“The announcement came during a joint briefing with the mayors of Chicago and Denver. The three cities have formed a coalition to press the White House and federal government for more migrant aid as each metropolis grapples with the economic and governmental burden of housing, feeding and educating tens of thousands of migrants.
Adams administration officials said Tuesday that the city is receiving nearly 4,000 migrants each week. In total, more than 161,000 migrants have entered New York City since the crisis began in 2022, and 68,000 remain in the city’s care.
“I’m proud to be here with my fellow mayors to call on the federal government to do their part with one voice and to tell Texas Governor Abbott to stop the games and use of migrants as potential as political pawns,” Adams said during the Wednesday announcement. “We cannot allow buses with people needing our help to arrive without warning at any hour of day and night.”
“This not only prevents us from providing assistance in an orderly way, it puts those who have already suffered so much in danger,” he added.”
“President Joe Biden’s administration is currently considering new regulations that will deny middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans crucial child care services, specifically hampering their ability to welcome au pairs into their families. Biden has proposed further regulating the federal au pair program, which will disproportionately burden highly skilled working mothers, maybe even to the point of driving more of them out of the workforce.
For me, this issue is personal. Like millions of families in the summer of 2020, my family faced a childcare crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The daycare our two young boys attended, aged one and three at the time, closed its doors, and our temporary nanny found another job. Fortunately, my wife and I were both healthy and able to work from home. But caring for two young children while working proved challenging.
We tried to find a solution and re-enrolled our boys in daycare, but it closed down for days at a time due to COVID cases. As a result, my wife and I had to take turns working and taking care of the children. I’d work during the morning and early afternoon, she’d work in the late afternoon and night. It was unsustainable.
Desperate, we finally considered hiring an au pair, a step we had never seriously considered before. The idea of having a stranger live with us seemed off-putting. We were not used to having help at home. We associated such arrangements with the super-rich who could afford butlers, maids, and private jets. But the pandemic left us no choice and convinced us to take the plunge.
We are so glad we did.
We contacted an au pair agency and began interviewing au pairs within days. Due to COVID-related border closures enacted by the Trump administration, new au pairs weren’t coming to the United States, but those already here could switch families. After multiple interviews and in-person meetings, we decided we wanted to hire Neevoliah, who was originally from South Africa and had been with another family in San Francisco. She joined our family in early fall 2020.”
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“Hiring an au pair was the second-best decision we’ve made regarding our children (the best was having them). But the Biden administration’s proposed regulatory changes could end this program for us and thousands of other middle-class families.”
“Bier breaks down the pathways remaining for legal immigration. Those include: the refugee program, which gives qualified applicants a 0.1 percent chance of being accepted for resettlement; the diversity lottery, which offers a 0.2 percent chance of success; family sponsorships, which are capped for anybody other than spouses, minor children, and parents of adult U.S. citizens leading to years-long waits; employment-based self-sponsorship available only to the wealthy or those whose work is “extraordinary” or of “national importance”; and limited, red-tape-bound employer sponsorships out of reach of all but the lucky and well-educated.
The chart of the byzantine requirements for legal immigration captures the problem well, like a maze puzzle with no real means of escape.”
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“”Immigration is now prohibited in a similar way to alcohol during Prohibition,” Bier commented. “Although it had exceptions for religious, medical, or industrial purposes, alcohol prohibition outlawed all other sales. For both alcohol and immigration, the result of prohibition has been the same: widespread violations of the law, black markets, the spread of criminal organizations, arbitrary enforcement, government corruption, and massive government expenditures of taxpayer money to stop the violations.”
So, with legal pathways to entering the United States out of reach of most would-be migrants, they turn to illegal means. That necessarily includes “coyotes”—smugglers who get people through migration routes and across borders for a fee. They operate in the underworld with all that implies; they might be decent people just working a job, or they could be dangerous and abusive.
“Despite the illicit nature of their work and being cast as villains in the public eye, smugglers have complex, multifaceted relationships with their migrant clients,” Jasper Gilardi wrote in 2020 for the Migration Policy Institute. “At times, the relationship can be mutually beneficial or even lifesaving; at others, it can be predatory and dangerous. Abandonment, extortion, kidnapping, and even death are common.””
“two Swedish fans were shot dead. The alleged gunman, named as Abdesalem Lassoued, posted two videos online, in which he claimed to be a “fighter for Allah” and that he was a supporter of Islamic State.
Here the script is depressingly familiar. Reports in the English and Belgian media state the gunman was Tunisian, had been in the country since 2016, and was “known to the police”. His asylum application had been rejected in 2020, but a request to leave Belgium had not been enacted as Lassoued had moved house. A subsequent arrest for making threats on social media was working its way through the Belgian legal system.
It would be easy to blame some of these problems on Belgium itself. Districts of Brussels have long been allowed to opt out from the rule of law, and the nation’s multiple police forces are hardly a by-word for competence. But the situation is little better elsewhere. On Friday, France witnessed its second murder of a school teacher by an Islamist. Here the suspect was again ‘known to the police’ as an alleged extremist and has a brother in prison for terrorist offences.
Britain is no better. In November 2021, an asylum seeker in Liverpool died while attempting to blow up the city’s women’s hospital. Emad Al-Swealmeen had originally entered Britain on a tourist visa, claiming he wanted to see Britain’s Got Talent be recorded in Belfast. Al-Swealmeen was still in the UK six years after his asylum claim was rejected.
Huge numbers of primarily young men, have crossed Europe’s leaky borders since 2015. Research for Policy Exchange earlier this year found 83% of those crossing the channel on small boats in 2022, were male. We know next to nothing about who they are or what they believe. In many cases they move to communities where levels of integration is already poor, and extremist ideals have currency.”
“Yesterday, the Biden administration announced new actions to help get recent immigrants to work, including offering almost half a million Venezuelans a status that will let them live and work in the U.S. legally for the next 18 months. The new measures come at a critical time, as labor shortages persist and cities struggle to provide for newcomers.
Certain Venezuelan migrants are eligible for temporary protected status (TPS), a designation offered to migrants who can’t safely return to their home countries due to armed conflict, environmental disaster, or another temporary safety hazard. Venezuela was first designated for TPS in 2021 due to a severe political and economic crisis perpetuated by Nicolás Maduro’s regime. Under that designation, Venezuelans who came to the U.S. before March 2021 qualified for protection; now, the status will apply to Venezuelans who arrived before the end of July this year. There are currently 16 countries designated for TPS.”
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“The Biden administration announced a raft of other immigration and border enforcement measures.., including harsh actions like deploying military personnel to the border and expanding family deportations.”
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“The administration is also aiming for quicker review of work authorization requests filed by migrants who enter the country through mobile app appointments or through the private sponsorship program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. DHS says it’s aiming to improve the median processing time for those work authorization applications from 90 days to 30 days. U.S. immigration agencies have long struggled to efficiently process various kinds of applications, so it remains to be seen whether those improvements will happen.”
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“in the absence of broader immigration reform spearheaded by Congress, these are welcome actions. Getting immigrants to work is an obvious economic good—the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate there are 8.8 million job openings in the country—and it’ll also reduce the burden of government spending. The Biden administration has sent nearly $770 million to localities to help fund services for new arrivals. Without a clear legal pathway to employment, many migrants simply wouldn’t be able to provide for themselves and turn away from city-provided services. Encouraging migrant self-sufficiency is particularly important in New York City, which has a “right-to-shelter” law that has proven costly.”
“The United States boasts more international students, immigrant inventors, and foreign-born Nobel laureates than any other country. But thanks to our dysfunctional immigration system, the U.S. is slowly surrendering that advantage to other countries.”
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“Demand for H-1Bs far outpaces supply, and the annual cap of 85,000 visas has not changed in more than 15 years. Three-quarters of America’s H-1B workers are Indian. But thanks to caps on the number of green cards a given country’s nationals can receive each year, there is a massive backlog of workers waiting for permanent residency. It can take decades for Indians to achieve that status.”
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” It is not just foreign workers who suffer under the U.S. immigration system. American employers are increasingly unwilling to navigate such complex processes to hire foreigners, depriving them of employees who might otherwise be perfect fits. Envoy Global, an immigration services provider, reported in March that 82 percent of the employers it surveyed “had to let go of foreign employees in the past year due to difficulties securing or extending an employment-based visa in the U.S.” A similar share transferred foreign workers to an office abroad for similar reasons. And a staggering 93 percent of the businesses that Envoy surveyed said they were considering nearshoring or offshoring.”
“When Najeeb and his wife, Atefa, escaped Kabul with their two children in April 2022, they believed that they would be processed for resettlement to America quickly. After all, Najeeb had been working for the U.S. Embassy when it shuttered in August 2021. Plus, their little girl’s sensitive health situation, they reasoned, was sure to put them on a fast track. They were manifested for a U.S.-run evacuation flight to Qatar in April, 2022, which seemed a positive sign for their hopes of resettling in America. In Doha, an expedited processing site for Afghan refugees, their case would surely move forward quickly.
But spring turned into a summer of anxious waiting and watching, and summer to winter. Now, as the family faces another winter in limbo in their cramped, shipping container-like room at the Camp As Sayliyah army base, the door to America appears to close on them. (The State Department did not respond to specific questions about the Nasiri case, citing confidentiality of visa records.)”
“Many critics of illegal immigration argue that foreigners should get in line if they want to move to the United States. It shouldn’t be so hard or time-consuming, they argue, for a law-abiding foreigner simply to wait his turn to get a green card.
The reality of the U.S. immigration system is much more complicated and costly than that. To that effect, the Cato Institute, a free market think tank, has released The Green Card Game. Players must navigate the game’s twists and turns in the hopes of securing a green card, which will allow them to live and work in the U.S. legally and eventually become a citizen.”
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“Round after round, different background after different background, I was unable to get into the country legally. I never even came close to the citizenship test. At one point, as a highly educated Afghan doctor fleeing religious persecution, I had no choice but to spend thousands on a journey from South America to the U.S.-Mexico border. My arrival date ticked up to 2045—only for a judge to reject my asylum case. (Unfortunately, that exact journey is a reality for many.)”
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“”A lot of people might play and conclude that the game is biased,” says Bier. “But the reality is that the game is easier than real life. In real life, you can’t set your profile, pick your country of birth, and play as many times as it takes.””