Why The White House’s Measures To Curb Visa Overstays Are Inadequate

Written by Guillermo Cantor

The White House issued a memo on Monday directing the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security to provide recommendations to reduce visa overstays. The recommendations, which are expected within 120 days, may include suspending or limiting entry of nationals of countries with high nonimmigrant visa overstay rates. 

Why is the administration pursuing these changes now? The rationale offered in the memo points to high overstay rates observed for nationals of certain countries. The memo directs the Secretary of State to focus on countries with overstay rates greater than 10 percent in the combined B1 – B2 visitor visa category (for business or tourism respectively), based on statistics reported by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

According to DHS’s latest Entry/Exit Overstay Report, there are 20 countries with overstay rates greater than 10 percent. Of those countries, 13 are in Africa, 3 in the Middle East, 2 in Southern Asia, and one in South East Asia and Oceania respectively. 

Yet the total number of visa overstays for most of those countries is very low. If we take out Nigeria, which accounts for about 10 percent of all overstays, the number of overstays for nationals of the other 19 countries combined represent only two percent of all overstays in fiscal year 2018. 

While in the past decade the number of overstays has surpassed the number of migrants entering the country through the southern border without inspection, there’s more to the story. A new report by the Center for Migration Studies explains that this is “not because overstays have increased more than [entries without inspection] but primarily because of the historic decline in illegal entries after 2000.” 

So is this effort to limit the number of visitors from certain countries really about the numbers? For several reasons, this doesn’t seem to be the case. The approach the memo takes would have little impact on reducing the number of visa overstays. 

Instead, this seems to be an attempt to punish certain countries. And penalizing entire countries—and the entire population within those countries—for the immigration violations committed by some of their citizens seems irrational and unfair. 

It’s also redundant. U.S. immigration law already imposes penalties on those who stay in the United States beyond the period authorized by the Secretary of Homeland Security. These penalties include bars for reentering the United States that range from three to 10 years. Additionally, U.S. consular officers have discretion to deny visas to applicants deemed likely to stay longer than permitted. 

While the memo also directs the Secretary of State to engage foreign governments in order to identify conditions contributing to their nationals’ overstay rates, it is uncertain how productive those engagements will be given the punitive terms with which this initiative was framed. 

Policies to address visa overstays, and enhance migration governance more generally, require a more thorough analysis. This should account for the factors that have driven increases and decreases of overstay rates for specific countries over time, the conditions in sending countries, the economic and political environment in the United States, as well as historical migration patterns. 

Unless the government takes a more rigorous and holistic approach to the immigration policy problems it is trying to address, sustainable solutions will continue to be hard to reach. 

 

 Source: www.immigrationimpact.com 

https://www.inmigracionyvisas.com/a4133-The-White-Houses-Measures-to-Curb-Visa-Overstays-Are-Inadequate.html

Ending Birthright Citizenship Could Put All Americans’ Nationality in Jeopardy

Written by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

On Monday night, President Trump told reporters that he intended to end birthright citizenship and claimed that he could do so with an executive order. 

Birthright citizenship comes from the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “Any person born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, is a citizen of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Although the president falsely claimed that no other country provides birthright citizenship, it is the law in over 30 countries, including Mexico and Canada. 

The unexpected announcement sparked fears for many in the immigrant community, including U.S. citizens whose parents are undocumented. It met swift condemnation from all sides of the aisle, with Republicans and Democrats alike questioning the legality. Legal scholars agreed that the plan is unconstitutional; a president cannot amend the Constitution through executive action. 

In 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship. Wong, born in San Francisco, had been prevented from re-entering the United States by immigration agents who argued that he was not a citizen because his parents were Chinese. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, declaring that “citizenship by birth is established by the mere fact of birth under the circumstances defined in the Constitution.” In other words, as long as you are born in the United States, you are a citizen. 

Despite this 100-year-old ruling, some continue to argue that the constitutionality of birthright citizenship is not settled. In a tweet on Wednesday morning, President Trump endorsed a fringe legal theory that the children of undocumented immigrants are not citizens because their parents were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, as required by the Fourteenth Amendment. 

However, “[t]o be ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the U.S. is simply to be subject to the authority of the U.S. government … [and to be] required to obey U.S. laws,” according to James C. Ho, a judge nominated to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals by President Trump and confirmed in January. 

The Supreme Court has largely agreed, suggesting in the 1982 case Plyer v. Doe that there is “no plausible” interpretation of the phrase that excludes undocumented immigrants. 

The only people not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States are diplomats and ambassadors, who are entitled to diplomatic immunity and are not required to follow most American laws. 

The only way for the president to end birthright citizenship would be to amend the Constitution, which requires a two-thirds majority vote of the House and the Senate, and then for three-fourths states to approve the Amendment. 

Eliminating birthright citizenship would create a new permanent underclass in the United States and could even leave some children stateless. 

It would also impose hardship on all Americans, who could no longer point to a birth certificate as proof of citizenship. If place of birth no longer guaranteed citizenship, then all Americans—not just those whose parents were undocumented—would be forced to prove their parents’ nationality to the government in order to be recognized as a U.S. citizen. Many Americans would likely be denied citizenship based on government mistakes. 

Although President Trump cannot change the Constitution with an executive order, his threat to eliminate birthright citizenship at a highly political moment is not only divisive but fundamentally out of line with America ideals. 

Source: www.immigrationimpact.com

http://www.inmigracionyvisas.com/a3937-Ending-Birthright-Citizenship-in-United-States.html