Who are we? What kind of a society have we built, and whom shall we welcome to it? What should we do to encourage the integration of newcomers? How should we deal with those who arrive uninvited?
This Population Bulletin examines current immigration patterns and policies in the United States, reviews the peaks and troughs of immigration flows, and provides a historical perspective on contemporary trends. In the past, as in the present, immigration laws have often produced dramatic consequences, some of which were unintended.
Resolving the fundamental economic, social, and political issues raised by immigration requires weighing the choices or trade-offs between widely shared but competing goals in American society. Resource Library. Immigration to the United States. Product: Population Bulletin, vol. Article Details Download. Population Bulletin, vol. What the U. Focus Area World and U. Resources Population: An Introduction to Demography. Changing Race and Ethnicity Questions on the U. Census Form Reflect Evolving Views.
Biden will work with Congress to first reform temporary visas to establish a wage-based allocation process and establish enforcement mechanisms to ensure they are aligned with the labor market and not used to undermine wages. Then, Biden will support expanding the number of high-skilled visas and eliminating the limits on employment-based visas by country, which create unacceptably long backlogs. Provides a path to legalization for agricultural workers who have worked for years on U.
Securing adequate, seasonal help in the agricultural sector can be inefficient and difficult to navigate, causing people to avoid or exploit the system, even when jobs remain unfilled. Biden supports compromise legislation between farmworkers and the agricultural sector that will provide legal status based on prior agricultural work history, and a faster-track to a green card and ultimately citizenship.
Biden also will ensure labor and safety rules, including overtime, humane living conditions, and protection from pesticide and heat exposure, are enforced with respect to these particularly vulnerable working people. Rejects the false choice between employment-based and family-based immigration.
Each day, in every state in the country, millions of immigrants granted a visa based on family ties make valuable contributions to our country and economy. Keeping families together and allowing eligible immigrants to join their American relatives on U.
That means approved applicants may wait decades to be reunited with their families. As president, Biden will support family-based immigration by preserving family unification as a foundation of our immigration system; by allowing any approved applicant to receive a temporary non-immigrant visa until the permanent visa is processed; and by supporting legislation that treats the spouse and children of green card holders as the immediate relatives they are, exempting them from caps, and allowing parents to bring their minor children with them at the time they immigrate.
Preserves preferences for diversity in the current system. Trump has set his sights on abolishing the Diversity Visa lottery.
This is a program that brings up to 50, immigrants from underrepresented countries to the U. Diversity preferences are essential to preserving a robust and vibrant immigration system.
As president, Biden will reaffirm our core values and preserve the critical role of diversity preferences to ensure immigrants everywhere have the chance to legally become U. Increases the number of visas offered for permanent, work-based immigration based on macroeconomic conditions.
Currently, the number of employment-based visas is capped at , each year, without the ability to be responsive to the state of the labor market or demands from domestic employers. As president, Biden will work with Congress to increase the number of visas awarded for permanent, employment-based immigration—and promote mechanisms to temporarily reduce the number of visas during times of high U.
Biden believes that foreign graduates of a U. Creates a new visa category to allow cities and counties to petition for higher levels of immigrants to support their growth. The disparity in economic growth between U. Some cities and many rural communities struggle with shrinking populations, an erosion of economic opportunity, and local businesses that face unique challenges.
Others simply struggle to attract a productive workforce and innovative entrepreneurs. Holders of these visas would be required to work and reside in the city or county that petitioned for them, and would be subject to the same certification protections as other employment-based immigrants.
Enforces the rules to protect American and foreign workers alike. Biden will work with Congress to ensure that employers are not taking advantage of immigrant workers and that U. Expands protections for undocumented immigrants who report labor violations. When undocumented immigrants are victims of serious crimes and help in the investigation of those crimes, they become eligible for U Visas.
As president, Biden will further extend these protections to victims of any workplace violations of federal, state, or local labor law by securing passage of the POWER Act. And, a Biden Administration will ensure that workers on temporary visas are protected so that they are able to exercise the labor rights to which they are entitled. Increases visas for domestic violence survivors. As president, Biden will end these delays and give victims the security and certainty they need.
And, Biden will triple the current cap of 10, on U-visas; this cap is insufficient to meet the dire needs of victims and hinders our public safety. Welcome Immigrants in our Communities Immigrants bring tremendous economic, cultural, and social value to their new communities. As president, Biden will: Marshal federal resources, through the reestablishment of the Task Force for New Americans, to support community efforts to welcome immigrants. Concrete efforts will most often happen within individual communities, but federal agencies have tremendous information and resources to support community-led efforts.
Push to repeal extreme, anti-immigrant state laws that have a chilling effect on the ability of immigrant domestic violence, sexual assault survivors, and other victims of crimes to seek safety and justice. Some state laws drive victims and witnesses into the shadows and threaten public safety.
As documented in a recent national survey , immigrant victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and trafficking are increasingly afraid to contact police, pursue civil or criminal cases, or go to court to seek safety. As president, Biden will work in partnership with cities, states, nonprofits, and law enforcement to build trust and push for states to repeal the laws that chill the reporting of domestic violence incidents and threaten public safety.
Expand long overdue rights to farmworkers and domestic workers. When Congress extended labor rights and protections to workers, farmworkers and domestic workers — who are disproportionately immigrants and people of color — were left out.
Still today, millions of these workers are not fully protected under federal labor law. As president, Biden will: Surge asylum officers to efficiently review the cases of recent border crossers and keep cases with positive credible-fear findings with the Asylum Division.
This change, recommended by the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, will eliminate duplication of resources and fact-finding while reviewing the merit of asylum cases and alleviate the burden on the overwhelmed immigration courts.
Not everyone leaving Central America is an asylum applicant, but many are, and each case should be reviewed fairly and in full accordance with the law. Migrants who qualify for an asylum claim will be admitted to the country through an orderly process and connected with resources that will help them care for themselves.
Migrants who do not qualify will have the opportunity to make their claim before an immigration judge, but if they are unable to satisfy the court, the government will help facilitate their successful reintegration into their home countries.
Restore asylum eligibility for domestic violence survivors. Under the Biden Administration, the U. Department of Justice will reinstate explicit asylum protections — rescinded by the Trump Administration —for domestic violence and sexual violence survivors whose home governments cannot or will not protect them.
Apply U. Double the number of immigration judges, court staff, and interpreters. There is a backlog of more than one million immigration cases in the administrative system resulting in applicants often waiting years before their cases are heard. This increase in vital immigration court staffing will support timely and fair adjudications for asylum and other cases.
End for-profit detention centers. No business should profit from the suffering of desperate people fleeing violence. Biden will ensure that facilities that temporarily house migrants seeking asylum are held to the highest standards of care and prioritize the safety and dignity of families above all.
Increase the number of refugees we welcome into the country. With more than 70 million displaced people in the world today, this is a moment that demands American leadership. Offering hope and safe haven to refugees is part of who we are as a country. As a senator, Joe Biden co-sponsored the legislation creating our refugee program, which Trump has steadily decimated.
His Administration has reduced the refugee resettlement ceiling to its lowest levels in decades and slammed the door on thousands of individuals suffering persecution, many of whom face threats of violence or even death in their home countries. Biden embraces the core values that have made us who we are and will prioritize restoring refugee admissions in line with our historic practice under both Democratic and Republican Administrations.
He will set the annual global refugee admissions cap to ,, and seek to raise it over time commensurate with our responsibility, our values, and the unprecedented global need. Tackle the Root Causes of Migration The worst place to deal with irregular migration is at our own border. As president, Biden will pursue a comprehensive strategy to strengthen the security and prosperity of Central America in partnership with the people of the region that : Addresses the root causes of migration by fostering greater security, economic development, and respect for the rule of law in Central America.
The Northern Triangle is riven by violence, plagued by narco-trafficking, and held in fear by criminal organizations wielding military-grade weapons, and it is particularly dangerous for women and children.
This support will also be supplemented by international donors and regional partners. Similar accounts have come from facilities holding detainees who have been transferred to ICE custody and to facilities holding unaccompanied minors under the supervision of ORR.
These entities—most of which are state-licensed and privately run, or are administered by county or municipal governments—have fallen short of federal standards; have failed to meet standards set under state policies; and have documented incidents such as violent assaults, sexual assaults, and suicides. Immigration enforcement is a federal government power, and while some states and municipalities have opted not to assist federal authorities in immigration enforcement—most commonly referred to as sanctuary states or cities—the primary power rests with the central government to set and administer immigration laws.
However, like many areas of policy, the issue has grown larger than the capacity of the federal government to address on its own. Therefore, the relevant federal agencies have used contracting to be able to administer the system. Through a system of contracting, the federal government, namely ICE or the Department of Health and Human Services HHS , pay other entities to house detainees until their cases are processed and adjudicated.
Often those contracts are signed with private companies or with state, county, or municipal governments—a practice known as intergovernmental service agreements. Under these contracts, private or local government facilities will be responsible for housing and maintaining detainees and the federal government pays a per-person per diem to cover costs and compensate those entities.
These can become quite lucrative contracts for local governments and for private companies, often creating incentive structures not simply to take such contracts but to maximize revenue. Those incentives, combined with a public and private prison system in the United States that itself faces calls for major reform, has created living conditions that do not live up to acceptable standards.
The result has been a decadeslong problem in the United States that has intensified over the past few years. Immigration agencies have not been given the resources to meet their obligations, internal oversight has been lacking, transparency has been limited, accountability has been scarce, and even proposed solutions such as contracting have not solved these problems, but simply shifted them to another setting. In the end, humans suffer from these governmental shortcomings, and the current immigration crisis has thrust that challenge into the public eye—even if complete information has not been fully available to the public.
How, then, can states play a significant role? The chart below shows the breakdown in the number of adult immigration detainees held under the authority of ICE those transferred from CBP and the type of facility in which they are held. Those facilities are thus subject not only to the regulatory authority of the state, but state law enforcement, public health standards, etc.
Other agencies also have jurisdiction to investigate and monitor these facilities. When an individual housed in one of these facilities—be that person a local-level offender or an ICE detainee—dies, is assaulted, is the victim of rape or other type of abuse, the state government has jurisdiction to investigate.
And although there have been high-profile incidents in which members of Congress or their staffers have been blocked from entering federal facilities, including most recently more than a dozen CBP and ICE facilities in Texas , those barriers do not necessarily exist for state-regulated entities.
And while it would be preferable to allow investigators, overseers, and media access to all types of facilities, states can and must take a more active role in the absence of that.
As explained in the previous section, states have a role in immigration policy through contracting. This opens the door for them to play a major role in improving immigration policy. In states where ICE detainees or unaccompanied minors detained by HHS are held in private or local facilities, state regulatory officials, social workers, lawyers, public health officials, and others can enter the facilities to enact a large-scale evaluation of the conditions in which people are held.
This will allow a better understanding of their experience during other stages of custody, documenting both the positive and negative aspects of their time since apprehension. In many cases, states are working to do this, but a broader, coordinated effort is necessary. However, simply expecting state agencies to take on the additional work is insufficient. Leadership from governors, legislatures, and agency heads is necessary to demonstrate both a public desire for straightforward evaluations of the situation and to place additional resources behind the effort.
Such action will motivate the types of investigations and oversight necessary to understand better the experience of a CBP detainee and his or her track through the immigration system, and it will also highlight the plight of others being held in the same facilities. And while federal immigration officials may not want reporters, legislators, and other outside support staff entering their facilities, those same officials cannot stop detainees from discussing the details of their experience once they have been transferred to facilities that are non-federal.
The information regarding those experiences is critical both for the treatment of detainees for physical or mental health symptoms and for oversight of the system more generally.
This will keep governors informed as to progress, avenues of inquiry, and findings in near real time. Moreover, it will help identify weaknesses or bureaucratic slack that are preventing those inquiries from being thorough or completed. The ultimate goal of a coordinator or czar will be to implement procedures to ensure that such monitoring and oversight continues into the future.
In the medium term, this individual should be responsible for requiring standardized reporting from each agency with authority over the relevant issues. A coordinator can then use that standardized reporting to compile a broader interagency report on the treatment of detainees and the conditions within detainment facilities.
However, limited transparency at the federal level has hindered and continues to hinder this effort. Despite those challenges, numerous groups and elected officials work tirelessly daily to examine the record of immigration policy in the United States and more importantly, to do their best to assist individuals who are subject to some of the worst outcomes that immigration policy failures provoke.
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