An Analysis of Immigration Policy in the Second Year of the Obama Administration
Washington D.C. - This week, the Immigration Policy Center released its Second Annual DHS Progress Report: An Analysis of Immigration Policy in the Second Year of the Obama Administration. After two years in office, the Obama Administration faces numerous immigration challenges—many of its own making. With comprehensive immigration reform held hostage by Congress, the Administration faces a dilemma: how can it realize its vision of a humane and just immigration system—for which President Obama has so eloquently called—when the immigration system is no longer fully functioning?
The Immigration Policy Center’s first DHS Progress Report tracked the first year under the Obama Administration, finding that there was great enthusiasm within the DHS to shift away from deportation-only priorities and more fully engage the public. But a disturbing tendency has taken hold that relies on enforcement-driven strategies as a way to prove that the Administration is sufficiently enforcement-minded and can therefore justify its support for comprehensive immigration reform.
Today’s report finds that this tendency has turned into a dogged insistence that the Administration’s hands are tied without Congressional action. This conclusion is unwarranted, given the wide range of executive branch authority available to DHS and the President. It is also a shortsighted perspective in an era when Congress seems ill-equipped to govern the nation.
The report details DHS’s progress in three areas: prioritization, transparency, and coordination. DHS gets mixed reviews, largely because there are institutional flaws in how immigration policy is made and implemented. First, by assuming that legislative reform would and could solve all the department’s woes, there has been insufficient attention paid to reforming DHS from within. Because of this mindset, the three immigration agencies—ICE, CBP, and USCIS—continue to operate on different planes, with insufficient coordination and increasingly differing approaches to the same issues or cases.
The report recommends a renewed commitment to prosecutorial discretion and other executive branch authority; further expansion of efforts to engage and involve the public in immigration policy making; continued support for programs such as citizenship and integration training; and a rejection of the mindset that deportation is the natural consequence of enforcing the law.
To view the report in its entirety, see:
Second Annual DHS Progress Report: An Analysis of Immigration Policy in the Second Year of the Obama Administration (IPC Special Report, April 12, 2011)
To hear a recording of a tele-briefing on the report click here or visit:
http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/special-reports/second-annual-dhs-progress-report
"The dirt and filth that does not kill you, makes you stronger"
ReplyDelete"Todd Landfried, a spokesperson for Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform, a group of more than 250 businesses in the state, says companies are realizing that SB 1070 drove away consumers and taxpayers, made it harder to find labor, and gave Arizona a bad reputation as a place to do business".
New America Media,
News Report
One Year After SB 1070, Arizona's Immigrant Networks Are Stronger
April 22, 2011
http://newamericamedia.org/2011/04/one-year-after-sb-1070-arizonas-immigrant-networks-are-stronger.php
Some excerpts ;
"There's a general concensus that [passing anti-immigrant legislation] has been a bad strategy for Arizona," Landfried says.
A study released this past March by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank in Washington, D.C., contrasts the economic effects of massive deportation with the effects of legalization of Arizona’s estimated half a million undocumented immigrants.
An enforcement-only approach could lead to a loss of 17.2 percent of total employment in the state and shrink the state's economy by $48.8 billion, according to the report. Legalizing undocumented immigrants in the state, meanwhile, could increase employment by close to 8 percent and increase state tax revenues by $1.68 billion.
As of last November, a boycott against the state had cost convention centers $141 million in cancellations, according to another CAP study.
Alfredo Gutierrez, a former Democratic state senator and editor of the bilingual online newspaper La Frontera Times in Phoenix, says that businesses turned against SB 1070 in the wake of the boycott and the efforts by pro-immigrant groups to exert political pressure, through civl disobedience demonstrations and behind the scenes.
The pro-immigrant movement in Arizona "is maturing politically—it was being pushed to the brink,” Gutierrez says.
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