The Border Security Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act, created by a bipartisan group of eight U.S. senators, recently passed the U.S. Senate and will soon be deliberated in the House of Representatives, where anti-immigrant legislators are likely to give...
The U.S. immigration system—and efforts to reform it—can impact women differently from men. While much of the U.S. immigration debate has centered on controversies over citizenship and “border security,” less attention has been paid to the enormous impact of immigration policies on women, who make up 51 percent of undocumented immigrants and face unique challenges as they try to make a living in a new country.
With a handful of legislators finally beginning to tackle the broken U.S. immigration system, immigration reform is back on the front page in the United States for the first time this decade. But it has never been off the radar for immigrant groups, who have witnessed first-hand the toll that indiscriminate deportation, indefinite detention, and ongoing discrimination have taken on our communities.
As I looked onto the tens of thousands of people proudly waving American flags at April’s immigration rally in Washington, D.C., I couldn’t help but think of my immigrant parents. Driven by a lack of economic opportunity and a desire for a brighter future, they escaped to the United States in their late teens. They were able to become citizens through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which included Ronald Reagan’s so-called “amnesty.”
In the U.S. immigration debate, we have thus far focused our attention on the symptom—Mexicans crossing the semi-permeable barrier into the United States—and treated the crossing itself as the problem to be solved. In other words, policy makers have been preoccupied with figuring out how to make the border less permeable. But this is a fool’s errand. It’s time to start looking at the pressures that drive unidirectional movement instead of at the symptom.
The inexorable decline of global fertility rates will just as inexorably lead to more migration of the world’s people.
The name of the neighborhood could not have been more symbolic. Located in southern Tel Aviv, the impoverished Hatikva quarter has always born the stigma of sharing a name with Israel’s national anthem, while playing home to some of the poorest, most marginalized Jews in the country—as well as a growing population of African asylum seekers, mostly from Eritrea and South Sudan.
Excited about turning 18 during a presidential election year, Jenna Johnson registered to vote with her high school classmates and cast her first ballot. She canvassed her local Minnesota neighborhood as a volunteer signing up voters. Then four years later, while sharing stories with other Korean adoptees who remembered their naturalization ceremonies, Jenna couldn’t recall ever experiencing her own. A few days later, she phoned what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service to check on her status and was shocked to learn that she was not a U.S. citizen. Her green card, which she kept as a memento from her adoption as a 2-year old, had expired.
Much of the West voiced great support for the Arab Spring. However, the European Union in particular soon curbed its enthusiastic reaction when residents of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) began streaming into Europe after turmoil from the Arab Spring left many MENA civilians unable to remain in the region. Immigration from the Middle East and North Africa to the European Union surged over the past year, causing the leaders of many EU countries to speak out against the growing influx of Arab immigrants seeking refuge within their borders.
Huong, a Vietnamese-American artist and activist, seeks to capture the magnitude of America’s immigration debate in her latest mural project, “Immigration – The Wall of Borders.” In a recent visit to FPIF, Huong was keen to emphasize the scale of the mural: eight feet high and over 200 feet long, with a planned expansion to some 400 feet by the time the mural is unveiled in Miami in January 2012.