Biden administration’s attempts to restore asylum protections. Here’s how the asylum process works.
Jun 4, 2024
Crossing the Darién Gap
Hundreds of thousands of migrants risk their lives each year to cross the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama. Images from along the journey show the dangers they face.

by Diana Roy and Sabine Baumgartner Jul 22, 2024

Tough New Immigration Rules Risk Empowering the Cartels
Tight restrictions on asylum and parole will drive migration further underground, where criminal groups profit.

Blog Post by Will Freeman Jan 16, 2024

Acts of Privation
Feeling stuck and unheeded, young Nigerians are increasingly resorting to all manner of desperate measures.

Blog Post by Ebenezer Obadare Jan 18, 2024

  • Europe and Eurasia
    The EU’s Migration Crisis: When Solidarity and Sovereignty Collide
    The wave of migrants surging into the European Union (EU) poses a historic challenge for European integration. Today in Strasbourg, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg proposed that all twenty-eight EU member states accept binding quotas for accepting refugees and develop a common European list of safe countries of origin, declaring, “We need more Europe in our asylum policy. We need more Union in our refugee policy.” If implemented, the plan would bring welcome coherence to what has been a flailing EU response. Unfortunately, European countries are deeply divided on the proposal’s merits. The crisis has once again exposed the dilemma at the heart of the “European project”: namely, how much sovereignty should Europe’s nations be willing to surrender to preserve solidarity within the continent? How this debate plays out will help determine whether EU continues to integrate in a federalist direction or devolves into a looser confederation of states that the French leader Charles de Gaulle conceived as a “Europe des patries.” Juncker’s idea is that EU member states should reallocate a total of 160,000 refugees from Italy, Greece, and Hungary. He said, “We now need immediate action. We cannot leave Italy, Greece and Hungary to fare alone. Just as we would not leave any other EU Member State alone. For if it is Syria and Libya people are fleeing from today, it could just as easily be Ukraine tomorrow.” Juncker’s plan calls on EU member states to more equitably share the burden of asylum seekers. He couches his proposal in the language of EU idealism, as an expression of the humanitarian values that have defined postwar Europe. Today, he underscores, “It is Europe today that represents a beacon of hope, a haven of stability in the eyes of women and men in the Middle East and in Africa. That is something to be proud of and not something to fear.” Alas for Juncker, pride and fear are at war in Europe. European governments disagree on the merits of his proposal, which touches on a foundational principle of sovereignty: the authority to determine not only who enters a nation’s territory, but also who is entitled to stay. To be sure, when it comes to sovereignty, the members of the EU lost their virginity long ago. Since the Treaty of Rome (1957) establishing the original European Economic Community, members of the expanding bloc have agreed to “pool” sovereignty in ways unimaginable for most Americans. The EU’s supranational features include a powerful European Commission able to set regulatory standards in innumerable areas, a European Parliament composed of legislators elected from member states, and a European Court of Justice empowered to override domestic legislation at odds with EU law. Most recently, the Treaty of Lisbon (2009) created a new president of the European Council, a High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and an External Action Service—a sort of EU State Department. Finally, the 19 members of the Eurozone have adopted a common currency, a European Central Bank, and (in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis) a banking union. Within EU itself, member states have also accepted free movement of EU citizens, including for reasons of employment. And, at least on paper, they have endorsed common principles and procedures for handling applicants for refugee status, through the 2013 Common European Asylum System. The Juncker proposal goes a step further, however, by mandating shares of refugee admissions. And in the minds of some Europeans, it is a step to far. The plan’s two most influential champions are Germany and France, whose governments believe that a mandatory, continent-wide commitment by EU members is the only way to equitably distribute the burden of asylum-seekers. German chancellor Angela Merkel, who has already committed Germany to take in 500,000 refugees annually for the foreseeable future, is understandably enthusiastic about sharing the migrant load. French President Francois Hollande, whose country already hosts large minority populations, has come around in support of the plan, and France has committed to take an additional 24,000 refugees over the next two years. Juncker’s problem is that a lot of other Europeans aren’t buying it—and believe that any national contributions to the common effort should at the discretion of member states, rather than mandates handed down from Brussels. This sentiment is strongest in Eastern Europe, which has less recent experience with accepting refugees and assimilating immigrants from outside Europe. In a joint statement, the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary declared that any proposal “leading to [the] introduction of [a] mandatory and permanent quota for solidarity measures would be unacceptable". Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has gone so far as to order the building of a razor-wire fence along his country’s 109-mile frontier with Serbia. But opposition to Juncker’s proposal is by no means restricted to the East. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron has agreed to accept up to twenty thousand refugees by 2020, but emphasized that Britain is not obligated to participate in the Juncker proposal to distribute refugees throughout Europe. These defenses of national sovereignty can appear mean-spirited, but they may be smart politics. Across the continent, one encounters a rising tide of populist nationalism—some of it of a very ugly, extremist variety. Mainstream politicians like Cameron—himself feeling the heat on the right from the UK Independence Party (UKIP)—seek to coopt some supporters of smaller nationalist parties. In this environment, Merkel and Hollande’s support for the Juncker plan looks particularly courageous. Within Germany, attacks on migrants have more than doubled in 2015 compared to last year. In France, meanwhile, National Front Leader Marine Le Pen is making hay accusing Merkel (and by implication Hollande) of threatening French domestic employment by swamping the continent in cheap migrant labor. Le Pen’s framing of the issue is savvy. While UNHCR estimates that the majority of asylum seekers washing up on Europe’s shores are genuine refugees from conflict, some are indeed economic migrants looking for a better life. Given the continent’s continued economic malaise, Le Pen and other nationalists are banking on a nativist reaction against foreign job-seekers. Other European leaders, led by Orban, are depicting the migrant crisis as a fundamental question of Europe’s identity as a Christian (rather than Muslim) region. Both also draw on popular sentiments of alienation from Brussels and frustration with the shortcomings of the European project. Lost in all this is the fact that Europe is a graying continent that desperately needs migrants for jobs. This coming Monday, EU officials will gather to debate Juncker’s proposal in Brussels, where European solidarity will be put to the test by divergent national attitudes about how much national sovereignty to sacrifice—and how much to defend. Historically, European elites have often used crises as opportunities to propel further gains in European integration—in the manner that the French would term “fuite en avant” (or “escape forward”). Whether this is possible today, as European leaders court populist support—while the EU technocrats seem distant from the people of Europe—remains to be seen.
    Blog Post by Stewart M. Patrick September 9, 2015 The Internationalist
  • International Organizations
    World on the Move: Understanding Europe’s Migration Crisis
    Coauthored with Theresa Lou, research associate in the International Institutions and Global Governance program at the Council on Foreign Relations. The migration crisis of 2015 makes for somber reading. Seven hundred migrants drowned crossing the Mediterranean from war-torn Libya. Last week, Austrian authorities made the grisly discovery of seventy-one corpses in a truck. Most recently, the body of a three-year-old Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach, sparking international outcry. People have been on the move since the dawn of time, of course, but never in such numbers. By the end of 2014, 59.5 million individuals had been uprooted due to conflict or persecution—the highest level since World War II. Despite knowing the risks, every day thousands continue to board rickety boats, or pay smugglers for the promise of safety and better lives ahead. Ground zero for the current crisis is the European Union (EU), where approximately 1.7 million desperate people have attempted to enter between 2011 and 2014. The Syrian civil war has displaced more than four million refugees to neighboring countries such as Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, where camps burst at the seams. As chances of returning to Syria dim—and prospects in host countries remain bleak—even more refugees are now heading for Europe. However, EU leaders are flailing in response, whipsawed between the humanitarian and self-interested instincts of their electorates. Hungary’s refusal to allow migrants to board trains for other EU countries and the building of a fence along its borders with Serbia are only the latest examples. The EU’s crisis is compounded by poverty in the western Balkans, where high unemployment and entrenched political corruption have led many to conclude that life will simply not get better. More than forty percent of all asylum applications in Germany during the first six months of 2015 came from Kosovo, Serbia, and Macedonia. Why is Europe Struggling? The pressures of uncontrolled migration are hardly restricted to Europe—as the U.S. presidential campaign has underscored. But the EU’s predicament is particularly acute. The sudden influx of migrants has appeared to catch European governments by surprise, and has exposed fissures among the members of the Union. There at least four reasons why Europe is struggling. Europeans often don’t know who is crossing their borders: Are they refugees or economic migrants? Many of the people showing up are asylum seekers who claim the status of refugees—defined under a 1951 UN convention as someone who has fled his or her country because of a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” But until such claims can be definitively evaluated—which can take months—these people are stuck in limbo, suspected of being economic migrants who have chosen to move for better job prospects. Making such judgments is tough, but the decisions matter: refugees are entitled to international protection in an asylum country, whereas economic migrants can be turned away. But what about those who fall in the gray zone? Are people who flee from a country plagued by persecution, discrimination, and also a crumbling economy asylum seekers or migrants? What about those who fled their countries for refugee reasons but continue on in search of better job prospects? Answers to such questions often boil down to a judgement call with grave implications for the person in question. EU members can’t get on the same page: Complicating matters, EU member states are quarrelling amongst themselves about how to respond. In principle, the EU’s Dublin Regulation stipulates that entry-point states are responsible for housing migrants and examining their asylum applications. But this EU law has placed a heavy strain on Mediterranean nations like Italy and particularly Greece, whose protracted financial crisis has left it ill-equipped to handle a sudden influx of refugees. In what it thought was a constructive move, Germany has suspended the Dublin Regulation and will allow Syrian refugees to apply for asylum even if they first arrived in another country. Berlin has since called for the EU to redistribute asylum seekers amongst member states. The idea of a quota system gained support from European Commission President Jean Claude-Juncker and, recently, European Council President Donald Tusk. But other EU members, including the United Kingdom and Hungary, vehemently insist that immigration policies be decided by individual governments. On Thursday, Hungarian President Viktor Orban blamed Chancellor Angela Merkel for essentially “inviting” migrants to Europe, labeling the crisis a “German Problem.” Such finger-pointing bodes ill for a unified EU front. Politicians are feeling the heat from right-wing blowback: The rise of right-wing political parties in numerous EU countries (Denmark, Sweden, and France, for example) has fueled popular anti-immigrant sentiments. Violence against refugees and migrants has spiked in Germany, where asylum seekers increased by 132 percent over the same period in 2014. The pressures of populist nationalism have made it more difficult for politicians at the inter-European level to agree on a unified response. Regulatory incoherence: In 2013, the European Parliament endorsed a Common European Asylum System, which establishes procedures to ensure uniform treatment for all asylum applications. Unfortunately, EU countries have failed to implement and enforce these provisions with any consistency. Complicating matters, there is no agreed list of countries the EU considers to be in conflict, making it hard to determine whether a person is an asylum seeker or a migrant. Nor are there any collective EU centers for asylum seekers to get processed and fed. Each EU nation has its own ways of doing things, exacerbating the sense of regulatory chaos. Europe’s migrant crisis is only the latest and most acute manifestation of a broader international problem: failure to develop and implement common standards and procedures for handling migrant flows, especially in the wake of political and economic turmoil. This is partly inherent in the complexity and sensitivity of migration, compared to other global flows. Hoping to benefit from globalization, governments in recent decades have lowered barriers dramatically for most factors of production, including capital, goods, services, and ideas—and they have negotiated multiple rules to govern the world economy. But the international regulation of migration has lagged, globally and regionally, because the cross-border movement of people is inherently sensitive politically—touching on issues of sovereignty, security, employment, and (not least) national identity. The result is a regulatory vacuum. All of these dilemmas are complex, and none is easily resolved. But the EU can and must do better.  European leaders will meet on September 14 in Brussels to combat the growing migrant crisis. At a minimum, they need to reach agreement on the following points Reaffirm humanitarian values: While the European Union needs to control its borders, it must do so in a manner that respects the humanity of migrants, even those attempting to enter illegally. Some national responses—including Hungary’s use of a train station as essentially a holding pen, as well as its decision to build a border fence with Serbia—are inconsistent with European moral values. The EU cannot afford to become a fortress, even as it remains a magnet for migrants. Hammer out realistic agreement on burden-sharing: Given controversy over the proposed quota system, EU leaders need to negotiate a workable compromise that more equitably apportions responsibility for screening, processing, sustaining, and (in principle) granting asylum to refugees. Such an accord would be a powerful and needed symbol of European solidarity. Jointly designate countries of safe origin: It is imperative that the EU finalize a list of safe countries of origin, so that those who do not qualify for asylum (namely, the economic migrants), can be repatriated in an orderly and humane manner. Member countries should also commit to fully implement efficient screening processes that reduce blockages and allow asylum seekers and refugees to get accommodations they require. Finally, Europe’s current predicament carries a larger lesson. The nations of the world need a more robust multilateral mechanism to develop and promote common global standards for the processing and treatment of migrants and refugees. The building blocks of such a system already exists, including in the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). But the IOM is mainly an assistance body rather than a forum for negotiation, and UNHCR is stretched thin by multiple humanitarian crises. However, rather than seeking to create an entirely new international organization, UN member states should look to strengthen these existing ones so that they can do more to assist countries and regions coping with unexpected spikes in refugees and migrants.  Ban Ki-moon’s upcoming emergency summit on migration (planned for September 30) is a welcome step in this direction.
    Blog Post by Stewart M. Patrick September 3, 2015 The Internationalist
  • Dominican Republic
    Deportations in the Dominican Republic
    Recent immigration actions  by the Dominican Republic are not likely to result in mass deportations of Haitians, as some fear, but could exacerbate already difficult conditions in Haiti, says expert Michele Wucker.
    Interview with Michele Wucker and Sam Koebrich August 12, 2015
  • China
    Guest Post: China’s "Back to the Countryside" Policy: A Step Toward Reducing Rural-Urban Disparity
    By Lincoln Davidson Lincoln Davidson is a research associate for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Earlier this week, the Chinese government announced a set of policies aimed at encouraging migrants from rural areas to the cities to return to their hometowns and start businesses. The policy guidelines direct local governments to encourage migrant workers (as well as university graduates and discharged soldiers) to take the capital, skills, and experience they’ve acquired in urban areas back to underdeveloped rural areas and engage in entrepreneurship. These policies—think of them as the newest iteration of Deng Xiaoping’s “let some get rich first”—are a solid step towards promoting genuine market-driven development. People’s Daily reports that under the new policies local governments will employ the following five measures aimed at expanding rural entrepreneurship by returning migrants: Reduce “barriers to returning to rural areas” by providing training to returning migrants and reducing administrative fees for starting a business. Cut taxes for qualifying enterprises and individuals. Expand support for such enterprises, by providing subsidies, connecting them to local business networks, and helping them set up ecommerce platforms. Provide financial support for qualifying enterprises and individuals, by providing subsidized loans and expanding credit availability in rural areas. Increase support for entrepreneurial parks in rural areas. The policy comes at a time when the rate of migration to the cities is slowing. While migrant wages in China continue to grow, the rate of growth of the migrant workforce has declined for several years running, dropping from 5.5 percent growth in 2010 to just 1.3 percent in 2014. Government data also show that the number of rural residents employed near their hometown has grown at a faster rate than the migrant population over that time frame. Despite these trends in the labor force, these policies are long overdue. Although recent reforms have begun to liberalize China’s household registration system, known as the hukou system, movement to urban areas is still not always an option for rural residents. And in the countryside, where there’s less well-developed infrastructure, poorer access to credit, and strict rules about what land can be used for, it can be much harder to start a small business than in the city. By addressing the disparity between urban and rural residency, these policies are an important step forward in reducing the inherent inequality of being born in the Chinese countryside and a significant corrective to years of short-sighted development strategies in the Chinese countryside. Just as liberalization and the increased access to opportunities that accompanied it drove up rural incomes in the 1980s (and movement back towards state-driven development drove them down in the ‘90s), policies promoting rural entrepreneurship have the potential to significantly improve the economic situation of millions of Chinese rural residents today. At the same time, innovative agricultural ventures have an important role to play in China’s attempts to scale up its agricultural output. While this policy may not lead to more swimming pigs, it is aimed at upgrading agriculture and cultivating the services to support it. There has long been anecdotal evidence that potential income increases are not the sole—or even primary—factor motivating young Chinese to seek employment in urban areas. Among the many reasons that rural residents choose to head to the cities, a commonly seen one is a desire for self-improvement. Building on this, a 2013 study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that the desire for personal development is a significant motivator behind the migration decisions of youth from rural areas in Gansu Province. The new policies also speak to these individuals. Having gone to the cities to learn and grow, they now have a chance to return home and use their know-how to start up a business, taking on new challenges (and new opportunities for personal development) in the process. By providing training and support services, the new policies can help these entrepreneurial individuals transition from laborer to small business owner. At the same time, it could mitigate the brain drain from China’s countryside that has drawn the best and brightest to urban areas, further sapping the already lagging rural regions of economic vitality. Of course, given how “uneven” and “selective” policy implementation by local governments tends to be in rural China, it remains to be seen what impact these new policies will have. Local governments already facing fiscal crisis will not be thrilled at the prospect of providing subsidized loans and additional services, and verifying the status of returned migrants could prove to be an additional outlet for corruption. However, with its focus on small, entrepreneurial ventures by individuals, this policy has the potential to move the Chinese economy away from state investment with minimal impact on productivity toward private sector investment in productive assets. And in the long run, that could mean higher standards of living for millions of rural Chinese.
    Blog Post by Guest Blogger for Net Politics June 24, 2015 Asia Unbound
  • Trade
    Re-assessing U.S. Trade Policy on the Eve of the TPA Debate
    With the anticipated introduction in Congress this week of legislation that would give President Obama the authority to conclude massive regional trade agreements in Asia and Europe, the issue of trade and its impact on the American economy is about to take center stage in Washington.  To help shine some light on the issues at stake, we have substantially updated and revised, and are re-releasing today, the Renewing America infographic Scorecard and Progress Report on U.S. Trade and Investment Policy. This report, like others in the series on education, corporate taxes, worker retraining and other issues, is intended to assess how the United States is doing against its peer competitors in Europe and Asia in creating a policy environment that enhances the competitiveness of the U.S. economy.  The conclusions will not be entirely to the liking of either advocates or critics of the U.S. trade agenda. Compared to the sometimes outsized claims of proponents, the U.S record on trade and investment has been mixed. While U.S. exports are growing fairly strongly, the United States does not export as much as it should for an economy of its size and product mix. While the United States still attracts more foreign investment than any other country, our share has dropped sharply over the past decade, and the United States has lost more ground to China than other advanced economies. In contrast to opponents of further trade liberalization, however, the United States is likely to be among the biggest beneficiaries of additional trade opening. We are the most competitive in those sectors where the barriers to trade remain highest, such as business services, and where the potential gains from stronger rules prohibiting anti-competitive practices are the greatest. Service sectors like architecture, financial consulting, legal services and others now provide twice as many U.S. jobs as manufacturing, most of them at good wages. Removing trade barriers and strengthening rules in these sectors would almost certainly benefit the U.S. economy. The Obama administration, despite its initial reluctance on further trade opening, has tried to tackle some of these challenges head-on. The National Export Initiative, the Obama administration's first big trade initiative, rightly focused government policy on boosting the country’s lackluster export record, even though it has fallen well short of the president's stated goal of doubling U.S. exports. The creation of SelectUSA in the Commerce Department and the launch of the annual investment summits for the first time have seen the U.S government do what every other country in the world does by actively marketing the United States as a desirable investment location. The administration has undertaken similar efforts to encourage tourism to the United States, which is an often overlooked source of export earnings. And finally, the Obama administration has embraced the most ambitious U.S. trade agenda in two decades--including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with Japan and 10 other Asia-Pacific countries, and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe. While there are important substantive issues that must still be resolved in the negotiation of each of these agreements, their successful conclusion would put the United States in an enviable position in terms of international competition. Removing trade restrictions and aligning regulations where appropriate would make it easier for U.S.-based businesses to sell into the two other largest markets in the world, and thereby encourage investment in the United States. And, while the rising dollar is currently a source of concern, the United States today -- blessed by falling energy costs and technological leadership -- is a highly cost-competitive place to invest. Americans, it seems, understand the potential with trade. For 15 years, Gallup has regularly asked the public whether it sees foreign trade more as “an opportunity for economic growth through increased exports” or as “a threat to the economy from foreign imports.” This year, 58 percent of Americans said they saw more opportunity than threat, versus just 33 percent who answered the opposite. Those numbers are the strongest since the early 2000s, when Americans had enjoyed more than a decade of robust U.S. growth. The conclusions of this report will not resolve, of course, what are certain to be wrenching debates in Congress over whether to grant Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) to President Obama. But they should at least help frame the right questions--namely, where does the United States stand today against its peer competitors in Europe and Japan, and what are best ways to build on our advantages and minimize our deficits in the future?  We hope this report will be a helpful contribution to that discussion.
    Blog Post by Edward Alden April 13, 2015 Renewing America
  • Education
    Getting Americans Back to Work: A Long Way Still to Go
    For the first time since the start of the Great Recession in 2008, the United States is finally creating a lot of new jobs--252,000 jobs in December, and nearly 3 million over the whole of 2014. Unemployment has fallen to 5.6 percent, the lowest rate since June of 2008. But the good news masks an equally disturbing trend--far more Americans are dropping out of the work force, and those who are unemployed are remaining jobless a lot longer. The average length of unemployment--currently about seven and a half months--is twice as long as it was prior to the recession. Some three million Americans have been unemployed for six months or longer, and millions more have given up looking and dropped out of the labor force entirely. The costs of long-term unemployment to the U.S. economy, and to the individuals themselves, are enormous, and the resources to help those individuals are few and fragmented. In two new reports released today, we take a deeper look at the issue, and at how the United States could better tackle the problem. In our latest Progress Report and Scorecard, “No Helping Hand: Federal Worker Retraining Policy,” my colleague Robert Maxim writes: “The United States’ federal worker-assistance system--the collection of federal programs designed to help job seekers--does not adequately address this new kind of unemployment. It is particularly unable to cope with the massive spike in long-term unemployment brought on by the Great Recession.” These federal programs, the report concludes, are highly unequal, with some unemployed Americans enjoying far greater benefits than others, and are generally insufficient for getting workers back in the labor market, particularly at jobs that pay nearly as well as their old ones. Many European countries, where long-term unemployment has long been a chronic problem, have far more developed worker assistance and retraining programs than does the United States. And over the last decade, labor force participation has been rising in these countries even as it has been falling in the United States. But the costs of these “active labor market” policies are steep. Denmark, which has perhaps the most ambitious scheme in the world, spends 2.3 percent of its GDP on worker assistance and training, while Germany, which has the world’s best-developed apprenticeship programs, spends 0.8 percent of GDP on these programs. In the United States, the comparable figure is just 0.1 percent. But there are important things the U.S. government could do at far more modest cost. In the new Renewing America Policy Innovation Memo, “A Bipartisan Work Plan: Helping America to Work,” former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and CFR adjunct senior fellow Matthew Slaughter call for for Congress to embrace a jobs policy overhaul based on three core principles: “concentrate on jobs for the long-term unemployed; supplement wages, when necessary, to encourage employers to increase hiring; and relax congressional budget rules for programs that help people become earners and increase future tax revenues.” They also recommend better assessment of the effectiveness of existing job training programs, most of which have never been subject to proper oversight and scrutiny. The report calls for far more active engagement of the private sector in training programs, because the employers themselves best know their needs and the types of training required. Where necessary, it calls for federal wage subsidies or an expansion of the earned-income credit to get more people back into jobs, concluding that the costs to taxpayers will be modest. And Zoellick and Slaughter argue that Congress should be prepared to relax its sometimes overly rigid budget rules and recognize in its budget scoring that getting people back to work would boost output and increase tax revenues. Putting more Americans back to work would seem to be fertile ground for bipartisan cooperation in the new Congress. The two parties came together last summer and agreed in large numbers on modest reforms to federal job training programs. But far more is still needed to address the serious problems of long-term unemployment.
    Blog Post by Edward Alden January 13, 2015 Renewing America
  • United States
    Obama’s Immigration Action: Three Things to Know
    President Obama’s executive action on immigration policy is ambitious yet flawed, and Congress must now decide how to proceed, explains CFR’s Edward Alden.
    Explainer Video with Edward Alden November 25, 2014
  • United States
    Assessing Obama's Executive Action on Immigration
    Podcast
    MCMAHON: Thank you, operator. And welcome, everyone, on this call. This is the Council on Foreign Relations Media call, and it will be assessing President Obama's just announced executive action on immigration. I'm Robert McMahon, Editor of CFR.org, and I'm going to be speaking with CFR Senior Fellow Ted Alden today, and Ted's one of our leading chroniclers of immigration policy, and he's got a fresh blog post up this morning on the president's announcement, which is part of our featured coverage on CFR.org today. I'm going to speak to Ted for about 15 minutes or so about the president's action announced last night, and then we're going to open up the call, and we have until 2:00, if necessary, to dig into the immigration and immigration reform matters. So, Ted, I wanted to kick it off by mentioning that with the sheer number of people affected, roughly five million undocumented immigrants, and the human impact, this is a big deal, but you downplayed the overall significance in your blog post this morning. You noted that those affected will, essentially, be "tolerated guests rather than permanent residents." So, could the president have done more to affect their status of this? ALDEN: Well, I think if you look -- and thank you very much, Bob. It's good to be on the call. I think if you look particularly at the deferral of deportation, the answer is probably no. You know, it went to the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, and there's a lengthy opinion basically laying out what justice believes is the scope of presidential authority with respect to actions such as these. But the broader point I was trying to make in my blog post is really to underscore how much genuine reform in immigration policy still depends on action by the U.S. Congress. I was part of a council task force that we did here a few years back. I was the project director for it. The effort was chaired by Jeb Bush, who's, clearly, still in the mix for the 2016 presidential elections, and Mack McLarty, who was Bill Clinton's Whitehouse Chief of Staff, and we made a series of recommendations there for a broad congressional overhaul of immigration policy. Pretty much everything we wrote in that taskforce report, sadly, remains relevant today. So the point I was trying to make in my post today is that while there's no question this is an expansive action, one that will affect in a positive way the life of many, many unauthorized immigrants, it really does not, quote, fix our broken immigration system." The problems remain pretty much as deep as they did before the president announced his action last night. MCMAHON: Also because -- let's talk a little bit about the politics that you referred to, then, Ted. So, because of this action, which, as you say, affects so many people but is still sort of limited, because of it, though, we could have a corrosive effect with the now Republican led Congress, or soon to be fully Republican led Congress. And maybe pushing further remotely, any, sort of, deep seated reforms to immigration policy? After all, previously, at least the Senate, you had what looked to be some bipartisan support for immigration reform, but not the House. Now both Houses, perhaps, it's a big of a poison well. Does this action, then, you know, sort of undermine overall goals in immigration reform or did it still need to happen in some way? ALDEN: Well, I think there's no question that immigration reform still needs to happen. There are enormous problems out there. The question of the impact is, of course, what everyone is trying to calculate. I -- I -- you know, my -- and this is all water under the bridge. My hope was that the president would have done this back in June when Speaker Boehner informed him that the House Republicans were not going to be able to act on the Senate bill or on anything like that. There would have been a, kind of, logical cause and effect there. The congressional effort has stalled and, therefore, the president is taking executive action. The timing now is, in a lot of respects, not very good timing, of course, because you got a new Congress coming in, and so this is immediately a kind of slap in the face to the new Congress. So I can see the concern there. The real question, though, is what the Republican Party is going to do with this. I mean, the main reason that comprehensive immigration reform efforts have been stalled for many years is internal division within the Republican Party. There are some members of the party that are very supportive of reform, and many who aren't, and nothing has really changed on that front. You know, if I were advising the Republicans on this, I would encourage them to try to move some of the pieces on which there's broad agreement in the party. I mean, one of the possible political impacts of this move by the president is to break up the need to do all of this comprehensively. So, you know, the Democrats have wanted to see, for good reasons, comprehensive reform because they feared, well, if we just do it piecemeal and we deal with each of the components, that some kind of broad legalization will never happen. Well, if I were in the Republican Party right now, I'd say well, look, there's a legalization piece here. We've got five million who at least have deferred action. Why not move some of the other pieces of immigration reform through the Congress and see what the president's reaction to that is. But, you know, all of us at this point, obviously, are speculating. We don't know how the Republicans are going to respond and what the impact of that will be, so I hesitate to predict whether this will poison the well or whether, you know, a good -- a good club to the head is where it might actually allow for some progress on the other pieces of reform. MCMAHON: Another aspect of the president's address that hasn't gotten as much, sort of, front burner attention was involving legal immigration, so, you know -- and there was hope of enhancing prospects for skilled immigrants, but, as you write in your blog, these proposals are rather underwhelming. Can you kind of talk about that a bit? ALDEN: Well, I think, you know, what's been done here is rather modest. And I'll talk about a few of the specifics, which I think will have a positive, day-to-day impact. But there had clearly been some hope in the business community, particularly among the high-tech companies, that there would be the prosper (ph) for some expansion of skilled legal immigration as a result of this action. There had been various press reports that there might be additional visas freed up. There are different ways the administration could have done that, by recapturing unused visas from previous years. One of the ideas that was floated was, you know, you have an annual cap of 140,000 employment-based visas, which is now used not only for the applicant but for spouse and children as well. There was some talk about only counting the primary applicant. None of that happened in this action. And I was quite struck by the fact that the Whitehouse doesn't even appear to have asked the Office of Legal Counsel for an opinion on what the president's executive authority might have been in those areas. The OLC opinion is all about the scope of presidential authority for deferred action. So I thought that was interesting. I mean, that tells you that this is a lesser priority for the Whitehouse. The particular measures that are there, I mean, some of them, I think, are quite positive. There's the potential for a path in for immigrant entrepreneurs, which there's really no, sort of, easy legal visa path. Now there's a talk about using a power called parole in place to allow for entrepreneurs to come in and try to establish companies here. It's, you know, a partial version of what the StartUp Visa Act in the Congress would have done, but potentially useful. There is talk about issuing new regulations that will make it easier for people who are here on temporary visas who have applied for green cards to change jobs. So, just in sort of simple terms, if you're here on an H-1B Visa, and you've applied for a green card, you've applied through your current employer, and, under the current rules, generally, if you move to another employer, you have to file that application all over again. So if you're facing a five, six, seven, maybe 10 year wait for your green card and you switch jobs, then suddenly you're at the back of the line again, there's talk about changing that so that you can move from one company to another, which would be very positive because a lot of H-1B visa holders get stuck in positions for a long period of time there. There are issues about changing jobs and whether the job is similar. So there are a bunch of, sort of, regulatory issues here that I think are significant, and I think the action's a positive one. These are all things that the administration could have done outside of some grand executive action like this. This is all things that could have been done on their own, but, perhaps, by bundling them together as part of this action, they'll get some political momentum that they would have lacked otherwise. So small moves that really don't solve the big problems, but positive, nonetheless. MCMAHON: So let me speak to the skilled immigrant aspect just for a moment, then, Ted, and take a step back. You've consistently written and spoken about the number of such visas for highly-skilled immigrants is too small, and pointed to studies that showed that a larger H-1B program would be good for the U.S. economy. Can you kind of flush that out a little bit? Why is this matter -- why is this particular area one where -- one - first, there should be bipartisan support and should be acted on? ALDEN: Well, I think there clearly is bipartisan support. You know, if you look at bills that have gone through the House, Representative Chaffetz several years ago, High School Immigration Bill that passed the House overwhelmingly, very strong support on the Senate side. I mean, there can be debates over whether the H-1B program is the best vehicle or not, but I don't think there's any question that it's in the interests of the United States to attract and retain as many high-skilled immigrants as we can. The real pipeline here is, is it a U.S. university system, which remains, by far, the best in the world and highly attractive to the best students from everywhere in the world. We just saw the release last week of the latest foreign student numbers. We're getting up close to 900,000 foreign students, which is a record number, a disproportionate number of those in science, technology, engineering fields of one sort or another. And the current path for those people who remain in the United States is a very difficult one. The H-1B program is quota limited and the quota gets exhausted every year. There are long waits after you get your H-1B before you finally move to a green card and, eventually, the citizenship. There are difficulties with your spouse working while you're here on an H-1B, though, some of the regs here might help with that a bit. So there have just been a lot of obstacles to allowing people that clearly bring considerable economic benefits to the country to come to the United States or to remain here if there are here as foreign students. And it's pretty from the debates over the last five or six years, there is broad bipartisan support for measures that would increase levels of skilled immigration. MCMAHON: Great. Well, I think we'll open the call at this point. And those of you on the line should get ready to ask some questions. This is a Council on Foreign Relations media call that is assessing President Obama's executive action announced last night on immigration, and we're talking with Ted Alden, CFR Senior Fellow. So, operator, could you -- could you let me know if there's any question on the line, please. Operator: Thank you, sir. At this time, we will open the floor for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press the star key, followed by the one key. That is star one on your touchtone phone now. Questions will be taken in the order in which they are received. If at any time you would like to remove yourself from the questioning queue, please press star q. And we are now holding for questions, please press star one. Our first question comes from Richard Sisk from Military.com. QUESTION: Hi, Mr. Alden. Thanks for doing this. Could you please address what was at the bottom, the absolute bottom of the Whitehouse fact sheet that was put out last night and that concerned non-citizens in the military? Currently, as it's been explained to me this morning over here at the Pentagon, if you have a green card you can enlist. But, if your relatives, your mother, your father, are undocumented, then you can't. And the president is proposing, and the Pentagon backs it up, to change that. And, also, to give assistance, once you're in the military, to helping your undocumented relatives. What do you think about that? ALDEN: You know, there are a lot of provisions in this, and this is one that I am still trying to figure out. I'm hoping that my friend Margaret Stock, who works on these issues, actually did an event for us here a couple of weeks ago, will have a definitive answer on that. So if you know Margaret, I encourage you to track her down. She was the architect of the MAVNI program that you might be familiar with, that allowed (inaudible) people who are here legally but don't have green cards, a small number of them enlisted in the military. That program is now on hold apparently over the issue of whether DACA recipients will be eligible for participation in the MAVNI. So what they've talked about in the executive action here is allowing parole in place for spouse, parents, children of U.S. citizens who are lawful permanent residents. Parole in place is a discretionary power that the Executive Branch has to allow someone to remain in the United States even if they don't have some other kind of legal permanent status. And it sounds from this like they are willing to extend that to people who wish to enlist in the military, which could broaden the pool of potential recruits. But I, honestly, at this point have not figured out all the specifics. I've actually been trying to talk to Margaret this morning to see if I can get a few more details on exactly how this is going to operate. The language, as it stands, is that, and the USCIS has been directed to draw up policy on this in conjunction with the Pentagon and others. So I don't think we actually know, yet, what the real world impact is going to be, but keep in touch. I'm still trying to clarify this and, hopefully, I'll have more soon. QUESTION: Yeah. Apparently, DHS will have a say in this and, also, you know, what I've been told (ph) is I had no idea they knew that this number was this high, but since 9/11 we've had 92,000 -- 92,000 troops (inaudible). ALDEN: Yeah. I mean, you know, if you're a -- if you are a green card holder, right, you can enlist, so that's a lot of non-citizens who potentially enlist, and once you're in the military, there are provisions for a fast track to citizenship. So I can't confirm that number for you, but it doesn't sound unlikely to me. The issue, really, has been people who are not green card holders. And you particularly have -- the reason this is an issue is -- I mean, it gets back to my broader comments about the problems in the legal immigration system. So, say, you are a teenager who comes here with your parents, and your father's on an H-1B visa. OK. So your father has temporary legal status in the United States under an H-1B visa. And maybe your dad's applied for a green card, but there's backlog and he's going to have to wait 10 years to get a green card. So while that's happening, he's working under the H-1B, you hit the age of 21. Well, under U.S. immigration law, you no longer have any status. The fact that your father has an H-1B gives you no status in the United States. So, there are a lot of these young people because of the long delays for their parents to move to green cards, who end up in situations where they're out of status in the United States. And one of the things the MAVNI program did was, you know, it provides some sort of avenue for those people to enlist in the military and find themselves on a fast track to a green card and citizenship. We'll have to see whether the policy that they're talking about here is potentially going to broaden that pipeline into the military for people in that kind of situation. QUESTION: All right. Thank you. ALDEN: Thanks. MCMAHON: Thanks for that question. Operator, do we have any other questions at the moment? OPERATOR: At this time, we have no questions. Again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one at this time. MCMAHON: You know, while we're waiting, Ted, I was going to just touch on something that you referenced earlier, which was as the immigration reform effort was, let's say, unraveling last year around June, you were saying that would have been a good time to come up with what was announced last night. Do you have any sense of why this moment, a few weeks after the mid-terms, the president did decide to make this call or anything else about the timing of it? ALDEN: I mean, you know, I don't know anything probably on this than anybody else does, and, you know, I assume the reason they didn't do it in June is that they weren't ready to do it yet, even though I think the timing would have been very good because there would have been a direct cause and effect. We all know that the president had said he would do it before the end of the summer, and then delayed because of concerns about the impact on the mid-term elections, particularly on Democrats who were in Republican leading states this year that this would -- this would damage their electoral chances. Clearly, their electoral chances were damaged anyway. I think the reason now is he, you know, delayed for some period of time, had made the promise that he was going to move forward, and just felt like he needed to move and get it out of the way. There are certainly people who argue it would have been better to go to the Congress and say, look, you know, I'll give you one last chance, set a deadline of some kind, you know, maybe next June, and say, you know, if I don't see congressional action by this time, then I'm going to move ahead on my own, but that's, obviously, all water under the bridge at this point, and we'll have to see what the political impact of the action is. MCMAHON: I think it'd also be helpful for those on call to just sort of discuss a little bit the -- what is the modern -- or what is the current profile of an illegal immigrant in the country? I think this announcement has brought to the floor the fact that there are so many people who've been in the country for so long, but there were also -- there was also this very active deportation policy going. I think President Obama has helped -- or has been responsible for deporting close to two million people at this point. But they were the newer arrivals. They are people with criminal records and so forth. Could you talk a little bit, Ted, about the profile of many of the illegal immigrants in the country now? There's the five million, obviously, but there's an overall estimate of 11 million. These are people coming in, who are working on jobs, and we all have read about the types of jobs we're talking about. There are unskilled positions. There are landscaping positions. There are positions in all sorts of blue collar type jobs. Can you talk a little bit about the profile of a legal immigrant? ALDEN: I mean, I think it's -- you know, it's hard to generalize, and there's a lot of really good research out there on this. Jeff Passel's work at the Pew Hispanic Center, I think, has offered us probably the most complete portrait of the undocumented population in the United States. I mean, I think that the biggest thing to note is, as you say, a lot of these people have been here for a long time now. There was a very large wave of unauthorized migration in the United States in the 1990s and through the first five or six years of the 2000s. Overwhelmingly, from Mexico and Central America, but also from other places, you know, really all over the world. What we've seen since about 2007as a result, both of the economic slowdown and a vastly increased enforcement efforts, particularly at the border, is that the unauthorized migrant population has plateaued, so we really have seen no increase in the size of that population in the past six or seven years now. (CROSSTALK) MCMAHON: These are Mexicans and Central Americans, for the most part? ALDEN: Yeah. I mean, not exclusively, but those are the two largest categories. I mean, what we're seeing more recently is fewer Mexicans and more coming up from Central America, particularly from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala. A fair number of those fleeing violence of one form or another, as opposed to just being purely economic migrants coming into the United States seeking better work opportunities. So the sort of typical border crossers profile has been changing in recent years. There are many fewer of them. More of them are fleeing violence rather than looking specifically for economic opportunity. And a growing percentage of them are people who have been removed in the past and are trying to come back to reunite themselves with their families here. So, you know, if you go back to the 1990s, the typical border crosser was a young Mexican coming to the United States looking for work opportunities, men primarily. That's less so today. So what that -- I mean, what that means, I think, for this action is you do have a lot of people who qualify under the criteria that you would have had to have been here for at least five years in order to be eligible for the deferred deportation. The overwhelming majority of the unauthorized population here in the United States has been here for at least that amount of time. MCMAHON: Thanks, Ted. Operator, I wanted to queue again and see if there's any questions on the line. OPERATOR: Yes, sir. Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one. We do have a question from Jacqueline Albert Simon (ph) from Politique International. QUESTION: Yes, hello. Thank you, both, so much, for both the questions and the answers, which have been very helpful. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about process. We are talking about five million people, and we're talking about slow, stubborn bureaucracy. During that period that those five million people hope to apply, go through the process and so forth, what's the prognosis for how long that could take, how many years? And how many more people will become eligible as the five year limit exceeds the number of people who have been here now less than five, will they then can say two years we are eligible because the bureaucracy is so slow? ALDEN: Let me -- let me try to respond to that, and, you know, again, on a lot of these things the details are developing. If you look on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service website, there's an effort to try to address a lot of these questions. This is absolutely a legitimate concern, because you have in the immigration processing bureaucracy, you have, in a lot of cases, rather long delays. Though, it's important to distinguish between delays that are a result of quotas. You know, for instance, the very long waits for a green card are not a result of slow processing by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. They are a result of the fact that we have a quota that says you can only hand out so many green cards each year. And, in fact, there are sub quotas that say no more than seven percent of the green cards can go to citizens of any single country. So if you're from China or India or one of the large countries, you face much longer waits. So that' a primary reason for the delay. The issue of bureaucratic slowness is quite secondary in that context. What the government is saying is that they are prepared for this, that they have surged resources in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to try to ensure that they can process these applications without, at the same time, slowing down all of the other immigration-related applications that are coming in all the time. We'll have to see, of course, how that plays out. I mean, one thing to keep in mind is it's not as if five million people are going to come forward tomorrow. And under the previous action, the deferred action for childhood arrivals, so the so-called dream -- dream act kids who were beneficiaries of a similar action that the president authorized in 2012, it appears that only about half of that eligible population -- the estimates were about one and a half million -- only about half that many have come forward to seek the deferment. And I think it's likely that very many fewer than five million will come forward under this action, so the number will not be nearly as large as that. DACA worked pretty efficiently. I mean, people got through the system pretty quickly. There did not appear to have been delays in other aspects of immigration processing. So I think it was a kind of dry run for this broader action. It was pretty successful. So I am mildly optimistic, and I think that's all you could be, mildly optimistic, that the bureaucracy will be able to handle this. QUESTION: Thank you for that. I hope to retain your optimism. MCMAHON: Thank you for that question. You know, Ted, as you were speaking, I was also thinking about the previous presidents who have taken these steps, and I think none of them have been even close to this in terms of the scale. Although, previous presidents for both parties have deferred deportations, but there have been sweeping steps taken on immigration reform by Republicans, certainly. And many people point to President Reagan and the Reagan Administration's moves in Simpson-Mazzoli. What have we learned about these efforts, the bigger efforts to try to take on illegal immigration and the impact it's had on -- you know, on the movement of people into the country and the country's response. ALDEN: Well, you know, I mean, one of the -- you know, obviously, one of the arguments against doing something like this action is, you know, the magnet effect or the amnesty effect. In fact, this is an argument you hear quite often on the Republican side, that this will simply encourage more people to come. There's not a lot of evidence of that effect, you know, from the history. If you look at what happened after 1986, I think it was driven entirely by a combination of economics. There was huge demand in the United States for low skilled labor in the 1990s. Unemployment rates got very low. Lax enforcement, which was clearly a problem in the 1990s, and the big demographic bulge in Mexico and Central America. Really, none of those conditions exist now. The other thing I think that's a little different from this in previous actions is I -- and, again, I say this with a little trepidation because you never know for sure, but I think we're likely to see a lot less fraud this time around. I mean, the conditions are quite specific. So you have to have been here since January 1, 2010, and you have to have, you know, American citizen spouses or children. Under the 1986 act, for instance, there was a broad legalization of agricultural workers, and there were a lot of people who were able to come up with documents that looked authentic enough that seemed to show that they had been working in U.S. farms, when, in fact, they hadn't been. There's a lot of evidence that there was pretty widespread fraud in that program. I don't think you're likely to see that under this action. So my reading would be that the magnet effect of this is likely to be very limited. There won't be people who are trying to come to the United States illegally thinking that somehow they can piggyback off of this action and get some kind of toehold in the United States. So I'm not anticipating that there will be much of a response in that regard. MCMAHON: So as President Obama said, one of the big impacts, bringing people out of the shadows, and, then, of course, the human -- sort of the very human condition aspect of families being allowed to stay together or, in some cases, be reunited. ALDEN: Yeah, which is -- which is huge. I mean, you know, you have people who will not live daily in fear of arrest and deportation. They will -- I mean, they'll have to apply to the government in advance for what's called advanced parole, but they'll be able to travel back to their countries to see family, which they haven't been able to do for years. Work permits means, you know, they're not in danger of being fired if they're unauthorized status is revealed. So a lot of, obviously, very positive and important things for the individuals affected. But one of the points I was -- I was trying to make in my blog post is this is far, far short of what the congressional legislation would have offered. There's a lot less certainty, obviously status that could be taken away by a future president. So it's not a situation of saying well, job done. There's clearly a lot of work still to be done on the whole range of immigration issues. MCMAHON: Thanks. I want to go back to the operator and see if we have a question on the line. Operator, do we have any questions, please. OPERATOR: Yes. Our next question comes from Priscilla Bakes (ph) from Mitsui (ph). QUESTION: Hi. Thanks. I was wondering if you could talk about the broader political implications of the executive order. You mentioned that this could have a corrosive effect with -- between Obama and the Republican led Congress next year. And was wondering if you have further thoughts on, especially with this spending bill and other legislation, that might get tangled up in the immigration debate. I know it's not your - you focus on the immigration, but wondering if you have any thoughts on that, on the bigger political implication. ALDEN: Well, I mean, I've actually worked a lot on, you know, a couple of the other issues that people are saying might be affected. One, is trade promotion authority is an area that's been talked about as an area of possible cooperation between the Congress and the Whitehouse, and tax reform. And my reading would be that neither of these issues ought to be affected in any significant way. I mean, there's generally, in the Republican Party, a fair bit of support for trade promotion authority. It's not like this is a particular gift to the president. This is something that a lot of Republicans wants. They believe in free trade. They'd like to see the Trans Pacific Partnership and other trade agreements concluded successfully. I can't see any particular reason that this action ought to impede cooperation on that front. Tax reform is, obviously, very, very hard. You know, there were efforts made in the last Congress. Dave Camp, Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, put out a very thoughtful proposal that never found its way into legislation. It's a hard issue. But, again, I don't see any particular reason that this action ought to impede cooperation on that front. I mean, the question, and it's really, you know, a broader question for congressional experts, which I'm not, is whether you'll see, you know, just some sort of general, across the board obstructionism in Congress. So the Republicans being so angry about this, that they will go to the brink of government shutdown, will try to defund portions of the government. I have to think the answer will be no, because it's not likely to be a terribly successful strategy. I mean, you know, I'm being, you know, slightly apocryphal here, but, you know, one of the ways the Republicans could go after what the president has done here is to vastly increase the resources for immigration enforcement. The whole legal rationale for deferring deportation for this category of people is limited resources. The administration has to exercise prosecutorial discretion because there are 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country, and there's only resources available to remove about 400,000 a year. Well, if I were a Republican leader, I wanted to be clever on this, well, why don't you double the resources and say you can remove 800,000 a year. And there goes much of the rationale for prosecutorial discretion of the sort that the administration has exercised here. So, we'll have to see, but I think it would not be a smart strategy for the Republicans to respond to this action with general obstructionism, as opposed to targeted measures of one sort or another. MCMAHON: Thanks for that question. Ted, I wanted to ask one quick follow-up, which is, obviously, this is a matter that requires federal action, but I think one under -- potentially one under-reported aspect is the role that U.S. states have started to take. You know, you have -- I think there's something like 10 U.S. states that now offer driver's license to illegal immigrants, for example, in terms of ways of bringing them out of the shadows. Have you seen anything else in your study of this issue that shows a further movement by states that, you know, could be -- have some sort of palliative effect even while the federal government is mired in its own problems? ALDEN: Well, you know, the states have been going in all sorts of different directions on this. And there's been a lot of action at the state level, and I can't, you know, give a comprehensive overview of it, but a number of states, Arizona, some of the southern states and others, have obviously taken actions to try to crack down on illegal immigration in various ways. Others, like Utah, proposed doing their own guest worker program, where they would be able to invite foreign workers in and the federal government did not offer the waiver that would have been necessary to do that. But I think this will throw up a lot of questions for the states on how they want to respond. You mentioned the driver's license question, so, you know, individuals who are eligible for this deferment will be able to get, you know, work authorization papers. They'll be able to get social security numbers. It will be up to the states to decide whether, as a result of that status, they should also be eligible for driver's licenses, and in a lot of states it clearly will be. But there are other states that will push back against that. So, clearly, there are going to be a lot of issues that are thrown up for each of the states in deciding how to respond to what the president has done here. MCMAHON: Great. Thanks, Ted. Operator, I want to see if you had any other questions on the call right now? OPERATOR: At this time we have no further questions. But, again, that is star one if you would like to ask a question. We do have another question from Michael George, (inaudible) Fortress Investment. MCMAHON: Please go ahead. OPERATOR: Mr. George, your line is open. Please make sure your phone is not on mute. QUESTION: Yes. If I were a Republican, surely a good way for me to ensure the failure of this program would be to simply announce that in two years' time, if we got control of the House and the presidential office, to say that I would use the program as a nice, neat (ph) list for deportation. ALDEN: Well, I mean, this raises a very interesting question. And, you know, I had mentioned that I don't think we're likely to see five million people come forward, and that will -- you know, that will be the calculation that individuals will have to make, and it's a difficult personal calculation, right, because, obviously, you do come forward, you have identified yourself to the government in a way perhaps you weren't identified before. And if people are scared about that possibility, they're going to be reluctant to come forward. And so, I think, one of the issues that we will hear a lot of discussion about over the next while is what are the enrollment levels? Are people, in fact, scared to come forward or not? I think it's unlikely that a future president, even a Republican president, would take an action as drastic as that. I mean, even prior to the Obama Administration, there were very -- the deportation numbers really ramped up over the 2000s. They were quite early in the first part of the Bush Administration, but by the end of the Bush Administration, we had got close to the 400,000 number that has become the figure ever since. But, even then, the priority was clearly being placed on people with some kind of criminal record or other reason beyond just their illegal presence to make them a priority for deportation. So I would be surprised to see a future Republican president take that sort of action, but this, obviously puts, you know, the individuals deciding whether to come forward, in a difficult situation, because while there's potential benefit here, potentially you do make yourself more vulnerable as well. QUESTION: But would it surprise you if, say, Senator Cruz got up and said something like that? ALDEN: Wouldn't surprise me at all. MCMAHON: Thanks for that question. Operator, do we have any other questions on the line, please. OPERATOR: At this time we have no further questions. MCMAHON: All right. Well, I think we're going to wrap the call at this point. This has been a CFR media call on the record on assessing President Obama's executive action on immigration. And we've been fortunate to have Senior Fellow Ted Alden navigating the issues for us and, really, exploring them in many different directions. I want to thank those on the call for joining in, and also to Ted Alden, obviously, for framing the issues for us. This concludes this CRF media call on the executive action on immigration. OPERATOR: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect. END
    Event with Edward Alden November 21, 2014
  • Global
    The World Next Week: November 20, 2014
    Podcast
    U.S. lawmakers react to President Obama’s immigration speech; world powers and Iran reach a deadline on nuclear talks; and the London Conference on Afghanistan takes place.
    Podcast with James M. Lindsay and Robert McMahon November 20, 2014 The World Next Week
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    African Immigrants to the United States
    I have written before about New York’s City’s African-born population. Here, I want to call attention to the current wave of African immigration to the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, on October 23, 2014, the population of the United States was 319,131,500, the third largest in the world, after China and India. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey conducted 2008-2012, there were 39.8 million foreign-born in the United States. Of them, 1.6 million were from Africa, that is about 4 percent of the foreign-born population. That is a big increase from 1970, when there were only about eighty thousand foreign born from Africa, representing less than 1 percent of the foreign born population in the United States. Our African immigrant communities are mostly new. About three quarters of our Africa-born population came to the U.S. after 1990. Census Bureau reports suggest specific milestones in African immigration. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1965 replaced the national origin quota system with a new law that prioritized skilled labor, family unification, and humanitarian concerns. In 2010, about a quarter of African immigrants came to the United States as refugees or received asylum. More generally, as the American economy pulled ahead of the old colonial powers and immigration to Western Europe became more difficult, the United States became increasingly attractive as a destination for African immigrants in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Many Africans also came to the United States in search of educational opportunities. The four countries that provide the largest number of immigrants are Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Egypt. (Unlike the U.S. Department of State, the Census Bureau includes the North African Mediterranean littoral states as part of Africa rather than the Middle East). The four states that have received the largest number of immigrants are New York, California, Texas, and Maryland. Together, they include over one-third of the foreign born from Africa. The metropolitan areas with the largest African-born population are New York City, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. African immigrants are well educated. Forty-one percent of our African foreign-born have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 28 percent of the foreign born population as a whole. As of 2011, according to the Census Bureau, about 30 percent of the entire American population that is twenty-five years or older has a bachelor’s degree or equivalent. The American Community Survey shows that the foreign-born population of African origin is still small relative to other groups, despite its rapid growth. Unlike Europe, China, or Japan, the American population is not graying, largely because of immigration. The relative youthfulness of the American population is a source of vitality, and Africans are making their contribution.
    Blog Post by John Campbell October 23, 2014 Africa in Transition
  • Sub-Saharan Africa
    Where African Immigrants live in New York City
    As I have written earlier, there is significant immigration from Africa to the United States underway. The New York Times estimates that those born in Africa are about 4 percent of New York City’s immigrant population. Africans, like any other group, live all over the city. However, Andy Kiersz has published two fascinating maps on Business Insider that shows where in New York people speak specific foreign (not English) languages at home. Not surprisingly, Spanish is dominant in most neighborhoods in all five boroughs. There are Russian enclaves on Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens, large Chinese speaking areas in Brooklyn and Queens, French Creole in Brooklyn and a single French enclave on the east side of Manhattan. Otherwise, it is Spanish that is the most commonly spoken foreign language in New York City households. Kiersz then mapped those neighborhoods to show the most common non-English, non-Spanish languages, that is, the third most widely spoken language at home. That is where the Africans show up. On his map, Kiersz combines Kru (spoken in Liberia and the Ivory Coast) with Ibo (southeast Nigeria) and Yoruba (southwest Nigeria) on his map. Those speakers are to be found in north, central, and south Bronx (the neighborhoods include Woodlawn, Eastchester, Mott Haven, and Hunts Point). Amharic, spoken in Ethiopia, is the third largest language in the Rockaways section of Brooklyn. Mande languages are the third most widely spoken in east Bronx (including Throgs Neck).The Mande family of languages are spoken in Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Ivory Coast. From Kiersz’s maps, New Yorkers born in Africa are mostly from West Africa, especially Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and Liberia. Amharic speakers are the only large group of African language speakers from outside West Africa. African-born New Yorkers mostly live in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. Few are to be found in Manhattan or Staten Island. New York City, with a population of 8,405,837 (2013 U.S. Census) is by far the largest city in the United States. It is growing at about 2 percent a year, with a surplus of births over deaths and of immigrants into the city. However, New York City is small in comparison with Lagos (estimated population of twenty-two million) or other cities in China and the developing world.
    Blog Post by John Campbell September 25, 2014 Africa in Transition
  • Sub-Saharan Africa
    Africans Coming to New York
    Henry Louis Gates estimates that altogether about four hundred and fifty thousand Africans were brought to what is now the United States as part of the Atlantic slave trade, legal and illegal (legal importation of slaves from Africa ended in 1808, but illegal trafficking to the United States continued until 1865 and the defeat of the Confederacy). Thereafter, there was little African immigration to the United States, in part because of persistent American racism. Those blacks that came to New York in the twentieth century were mostly of Caribbean origin. They played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance and black New York politics. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Shirley Chisholm were both of Caribbean origin. The New York Times is calling attention to a new immigration stream from Africa to New York City. It estimates that between 2000 and 2010 the number of legal black African immigrants arriving in the United States doubled to about one million. The largest numbers have come to New York, but others have gone to California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Texas, and Virginia. The Times citing the New York City Department of City Planning estimates that in the past decade the African-born population of New York has increased by 39 percent and that about one third of black New Yorkers were born abroad, mostly in the Caribbean. Africans are about 4 percent of the city’s foreign born population. Compared to other immigrant groups in the past, Africans appear to be better educated. The U.S. Bureau of the Census, found that 30 percent of African-born blacks in New York City had a college degree, compared to 18 percent of Caribbean born blacks and 19 percent of the non-black foreign-born population. The establishment of an African immigrant community seems likely to change New York’s black political scene. The Times quotes Africans as saying that they self-identify as “African” rather than “African American.” The history of American discrimination against blacks has less relevance to them. The Times quotes one New Yorker of African origins as saying, “Selma doesn’t exactly cut for them.” African immigrants, with a strong family structure, a focus on education, and a willingness to work two jobs are doing well in the United States.
    Blog Post by John Campbell September 10, 2014 Africa in Transition
  • Immigration and Migration
    Renewing America Progress Report: Federal Debt and Deficits
    It’s not often that one hears the phrase “European steeliness.” But while the United States continues to punt its serious tax and spending problems ever farther down the field, Europe’s big economies have actually done something about fiscal challenges that were even bigger than those facing the United States. That is the conclusion of the new Renewing America Progress Report and Scorecard, “Balanced Owed: Federal Debt and Deficits,” by my colleague Rebecca Strauss, who also authored a companion piece that appeared today in Quartz. America’s politicians claim to be deeply worried about the growing federal debt. Fights over federal spending have roiled Congress, and in part led to last year’s government shutdown. But our lawmakers have done little to actually bring America’s federal balance sheet in line. In the short term, a somewhat stronger economy, the slowing growth of health care costs and the deep cuts to federal discretionary spending as a result of sequestration have all helped to reduce the huge deficits run during the Great Recession. But in the longer term, as America’s population ages and spending on Social Security and health care rise, the picture remains as bleak as ever. If current trends continue, the costs are clearly unsustainable. By 2040, U.S. government debt will total, by the most conservative estimates, more than 110 percent of GDP (compared with just 34 percent in the year 2000); nearly four out of every five federal dollars will be spent on entitlement programs and interest payments. Europe faces the same budgetary problems, and without some of the U.S. advantages. The American population is younger, our old people are wealthier and rely less on public spending during their retirement. U.S. taxes are also much lower. Yet despite these advantages, the failure of the U.S. government to respond has actually left the United States in a worse position than the major countries of Europe. France, Germany and Italy have each taken politically difficult steps to reduce spending on the elderly, tying future benefit increases either to inflation, tax revenues or life expectancy. That means that, compared with the previous spending trajectory, public pensions costs by 2040 will fall 30 percent in France, 40 percent in Germany, and almost 50 percent in Italy. In contrast the United States has done……. well, almost nothing. Washington has cut about 10 percent from the small portion of “discretionary” federal spending such as defense, education, infrastructure etc., leaving the country less able to defend itself in an increasingly unstable world, less educated at a time when education is the key to advancement, and left to watch its roads and bridges crumble and its water pipes explode. But it has done little either to raise revenue or to reduce the costs of the big entitlement programs that drive the federal deficit. And the longer we wait, the higher proportion of federal spending will go simply to paying off past debts. The American failure is, in good measure, due to a notable lack of “steeliness” on the part of the political class in Washington. Bringing federal debt under control requires unpopular decisions. There is a limited set of choices: raise taxes, cut entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, or further slash federal spending on discretionary programs. Realistically some of all three is probably necessary. But Americans want neither spending cuts nor tax increases, and both Democrats and Republicans have pandered to one side of that preference, making any “grand bargains” – or even little bargains – impossible. Will it embarrass our politicians to learn that the supposedly weak-willed European leaders have shown far more resolve? Probably not. But it certainly should.  
    Blog Post by Edward Alden September 8, 2014 Renewing America
  • Immigration and Migration
    Dos Naciones Indivisibles on Es la Hora de Opinar
    Two weeks ago, I was down in Mexico for the launch of the Spanish-language version of my book, Dos Naciones Indivisibles: México, Estados Unidos, y el Camino por Venir. During my time there, I had the pleasure of talking with Leo Zuckermann and Javier Tello on FOROtv’s Es la Hora de Opinar. We had a lively conversation on Mexico and US-Mexico relations. You can watch it here.  
    Blog Post by Shannon K. O'Neil July 30, 2014 Latin America’s Moment
  • Global
    The World Next Week: July 24, 2014
    Podcast
    The U.S. Congress prepares to act on the child migration crisis; the investigation of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 continues; and the UN Security Council discusses Syria.
    Podcast with James M. Lindsay and Robert McMahon July 24, 2014 The World Next Week