Promise to ‘Build the Wall’ Hurts Businesses and Residents Along the Border

Written by Tory Johnson

As the partial government shutdown stretches on, many individuals, families, and businesses around the country are struggling. At the heart of the shutdown and budget standoff is President Trump’s promise to “build the wall.” Yet for many people and businesses along the border, this is the last thing they want. 

Ahead of President Trump’s visit to the U.S.-Mexico border last week, business owners and leaders spoke out against the president’s continued demand to build additional fencing along the border. 

Business leaders in San Diego say that President Trump hyper-focusing on the wall is bad for the local economy and also an ineffective way to use taxpayer money, in part because the wall itself and the construction process can make it harder for people to cross the border at legal ports. With an estimated 90,000 northbound daily crossings at the San Ysidro port of entry, it is vital that business employees, customers, and goods or services can cross the border smoothly and efficiently. 

Businesses and communities throughout the border region have long voiced concern about the border wall and militarization stifling cross-border commerce, literally creating barriers that cut into vital revenue and relationships. 

According to Karim Bouris, executive director of Business for Good San Diego, San Ysidro businesses lost upwards of $5 million in November when the government closed the busy border crossing for several hours to install additional security barriers. In Santa Cruz County, California, businesses near the Tumacácori National Historical Park suffered when there were fewer visitors and tourists coming to the park from the Mexican side. 

Fewer tourists and shoppers means less money for the city of Nogales in Arizona, which relies on its sales taxes to pay for important services like law enforcement and sanitation. In border towns like Nogales, thriving businesses that attract new and return customers are vital to the local economy. 

But it can be hard to do this when customers can’t get across the border—or don’t want to. City Councilmember Marcelino Varona told Arizona Public Media that because of new barbed wire fencing in Nogales, “the frontier here—the border—looks like a prison system instead of a community.” 

In addition to U.S. businesses relying on shoppers coming from the Mexican side of the border, increased military presence and border fortifications negatively impact Americans visiting Mexico. For example, the U.S. government recently purchased a public parking lot in Nogales close to the border. Rather than sitting in long car lines to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. residents have parked in the lot and gone through the pedestrian crossing into Mexico, which is often a more efficient way to cross for short trips. 

The lot is currently inaccessible. After the government bought it, they closed the lot to the public and started filling it with military equipment. Without access to the lot, border residents have to park further away or skip the trip altogether—meaning fewer dollars added to the local economy and ultimately less money for public services in Nogales. 

When it comes down to it, border businesses and residents have been dealing with the presence of military personnel, equipment, physical barriers, and yes—a wall—for years. The border wall already exists and shutting down the government in an attempt to get money to build even more is a poor economic and policy decision. 

Ask those who see and cross the border every day—taxpayer dollars should fund policies that make ports of entry more efficient, safe, and support the people and businesses that make the border a viable place to live and visit.

Source: http://immigrationimpact.com/
http://www.inmigracionyvisas.com/a3993-Build-the-Wall-Hurts-Businesses-and-Residents.html

The United States Must Embrace Global Talent, As High-Skilled Foreign Workers Go Elsewhere

 

Written by Walter Ewing

If the U.S. government closes the door to highly skilled foreign workers, other countries stand ready to embrace their contributions. For instance, while the Trump administration contemplates an overhaul of the H-1B temporary employment visa, a process that would make it more difficult to obtain them, the Canadian government is offering the opposite. Canada is promising a two-week turn-around time on work permits for skilled foreign workers who are in the United States, but who might like to try Canada instead.

The U.S. government and employers must create a welcoming environment that attracts skilled people from around the world, because the United States is no longer the default choice for foreign workers looking for new opportunities. 

This is one of the central conclusions of a new book, “The Gift of Global Talent, ” by Harvard Business School professor William Kerr. 

The book synthesizes much of the existing research on high-skilled immigration and reaches a number of important conclusions. Paramount among these is that “talent is the world’s most precious resource.” The accuracy of this statement becomes apparent if you consider that computers, cars, and factories would not exist if not for the creativity of engineers and other high-tech professionals. 

Moreover, talent is highly mobile. Talented workers can readily travel to any corner of the globe where opportunity beckons to them—meaning that forward-looking nations must actively compete for these workers and not take them for granted. 

“The Gift of Global Talent” argues that one unique feature of talented individuals is that they tend to congregate in a relatively small number of places—like Silicon Valley, or equivalent locations in Canada, Europe, and Asia. 

Contrary to conventional economic thinking, this tendency to collect in one city doesn’t drive down wages or produce a surplus of workers. Rather, it makes the place even more attractive to other talented professionals. In Kerr’s terminology, this process gives birth to “talent clusters”—and it is the talent clusters that fuel innovation. 

As the author notes, the degree to which foreign-born workers contribute to the growth of these clusters is readily apparent in a couple of statistics. Immigrants account for one-quarter of all U.S. patents filed. And more than half of all U.S. workers with doctorates in science and engineering fields are immigrants. 

The talent clusters that have taken root in the United States would not exist in their present form without immigration. Likewise, these immigrants would not have been able to come without visas specifically designed for highly skilled professionals, such as the H-1B. 

To succeed in such a global labor market, businesses must be nimble; quick to follow new ideas and attract the workers needed to develop those new ideas. For this reason, many businesses very deliberately set up shop in the middle of a talent cluster so that they will have ready access to whatever sort of talented workers are needed as the business moves forward. 

The primary obstacle to getting the workers they need rests in the inefficiencies of the U.S. employment visa system (particularly flaws in the H-1B, such as the fact that the visa is tied to a single employer and is not “portable” if the worker wants to get a different job in a different company). These obstacles would only increase with changes to the visa’s availability being contemplated by the Trump administration. 

At a broader level, the administration’s anti-immigrant policies have already caused the United States to lose some of its luster as a home for global talent. This is an economically self-destructive course of action that must be reversed. Workers who possess knowledge and ingenuity transcend borders. Rational immigration policies would recognize this basic fact. 

Source: www.immigrationimpact.com 

http://www.inmigracionyvisas.com/a3922-United-States-must-support-foreign-workers.html

Written by Leslie Dellon

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued a revised, final policy memorandum on August 9, 2018 that radically changes how the agency will determine when a foreign student or exchange visitor is “unlawfully present” in the United States. “Unlawful presence” is a legal term used to describe any time spent in the United States after a foreign national’s period of authorized stay has ended. 

Most foreign nationals who are inspected and admitted in nonimmigrant status are authorized to remain in the United States until a specific date. However, academic program students and exchange visitors frequently are authorized to remain in the United States for what is known as “duration of status” because a date certain cannot account for the many variables that affect their length of stay, such as when they will complete a program or project. 

Under USCIS’ new policy, effective August 9, the day after an event that the agency considers a status violation, in most cases, will be the starting date for calculating unlawful presence for students and exchange visitors . Many will accumulate unlawful presence sooner than under the prior policy. Often, they will not know that they have fallen out of status and will not know that they are accumulating unlawful presence. The change is significant because generally a nonimmigrant who leaves the United States after being unlawfully present for more than 180 days but less than 1 year is barred from returning for three years; after one year or more of unlawful presence, the bar is ten years. 

USCIS’ policy change also affects the spouses and 18-or-older children whose status was based on the student or exchange visitor’s status, since they will accrue unlawful presence based on an event later found to be a status violation by the student or exchange visitor. 

USCIS released its initial version of this policy in May 2018, and provided 30 days for the public to comment. Despite the many objections commenters raised, USCIS made few changes. The only changes USCIS made in calculating when unlawful presence begins involve “reinstatement of status.” If a student files a reinstatement application within five months of being out of status, unlawful presence will begin only if USCIS denies the application. Although initially provided only for academic program students, USCIS now provides that if any student or exchange visitor is reinstated, regardless of when requested, the student or exchange visitor generally will not accrue unlawful presence during the time the request was pending. 

These changes are of limited utility because they do not address the fundamental “gotcha” problem with the new policy: People who only find out years later that USCIS now considers them to have been out of status and accruing unlawful presence. 

In its attempt to justify this radical change, USCIS manipulated data on students and exchange visitors who remained beyond their period of authorized stay, often referred to as “overstays.” USCIS claims that the total overstay rate was “significantly higher” in Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 and FY 2017 for the student and exchange visitor categories than for other nonimmigrants. However, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reports from which USCIS takes these numbers also reveals their flaws. DHS includes in these totals departure dates recorded after the authorized period of stay expired (“out-of-country overstays”). These could include people who stayed only a day longer because their flight was canceled, or they became ill. Indeed, Table 7 of DHS’ FY2017 report shows that 49% of “out-of-country overstays” of 60 days or fewer were 10 days or fewer. The other overstay category DHS includes is people for whom no departure record was recorded (“suspected in-country overstays”). But a departure may not be recorded because a person lawfully extended or changed nonimmigrant status or became a lawful permanent resident (a “green card holder”). Also, DHS admits that “determining lawful status requires more than solely matching exit and entry data” and that the agency established artificial “cutoff dates” of departures “expected to occur.” 

DHS also reports, based on more recent data, a compliance rate of nearly 100% of all nonimmigrants scheduled to depart in FY2017 by air and sea ports of entry, and of nearly 99% in FY2016. Looking at just the “suspected in-country overstays” in Table 8 of DHS’ FY2017 report, even with the inflation due to including people who are not overstays at all, as of May 1, 2018, the FY2017 overstay rate for student and exchange visitor nonimmigrants is only 1.43 percent. 

This unwarranted, punitive policy will only serve to drive students, and physicians, trainees, interns and other exchange visitors, toward opportunities in other countries. Foreign nationals are already growing increasingly wary of pursuing higher education in the United States, as evidenced by declining enrollment . This policy will only deepen their anxiety. 

 

Source: www. immigrationimpact.com  

http://www.inmigracionyvisas.com/a3877-Students-and-Exchange-Visitors-at-Risk-in-United-States.html

 

 

Immigrants And Refugees Are Among America’s 2017 Nobel Prize Winners

Written by Melissa Cruz. 

The Nobel Prizes, awarded annually in recognition of extraordinary achievement in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace, have once again been won by Americans who came here as immigrants and refugees. Three out of the five Nobel Prize categories included immigrants or refugees.

Immigrants have a history of winning The Nobel Foundation’s numerous awards—33 of 85 American winners have been immigrants since 2000. In the chemistry, medicine, and physics categories respectively, foreign-born Americans have won 38 percent of chemistry and medicine prizes, as well as 40 percent of all physics prizes awarded in the last 17 years. 

This year, scientists and researchers have been awarded prizes in physics, chemistry, and peace: 

• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded, in part, to German-born Joachim Frank. The biophysicist developed a method by which water can be frozen rapidly, ensuring that biological molecules in the water don’t form ice crystals and become blurred. This allows Frank to take a more detailed image of molecules. This image can then be used to study the molecules and potentially identify new cures for diseases.
• The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to physicist and MIT professor Rainer Weiss, among other members of his team. Weiss, also originally from Germany, designed an instrument that can detect gravitational waves. By studying these gravitational waves, Weiss is able to detect celestial events such as black hole mergers. Notably, Weiss is also a refugee—he fled from his home as a boy and immigrated to the United States during the Nazi’s rise to power.
• The Nobel Prize in Peace was awarded to Alexander Glaser and Zia Mian, among the other members of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Glaser and Mian, both researchers at Princeton University and born in Germany and Pakistan respectively, work to “outlaw and eliminate all nuclear weapons” under international law through their work with ICAN. Berit Reiss-Andersen, Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, remarked that the award represented “encouragement” to nuclear powers to continue negotiations around their use of weapons.

As with the winners from previous years, these immigrants and refugee have shared their talents, innovation, and energy with the nation. These Nobel Prize winners show that the United States must remain a welcoming place because our country would be losing out on a great deal if it shuts itself off to the foreign-born.

Photo by Adam Baker

Source: www.immigrationimpact.com 
http://inmigracionyvisas.com/a3723-Immigrants-and-refugees-who-won-the-Nobel-Prize.html