Category: News

President Trump made his first ever Oval Office speech to argue for 1000 miles of physical wall on the southern border.

A good fact check analysis by PBS of the speech can be found here.

More to the point, the speech downplayed the very real human rights crisis precipitated by the administration’s own changes in how it handles people arriving at the southern border seeking asylum.   Under longstanding U.S. and international laws, those fleeing violence and persecution can apply for asylum regardless of whether they present themselves at, or enter without inspection between, ports of entry.  By “metering” the number of people who can apply at the border, creating weeks-long waits, and by deciding to forcibly separate and then to detain families and children, the administration has created a humanitarian and human rights debacle that a border wall will not solve.

Just a fraction of the $5.7 billion that President Trump seeks for the wall, if spent on more asylum officers and immigration judges, would lessen the backlogs in processing asylum claims that can last for years.  And directing some of those funds to the northern triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, if tactically and transparently deployed, could help improve the conditions that are forcing people to flee for their safety and survival.

MeBIC agrees with this cogent response by the Center for Migration Studies.  From a human rights and an economic perspective, this administration should be spending taxpayer dollars on meaningful immigration law reforms, not on a border wall.

 

 

The City of Portland’s Office of Economic Opportunity has concluded a year-long effort to develop a plan to ensure Portland’s continued “welcome-ability” and to help area immigrants reach their full potential through city efforts to foster their civic, economic and social inclusion .  You can read the plan here.

The effort, in collaboration with the Portland Community Chamber of Commerce, and supported by a Gateways for Growth challenge grant backed by MeBIC partner New American Economy and Welcoming America, has also resulted in a new website where immigrants in Portland can find resources and employers and immigrants can connect.

Portland is an increasingly diverse city, attracting  immigrants who are vital to Portland’s social fabric, and to its population and economic growth, as highlighted in this report.    MeBIC applauds the City’s efforts to be a more valuable resource for the newcomers who represent the future of Portland, and Maine.

 

In a letter to Congress, on January 8, 2019 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged Congress and the administration to end the shutdown and enact legislation to provide needed immigration reforms that enjoy broad support.

Specifically, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce identified the need for meaningful reforms to a broken immigration system as the real imperative that needs to be addressed.   Its letter urged passage of legislation to  permanently legalize the over one million immigrants on the cusp of losing their work permits and right to remain in the U.S. due to the administration’s decisions to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for El Salvadorans, Haitians, Hondurans , Nepalis, Nicaraguans, and Sudanese, about 250,000 of whom have lived legally in the U.S. for over 20 years.   Right now, only federal court injunctions are blocking the administration’s actions that would strip them of their status.

The U.S. Chamber also supports increased border security, but not a wall, which the majority of the U.S. public also oppose, according to multiple polls.

As another business lobbying group, FWD.us, points out, the administration rejected multiple previous offers to increase border security, including funding for some additional border wall,  in exchange for legal status for DACA holders.  It’s now the administration’s obligation to end the shutdown and negotiate in good faith.   The economic and human costs of the shutdown and stalemate are too high.

 

As we’ve written previously, the crisis at the border is not about an “invasion,” and not something a wall will solve.

Two recent commentaries, one in the New Yorker, and another by a former Customs and Border Patrol officer provide a deeper dive into the complexities of the situation and how the current administration’s actions have exacerbated the humanitarian and administrative crisis, and ponder the costs to the U.S. as a nation of approaches to border security that ignore those complexities.

They are both worth a read.

2019 is off to an inauspicious start, with a government shutdown over a manufactured crisis.

As MeBIC has written previously, government data shows apprehensions at the southern border in FY 2017 and FY 2018, whether between or at ports of entry, at less than half of the nearly or over one million apprehensions annually from fiscal years 1983 through 2006.    This is hardly an “invasion”, contrary to the administration’s characterizations.

Moreover, in FY 2018, more than 42% of those apprehended were families with minor children or unaccompanied minors.  Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data shows that nearly 97% of those families were from the  “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where gang, domestic, and political violence are rampant, as were 67% of the unaccompanied minors, underscoring that these are people seeking protection, which international and U.S. law allows them to do.

In addition, as we’ve posted previously, studies reveal that the U.S.’s undocumented population is at its lowest level in over a decade, and various estimates are that those who entered legally with temporary visas and never left constitute more than 40% of that population, with the proportion of “overstayers” increasing in the past decade.  According to the administration’s own data, since 2007, each year the number of visa overstayers has exceeded the number of undocumented who entered without authorization.  The most recent full-year data available, for FY 2017,  shows over 700,000 people overstayed their visas, far eclipsing the 415,517 individuals apprehended at the southern border that year.

A border wall will do nothing to deter visa overstayers.  Nor will more physical barriers prevent those seeking safety, who have the legal right under both U.S. and international law to apply for asylum regardless of how or where they enter the country, from continuing to arrive based on their belief that the U.S. is a society that offers them hope and safe haven from violence and persecution.

Nor is a border wall the solution to the disfunction that has long existed in the U.S. immigration system, made more chaotic and cruel under the current administration.  President Trump’s willingness to keep the government shutdown going until he gets full funding for his border wall ironically is exacerbating the very real problems that exist.   For example, years-long backlogs in the immigration courts are made worse because the shutdown has furloughed most immigration judges.

With President Trump’s recent statement that the shutdown could last months or years,  despite bipartisan proposals to provide more funding for border security but not the full wall, 2019 is likely to be another challenging year for immigrants and immigration policy.

 

 

 

Forbes contributor Stuart Anderson discusses what we can expect on the immigration front from the Trump administration and the courts in 2019, and who knows, perhaps even from the new Congress.

As the article notes, much of the likely immigration activity will consist of  continued attacks by the administration on legal immigration, with negative repercussions for the U.S. economy.  His assessments and predictions are solid and worth a read.

Employers with non-agricultural seasonal labor needs can petition for H-2B temporary worker visas, but with limited exceptions, only 66,000 visas are available annually, divided equally between the two halves of the federal fiscal year.   Demand for H-2B visas chronically outstrips the supply.  For two years running, Congress has increased the number of available H-2B visas, but these have been short term fixes that expired at the end of their respective fiscal years.

In the absence of a permanent meaningful increase in the number of H-2B visas, the government has tried varying approaches to deal with the excess demand.  After years of conducting a lottery, for FY 2019, the government instead launched a first-come first-served system based on the time stamp, up to the millisecond, for when each application was electronically filed with the Department of Labor’s iCERT portal.

For seasonal jobs beginning on or after April 1, 2019  through September 30, 2019, the first moment that an employer could initiate the process through the iCERT portal was at 12:00.00.000 a.m. on January 1, 2019.  Within minutes, the iCERT portal crashed due to the high volume of submissions.

On January 2, 2019, the Department of Labor announced that it received applications for over 97,800 seasonal positions via the iCERT portal within the first five minutes after it opened.

Many Maine employers vying for any of the 33,000 available H-2B visas to help meet their increased labor needs for the spring/summer 2019 season are likely to find themselves shut out.  Employers seeking details about which workers are cap-exempt can check here.

Congress should enact a permanent and substantial increase in the number of H-2B visas so that employers can look to the program as one that can be relied on to meet their seasonal labor needs.  With unemployment lower than 4% nationally and in Maine (where it has been below 4% for a record 36 months), there is no excuse for inaction.

 

Maine’s unemployment rate has been under 4% for 36 straight months, as pointed out in this Portland Press Herald article.

However,  MeBIC Board member John Dorrer, a labor economist and former director of the Maine Department of Labor’s Center for Workforce Research and Information, points out in the article that the tight labor market is likely to trim growth and tax collections and hurt the state’s economy.

Businesses are offering bonuses, raising wages, creating training programs, and trying to re-engage retired workers and attract newcomers to the state, but those efforts are not enough to make up for our labor shorfall.

Immigrants are part of the solution, too.  We need to make sure that the federal administration stops constricting immigration, through its policies that reduce refugee arrivals, or would slash immediate family immigration, and that raise obstacles to legal immigration by every type of worker, from manual laborers to professionals.

 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is charged with ensuring that employers comply with the Immigration and Nationality Act’s employer sanctions provisions.

According to a recent ICE announcement, in FY 2018  ICE enforcement actions directed at employers increased by over 400% compared to FY 2017, with 6,848 worksite investigations opened, and 5,981 I-9 audits initiated, the highest number in a decade.   While criminal prosecutions and convictions of employers held steady in FY 2018, ICE projects that these will increase in future years due to lengthy investigation and prosecution time frames.

Since 1986, it has been unlawful for U.S. employers to hire individuals who are not authorized to work in the U.S.   Among other requirements, employers must complete  the Employment Eligibility Verification Form I-9 for all employees within their first three days of hire, to show that the employer has reviewed any new employee’s documentation of identity and employment eligibility.

ICE can conduct I-9 audits and other enforcement actions to ensure that employers are in compliance with the law.

As the Cato Institute points out, even with ICE’s recent enforcement increase, the number of impacted businesses is only a fraction of 1% of all U.S. employers.   Since ICE lacks the capacity to investigate all employers, Cato posits that ICE’s aim is to generated greater compliance through fear.

It remains to be seen if this trend will continue in 2019.

As described in this previous MeBIC post, the Department of Homeland Security published a proposed rule change on October 10, 2018 that would upend decades of settled policy and result in denials of residency to an estimated hundreds of thousands of immigrants annually.  Over 210,000 comments, the vast majority in opposition, were submitted before the public comments period ended on December 10, 2018.

MeBIC Board member David Barber, senior consultant at Barber Foods, wrote this Maine Sunday Telegram op-ed to raise awareness of the proposed rule and of the public comment opportunity to oppose it.

MeBIC Board members Mark St. Germain of St. German Collins and Cathy Lee of Lee International, were joined by Maine business owners Daniel Freund of Common Census, and Liz Greason of Maine Intercultural Communications Consultants on a  public comment opposing the rule submitted  on December 7, 2018 by 120 business executives nationwide, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.  Additional MeBIC partners submitted their own individual comments.

While the proposed rule change purports to apply to all who hope to enter or become permanent residents of the United States, its impact would fall squarely on those immigrating as immediate family members of U.S. citizens or permanent residents.   Family-based immigration, which makes up two-thirds of all immigration to the U.S.  and Maine annually, would likely be slashed by at least half.

In Maine, if family-based immigration were halved, the state would have had net population loss, instead of the gain of 3118 persons actually experienced from 2010 to 2016, as we’ve explained here.  The proposed rule change would not only harm families and defy our values and centuries of immigration tradition, but also damage  our economy by throttling a critical and reliable source of new Maine residents when the State’s population is rapidly aging and deaths outpace births.

While the administration may not change course in response to the outpouring of opposition to the proposed rule change, the comments will be helpful in any litigation to block application of the rule change if it is ultimately finalized.

 

 

A recent article in Mainebiz  describes how Maine’s workforce shortage is challenging a variety of Maine’s employers and industries.  Offering higher wages, signing bonuses and more robust benefits packages isn’t enough to fill all the job openings that exist.

The article makes clear that Maine simply needs more people, and it identifies immigrants as part of the solution.   This echos what economic and business leaders have been saying for years, including Coastal Enterprises, Inc., and the Maine Development Foundation with the Maine State Chamber of Commerce.

A new State Legislative session will be underway in January 2019.  MeBIC will be working to support legislation to help Maine welcome immigrants and facilitate their ability to contribute to their fullest potential as workers, consumers, entrepreneurs and taxpayers.  In addition, MeBIC will advocate for federal policy changes so that immigrants with temporary or limbo status living in Maine, such as those with DACA, TPS or undocumented status, will have a path forward to apply for permanent residency, and can remain as productive members of our communities.

Maine’s immigrants are well educated and skilled.  Over 33% of Maine’s immigrants have either a bachelors or graduate degree, compared to just under 30% of native Mainers.   Prior to coming to the U.S., many worked in professions that are badly needed in Maine, such as medicine and engineering, but find themselves unable to continue their careers here due to credentialing and licensing barriers.  This results in tremendous “brain waste”.

The New Mainers Resource Center (NMRC), a part of Portland Adult Education and Portland Public Schools, has released Foreign Trained Professionals: Maine’s Hidden Talent Pool, a new report looking at the challenges highly skilled immigrants face in resuming their professions.  Opaque guidance on the steps required to apply for licensure, high fees for credential evalutions and language testing, and lack of acceptance by registration boards of degrees and experience obtained abroad are among the factors that result in many immigrants having to take jobs far beneath their skill level, or to repeat their education in the U.S., or to choose new careers.

The report analyzes the problem through the lens of several professions in demand in Maine, including doctors, nurses, lawyers, engineers, accountants, and teachers.  The report additionally makes recommendations for improvements to reduce the barriers that foreign trained and experienced professionals in these fields face.

The NMRC also has produced explanatory licensing guides to walk foreign trained professionals through the steps needed to attain licensure in each of the six professions examined in the report.

Maine cannot afford to have immigrants be unable to work to their fullest potential.  The NMRC’s work  may be the first step on the road to improvements.  You can find the report here and the licensing guides here.

 

 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released an advance copy of a proposed rule that will substantially change the H-1B petitioning process. The rule will be officially published in the Federal Register on December 3, 2018, with public comments accepted until January 2, 2019.

H-1B visas are temporary professional work visas for those working in positions that require at least a bachelors degree or higher, or specialized knowledge.  Many of these positions are subject to a 65,000 visa cap for those with bachelors degrees or higher, with an  additional 20,000 visas available to those with at least a masters degree.

The number of employers seeking H-1B visas for foreign-born employees chronically exceeds the number of cap-subject visas available.  As a result, for years U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has not allowed employers to file their H-1B petitions until April 1st for positions beginning on October 1st, the next fiscal year.  The visa cap has been reached within five days and selection of petitions to process has been done by lottery..

The proposed rule would require all employers who intend to file a petition for an H-1B employee to register in advance of the first allowed filing date.  The proposed rule states that USCIS will then notify the employer that it will be allowed to submit the petition, or that the cap has been reached.  In theory, this change would save employers the time and expense of preparing and submitting an H-1B petition, only to be shut out when the cap is quickly exceeded.

The proposed rule also would change the order in which accepted H-1B petitions are processed, purportedly to increase the number of visas going to those with masters degrees or higher, rather than to those with bachelors degrees.  However, the rule appears to ignore how the Immigration and Nationality Act dictates that how visas will be allocated among those with masters and bachelors degrees, and as applied, could result in fewer individuals with masters degrees getting H-1B visas than Congress intended.  This analysis by the Cato Institute describes some of the problems with the proposed rule in more detail.

Employers who use H-1B visas should speak with their immigration counsel to discuss the impact this rule change would have on their H-1B filing process, and should consider filing a public comment once the proposed rule is published.