Immigration

We need to restore humanity to our immigration system.

We must modernize and restore humanity to our immigration system. We must halt mass deportation, open our borders to asylum seekers, and provide more pathways to citizenship while prioritizing keeping families together, growing our economy, and ensuring that the United States remains a refuge for those fleeing persecution.

Thus far, the Biden administration has failed to demonstrate a humane response to crises at our southern border. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in March 2020, the Trump administration implemented Title 42, a rarely used health law that allowed the U.S. to quickly expel migrants without providing an opportunity to apply for asylum due to COVID-19. When the Biden administration took over, instead of halting Title 42 use at the border, they provided just one very limited exception to Title 42, which was for unaccompanied minors. The U.S is continuing to expel asylum seekers at our border. The Biden administration has used COVID-19 as an excuse to close our borders to those seeking protection rather than expanding our processing capacity to safely allow asylum seekers into our country.

There is no reason we should be expelling migrants at the border due to COVID health concerns. We have the resources to make COVID-safe processing of asylum seekers at the border possible. We must stop relying on Title 42 as a deterrence mechanism, and expand our processing capacity. We can do this by implementing a vaccination program, collaborating with international partners to increase COVID testing, and by only detaining asylum seekers when absolutely necessary.

We must reform and expand avenues to legal immigration.

Increasing legal immigration is of paramount importance. The first and foremost reason is because of our own national interest — much of America’s early success was due to the phenomenal talent of immigrants, and it’s necessary for us to continue to attract the world’s best if we are to compete as a world leader in technological innovation. As a business owner, I know first-hand that established entrepreneurs aren’t as held back by lack of financial capital as they are by lack of human capital.

There is an enormous amount of potential for economic and scientific growth going untapped due to our broken immigration system. If done properly, immigration reform will protect family values, strengthen national security, reduce unemployment, spur innovation, stimulate competition, increase public safety, enhance the U.S. economy, reinforce international relations, and help those most in need.

Reforming and expanding the H-1B visa program should be a top priority for Democrats. The H-1B visa, known as the “high-tech” visa, is granted to foreign workers in specialty occupations, primarily those of a technological nature. America educates superlative STEM graduates, but too often those without American citizenship are unable to stay once their student visas expire. To obtain a H-1B visa, a company must sponsor them for a specific job, a process both arduous and expensive. Updating this process is critical for retaining newly-groomed talent and for future American innovation.

We must also reform the U visa program. The U visa was designed to shield victims of particular qualifying crimes from deportation in exchange for their cooperation with law enforcement. However, many have found the visa impossible to secure. Some of the issues plaguing the visa are: a lack of consistent criteria to administer the visa, lack of cooperation from some law enforcement agencies, and an enormous visa backlog–if no new U visa petitions were filed, it would take over 17 years to completely clear the backlog.

We must create national guidelines to govern U visa certification, hire additional U visa adjudicators, recapture unused visas, and increase the annual cap on the number of visas are all necessary to ensure the program will continue offering protections to crime victims and increasing public safety.

There are many types of immigration, however, and not all should require a specific set of skills. America has long been a refuge to those from parts of the world made inhospitable by war and persecution. Today’s world is as inhospitable as ever, and we must accordingly open our doors wherever we can, to provide sanctuary. Increasing the amount of refugees we take from specified at-risk countries is a moral imperative, and regardless of Republican claims to the contrary, does not carry with it the risk of heightened terrorist attacks.

Families should not be dismissed as “chain migrants.”

“Chain Migration” is a term created by anti-immigration hardliners to dehumanize the practice of family reunification. And that’s exactly what the practice is — a policy that allows families to live together in the United States. The archetype of the sole migrant going alone to the United States to begin a new life before their family goes back two centuries, and if you trace almost anyone’s roots back a couple of generations, you’ll find it’s how we all got here in the first place.

Opponents claim that this “dilutes” the immigrant pool, and that the practice increases immigration from people without skills. In fact, studies have shown that immigrants who move for economic reasons are predisposed to return home once they’ve made enough money, whereas those who move for social reasons overwhelmingly tend to stay, as they’re moving into a new community. In other words: allow a person to come to America to do a specific job, and he or she might not stay. But provide them with the opportunity to put down roots, and they create a new life in America. This practice is not only moral, it is economically sound.

We must recapture unused green cards.

Since 1992, hundreds of thousands of green cards authorized by Congress have been left unissued due to administrative complications, and COVID-19 has significantly exacerbated the problem. There are over a million unused green cards currently in circulation, costing the US economy trillions of dollars due to economic losses. Recapturing unused green cards would likely contribute approximately $1.080 trillion to US GDP over ten years and increase net revenue to federal, state, and local governments by approximately $463 billion. We must modify the recapture provisions from the U.S. Citizenship Act to include both unused employment-based and family preference green cards. These modifications would recapture an additional 250,000 green cards, lead to about 158,000 additional new arrivals, contribute an additional $265 billion to GDP over ten years, and raise an additional $100 billion in net revenue.

We must view immigration as a source of strength and power for our country.

The U.S. consistently ranks at the top of the soft 30 power index. The term ‘soft power’ is used to describe the nonmilitary resources available to states and institutions: culture, political values, and foreign policy. The soft power index measures the ability for a nation to get others to “want what they want” instead of “forcing others to do what they want.” In short, it is a measure of cooperation instead of coercion.

Recent studies have confirmed the strong ties between immigration policies and soft power ranking. For example, one soft power metric, education, is measured in terms of the “ability of a country to attract international students.” Other metrics deal with the ability to engage with global audiences and the capacity for innovation respectively– both of which benefit from diverse communities driven by immigration. Another soft power metric is culture – immigrant artists have created some of the most influential American cultural productions, and are often uniquely good at creating content that resonates with a global audience.

For much of the 20th century, the U.S. accepted millions of refugees and immigrants, this generated a reputation of openness and opportunity. Moreover, various diasporas from a wide range of countries have created communities in the U.S. that have facilitated cultural, political, technological, and business exchanges with their home communities.

While our immigration policy has been generous at times, the U.S.’s history and reputation will forever be marred by moments of exclusion and racism. Immigration laws in the 1920s imposed quotas and excluded Asian immigrants, during World War II many Jewish refugees were denied entry, in the 1950s; Japanese-Americans were interned, millions have been deported, and the Trump administration implemented travel bans on citizens of majority-Muslim countries, separated families, and left thousands of vulnerable asylum-seekers to wait in unsafe cities— to name a few. These inconsistencies reduce the potential for U.S. immigration policy to be a source of soft power, and in some cases, reduce U.S. soft power overall.

But how do we generate more soft power? We do so by fostering a culture of multicultural inclusion, cooperation, and tolerance. This can be done by expanding student, employment, and diversity visa programs, and committing consistently to refugee resettlement. This will boost our ability to engage with global audiences and project images of cooperation and tolerance that, in turn, translate into soft power.

Moral implications aside, our failure to welcome immigrants and refugees with open arms comes at a great cost to our world standing and soft-power ranking. Our immigration system and resettlement system are too slow, our asylum system too backlogged, and our parole system is too temporary to reap the full benefits of diversity and immigration.

We must act now. There are nearly 3 million Ukrainian refugees currently seeking safety. Despite our geographic distance, we must provide a safe haven for Ukrainian refugees just as the Biden Administration rightfully did for Afghan refugees in the fallout of the withdrawal of Afghanistan. This is not only the humane thing to do, but the best diplomatic move for our nation’s world standing. Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. resettlement system was not built to provide immediate protection for refugees. Our screening and security process currently lasts well over a year and a half– oftentimes longer. Simply put, the U.S. refugee system can’t resettle Ukrainian refugees very quickly. So, the U.S. must provide expedited processing to Ukrainians who already had pending refugee applications. Furthermore, we must reauthorize the Lautenberg Amendment, which would help relocate roughly 4,000 Ukrainian religious minorities to the U.S. We must expedite the processing for all immigration petitions of Ukrainian nationals. We must fast-track any Ukrainian with a pending immigration application. And, we must utilize humanitarian parole to allow Ukrainians entry for a temporary period of time. Morally– we cannot leave the millions of Ukrainian refugees out to dry. Diplomatically– we cannot miss out on the vast educational, cultural, and political benefits that come with welcoming refugees.