President Trump’s promised assault on immigration, including a pledge to end the DACA program, was critical to his election victory in 2016.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump will not try again to immediately terminate President Barack Obama’s program that protects young undocumented immigrants, after the Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Mr. Trump’s first attempt to make good on a crackdown that is at the core of his political identity.
Instead, the administration announced new restrictions on the program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which has allowed about 650,000 undocumented immigrants to live and work in the country legally.
Amid a “comprehensive review” of the program, Chad Wolf, the acting homeland security secretary, announced in a memo that immigrants who already had protections would be allowed to renew their status under the program for one year, rather than two. The memo, which is intended to replace the one that originally established DACA in 2012, also said that first-time applicants to the program would be rejected.
The announcement appears to directly contradict an order by a federal judge, who ruled last month that the administration must immediately begin accepting new applications for the program. It will most likely face immediate legal challenges.
“We obviously have no choice but to go back to court,” said Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer on the case against the administration’s move to eliminate DACA that reached the Supreme Court. “It was illegal the first time, and now it’s a constitutional crisis. It’s as if a Supreme Court decision was written with invisible ink.”
Immigrants rights groups saw the revised memo as a first step toward completely eliminating DACA. It could also energize Mr. Trump’s base by suggesting that the program would eventually be scrapped, while helping the president avoid the blowback from images of young people being deported just before the election.
A Pew Research Center poll conducted in June found that three-quarters of Americans support not only allowing so-called Dreamers to remain in the United States, but also providing them a path to permanent residency.
“I think they made the calculation that by deferring the final blow to DACA until after the election that they would be able to escape taking the hardest hit,” said Omar Jadwat, who directs the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
Officials declined to say how long the review would take or whether it would be completed before the general election in November, although the decision to allow one-year renewals suggested that Mr. Trump and his aides did not envision making another attempt to end the program before the vote.
Many of the hundreds of thousands of DACA beneficiaries who have felt their futures to be in peril reacted with exasperation to the latest development.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” said Pierre R. Berastaín, whose application for a two-year renewal of his DACA status, which allows him to work at Harvard University, his alma mater, was approved this past month. “I’m very cognizant of the tremendous anxiety of people who are in limbo.”
Mr. Berastaín said that as he waited for a Supreme Court decision on his fate, he dusted off an old safety plan he had developed as a student and updated it with current contact information for his loved ones, his lawyers and any elected officials who might be able to intervene on his behalf if he was arrested by immigration authorities.
“I had this extreme anxiety and depression because of the instability of my situation,” he said.
Groups that favor tighter restrictions on immigration were gratified that the program would at least be curtailed.
“It’s a smart move,” said Jessica M. Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, one such group. “In this way, he manages to keep the ball in Congress’s court without having to keep the program going on autopilot.”
Ms. Vaughan said she thought Congress should ultimately decide the fate of the program, but that for now lawmakers should remain focused on responding to the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis.
Mr. Trump’s promised assault on immigration, including a pledge to end DACA, was critical to his election victory in 2016 and became a central part of his administration’s agenda as he moved to keep out refugees and asylum seekers, to build a wall across the southwestern border and to reduce legal immigration.
Mr. Trump’s initial move to end DACA in 2017 was blocked for more than two years by federal judges who said he had failed to provide proper justification for ending a program that allowed some young undocumented immigrants to live and work in the United States without the threat of deportation.
The Supreme Court agreed last month.
The president has long argued that DACA was an illegal use of executive authority by his predecessor. But he has wavered about what should be done to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who benefit from it. At a White House news briefing Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump said, “We are going to make DACA happy and the DACA people and representatives happy, and also end up with a fantastic merit-based immigration system.”
He again said he was working on a merit-based immigration bill that he could enact without Congress, an assertion that is false.
Thousands of undocumented young people who have turned 15 since the original rescission — the minimum age required to apply — had expected the government to begin accepting new applications to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision.
However, the agency that processes DACA applications has been rejecting them, according to immigration lawyers, while it has continued to process renewals for current recipients.
Most legal scholars interpreted the ruling to mean that the original program had been revived and that, therefore, new applications must be accepted. An administration official said on Tuesday that the memo issued that day would legally justify the decision against approving new applications.
Mr. Obama created DACA in 2012 after Congress refused to provide a permanent path to citizenship for the young immigrants. Most of the Dreamers are in many ways indistinguishable from the American citizens with whom they attended elementary, middle and high school.
The program has strict requirements. To be eligible, applicants have to show that they had committed no serious crimes, had arrived in the United States before they turned 16 and were no older than 30, had lived in the United States for at least the previous five years, and were in school, had graduated from high school or had received a General Educational Development certificate, or were honorably discharged from the military.
Mr. Trump has at times expressed sympathy for the immigrants who are protected by the program even as he denounced it as an illegal use of presidential authority.
In 2017, his hard-line advisers — including Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration agenda; Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist; and Jeff Sessions, his attorney general — urged him to end the program, which at the time faced a legal challenge from several conservative attorneys general.
Michael Crowley contributed reporting from in New Haven, Conn.; Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Washington; and Miriam Jordan from Los Angeles.
In an effort to combat Chinese espionage in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has recently launched a nationwide investigation aimed at Chinese student visa holders suspected of having undisclosed Chinese military ties.
FBI officials interviewed Chinese student visa holders in more than 25 American cities—an initiative that some experts call the largest known crackdown since the United States and China restored diplomatic relations in 1979.
Chinese espionage via student visa programs has become an increasing threat to the nation’s national security.Many of these students have direct ties to Chinese military and its ruling Communist Party and are sent to acquire knowledge of U.S. technological, military, and cyber operations.
The seriousness with which the FBI is taking the Chinese espionage threat is not unwarranted. Chinese visa holders represented more than a third, or approximately 370,000, of the 1.1 total number of student visa holders in the 2018-2019 school year. Some of these holders committed high-level crimes including recruiting spies for Chinese intelligence agencies, transporting U.S. cancer research cells to Chinese universities, and sending U.S. military documents and information to China.
Chinese spying operations against the U.S. do not end at universities. In the past few decades, China has also attempted to infiltrate American embassies and the highest levels of American corporations. In 2017, members of the Chinese military were indicted for breaching the credit reporting company Equifax, which exposed the personal information of some 150 million Americans to fraud and abuse.
In addition to the FBI’s nationwide investigation, there have been other recent increased efforts to help address espionage concerns. In May, the State Department prepared to revoke the visas of some 3,000 Chinese students in the U.S—an all-time high—citing national security concerns as its primary reason. In July, the Trump administration considered travel restrictions on members of the Chinese Communist Party to the United States. During the same month, the administration also barred new foreign students, many of them Chinese nationals, if they were taking classes solely online as a way to prevent fraud and other national security risks.
Before the opening session of trade negotiations between U.S. and Chinese trade representatives at Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China, February 14, 2019. /Reuters
The vast majority of Chinese students are not compromising the nation’s national security, but it remains critically important to mitigate real threats posed by the Chinese government. Student visa programs should benefit both the United States and students seeking to advance their education. Yet, China continues to exploit these programs to gain a competitive advantage over the U.S. economy, military, and technology sectors.
Since the first census of the United States in 1790, counts that include both citizens and noncitizens have been used to apportion seats in the House of Representatives, with states gaining or losing based on population change over the previous decade. If unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. were removed from the 2020 census apportionment count – which the White House seeks to do – three states could each lose a seat they otherwise would have had and three others each could gain one, according to a Pew Research Center analysis based on government records.
If unauthorized immigrants were excluded from the apportionment count, California, Florida and Texas would each end up with one less congressional seat than they would have been awarded based on population change alone. California would lose two seats instead of one, Florida would gain one instead of two, and Texas would gain two instead of three, according to analysis based on projections of Census Bureau 2019 population estimates and the Center’s estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population.
This blog post explores the role of the nation’s unauthorized immigrant population in apportionment of congressional seats. Every decade, the U.S. Census Bureau conducts a count of all people living in the country, which is then used to distribute seats in the House of Representatives to the states. The analysis in this blog post is based on projections using Census Bureau population estimates, Pew Research Center estimates of the size of the unauthorized immigrant population and established formulas for assigning congressional seats.
The Method of Equal Proportions assigns congressional seats to states based on their populations after each state is given their first seat. The method requires 50 state population figures and assigns seats sequentially; it stops after the 435th seat is assigned. Our population figures for 2020 are based on the Census Bureau’s official population estimates for 2018 and 2019 projected to April 1, 2020. We use these for our baseline apportionment.
The Pew Research Center has published estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population for states through 2017. The estimates for 2016 and 2017 show very little change, and external indications suggest few changes since then. Accordingly, we use our 2017 estimates for 2020 and subtract them from the total to provide the populations for an apportionment which excludes unauthorized immigrants.
Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio would each hold onto a seat that they would have lost if apportionment were based only on total population change. Alabama filed a lawsuit in 2018 seeking to block the Census Bureau from including unauthorized immigrants in its population count.
In addition to these states, 11 more would gain or lose seats based on population change alone, whether unauthorized immigrants are included or excluded. Five states would gain one seat each: Arizona, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon. Six states would lose one seat each: Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia.
The apportionment of seats in Congress is required by the U.S. Constitution, which says that the census will be used to divide the House of Representatives “among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State,” except for enslaved people, who, until the late 1800s, were counted as three-fifths of a person, and certain American Indians. The 14th Amendment eliminated the partial count of enslaved people, and the total American Indian population was added later to congressional reapportionment calculations. The number of seats in the House was fixed at 435 following the 1910 census. Each state gets one seat, and the remainder are assigned according to a complex formula based on relative population size.
The census count includes everyone living in the United States, except for foreign tourists and business travelers in the country temporarily, according to Census Bureau rules. For apportionment purposes since 1990, military and civilian federal employees stationed abroad and their dependents are counted as living in a state if they provided a state address in their employment records. The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and U.S. Island area populations are excluded from the apportionment total because they have no voting representation in Congress.
Federal law requires the population totals from the decennial census be delivered to the president nine months after Census Day, meaning Dec. 31, 2020. The Census Bureau has requested Congress extend the deadline to April 30, 2021, due to the coronavirus pandemic, although the White House reportedly may push for a “timely census” fueled by $1 billion in additional funding. States would redraw congressional district boundaries to fit the new totals. The results would take effect for the Congress that meets in 2023.
In his memorandum announcing a new policy “to the extent practicable” in how congressional seats are divided up, President Donald Trump asserted that the president has discretion to decide who is considered an inhabitant of the U.S. for apportionment purposes. Some of the same groups that successfully challenged the White House attempt to add a citizenship question to the census last year said they also would sue to block any change in apportionment policy. Democrats announced they would hold an emergency congressional hearing to respond.
The Census Bureau does not regularly publish counts or estimates of unauthorized immigrants, although the Department of Homeland Security has done so. Last year, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against including a question about citizenship on the 2020 census, the president ordered the Census Bureau to assemble a separate database, using other government records, on the citizenship status of every U.S. resident. This has also been challenged in court.
The Center’s analysis relies on assumptions about populations to be counted in the 2020 census and estimates of unauthorized immigrants. The actual figures used for apportionment will be different from these, and so the actual apportionment could differ regardless of whether unauthorized immigrants are excluded from the apportionment totals.
D’Vera Cohnis a senior writer/editor focusing on immigration and demographics at Pew Research Center.
Environmentalists are making a last-ditch effort at the Supreme Court to stop the continued construction of parts of President Trump’s border wall.
The Sierra Club asked the justices to undo their decision from a year ago that allowed construction now that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that the administration’s use of funds for the wall is unlawful.
Without the Supreme Court’s action, say lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition, the Trump administration could simply run out the clock.
“The Trump administration has lost in every lower court, but is still rushing to complete the president’s border wall before the Supreme Court can review the merits of this case,” said Dror Ladin, an ACLU lawyer. “If the administration succeeds, there will be no border wall construction left to stop by the time the Supreme Court hears this case.”
A panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled last month that Trump’s transfer last year of $2.5 billion in military funds to pay for border wall construction was an illegal overreach of executive authority.
The president, who ran for office in 2016 promising that Mexico would pay for the border wall, has obtained more than $15 billion in U.S. federal funds for his signature project, including $5 billion provided by Congress through conventional appropriations. The president has tapped into Pentagon accounts for the remaining $10 billion, including the $2.5 billion transfer last year that the Ninth Circuit said was unlawful.
Last summer, the Supreme Court on a 5 to 4 vote allowed the administration to proceed with the transfers and contracts for construction even though House Democrats, affected states and environmental groups said that violated the will of Congress, which withheld the funds from the administration.
I stand with the Wall of Moms and I see a WALL OF AMERICANS against Trump.
‘Wall of Moms’ groups, inspired by Portland protesters, emerge in New York, Chicago and D.C. – The Washington Post https://t.co/PbPfgrUCoa
But in allowing the administration last summer to proceed, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said that the government had “made a sufficient showing at this stage” that private entities could not challenge the transfer of money by the executive branch.
Now, the Ninth Circuit panel in San Francisco agreed with a district judge who said that was not so. “It is for the courts to enforce Congress’s priorities,” the panel said in a 2 to 1 decision, and it found the Sierra Club “may invoke separation-of-powers constraints, like the Appropriations Clause, to challenge agency spending in excess of its delegated authority.”
The ACLU in its filing Wednesday said that the high court needs to step in now, or else it will be too late.
The administration has 150 days to appeal the Ninth Circuit’s decision, the ACLU petition says. Absent emergency action from the Supreme Court, “defendants will complete the entire wall before they even need to file a petition for certiorari with this court,” the petition states.
Outrage is mounting across the United States over the abusive tactics of federal agents, led by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), against protesters in Portland. Video footage and reports from protesters in Portland appear to show agents using excessive force against protesters and journalists and arbitrarily arresting and detaining people.
But the Trump administration shows no signs of changing course. Today the president announced that federal agents would also be sent to Chicago and Albuquerque.
Chicago Mayor Lightfoot has said that her admin. would be working with federal agents to help address recent violence, but she warned the White House that she would not tolerate any abuse of power.
“We see what’s going on in Portland…which is why I’ve drawn such a sharp line.” pic.twitter.com/y23SCRQRqo
“This is the kind of thing we see in authoritarian regimes, ” Mary McCord, a Georgetown Law professor and former national security official at the US Department of Justice, told the New York Times.
A Navy vet asked federal officers in Portland to remember their oaths. Then they broke his hand.
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 20, 2020
While the actions of DHS agents in Portland are disturbing, they are also familiar. Human Rights Watch researchers working on US immigration policy have for many years seen DHS agents engage in lawless and abusive tactics against non-citizens in communities across the country. Numerous reports by Human Rights Watch and other organizations have documented frequent abuses, with little accountability.
Kayleigh McEnany White House Press Secretary just played two videos from my reporting on the ground in #Portland@RichieMcGinniss reporting was also featured in today’s briefing! pic.twitter.com/6aQiQ8GNGR
— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) July 24, 2020
The events in Portland are also part of a continuing pattern of DHS agents violating the rights of US citizens. In 2019, Customs and Border Patrol agents were revealed to have harassed, surveilled, interrogated, and detained journalists, lawyers, and activists at the US-Mexico border, interfering with their freedom of speech and movement. Border Patrol agents have been accused of racially profiling US citizens in border communities – in one case, two US citizens filed suit after being detained in Montana because Border Patrol agents had heard them speaking Spanish.
We have been watching President Trump stigmatize migrants and asylum seekers as dangerous and a threat to the US for years. We are now seeing him describe US protesters in similar broad strokes. Sending agencies with a long track record of abuse and little relevant training to police US cities highlights the contempt this administration has for the rights of US citizens and non-citizens alike.
Over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has decided to close the door to engineers, executives, information technology experts, doctors, nurses, and others who come to the United States on work visas. It has attempted to ban international students from attending American colleges and universities that hold classes virtually in the fall. And it has shown an unwavering commitment to canceling the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
Taken together, these are the most restrictionist immigration policies in nearly a century. This is a fundamental mistake at a time when our nation’s economy is already suffering.
If you want businesses to grow and the economy to rebound, you allow skilled workers to come here legally to work and contribute to the well-being of our nation; you don’t lock them out. If you want the next revolutionary start-up to be founded in America, you welcome foreign students; you don’t threaten to upend their lives and send them home during the middle of a pandemic. And if you want children to grow up to reach their potential and live their American dream, you give them the tools and certainty to succeed; you don’t kick them out of the only country they’ve ever known.
How did we get to this point?
Last month, the administration issued a proclamation severely restricting legal immigration into the United States for work purposes. The executive order puts up a “Do Not Enter” sign for all sorts of skilled workers who come to our country legally to contribute to the economy. The sweeping order will push jobs and investment overseas and slow our economic growth at a time when we need it most.
Take for example a manufacturer we heard from who is opening up a new production line here that will create jobs for American workers. To ensure that this new facility and its equipment function properly when it opens up, the company needs to temporarily employ technical experts from overseas. The administration’s proclamation directly prevents this from happening — meaning no international experts, no new production line, and no new jobs for American workers. Unfortunately, there are many other businesses across a host of industries in similar predicaments.
This week the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a coalition of trade associations and businesses, including the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Retail Federation, and TechNet, filed a joint lawsuit seeking an injunction to stop the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department from implementing the administration’s proclamation restricting the use of various nonimmigrant worker visas.
Not only does the policy threaten America’s economic interests, but these restrictions clearly exceed the authority of the executive branch, as they take a sledgehammer to the immigration laws that Congress crafted over many generations.
The administration should learn a lesson from its other attempts to restrict legal immigration.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security wisely reversed course on its policy banning international students from staying in the United States if their college or university holds classes virtually in the fall, but only after widespread condemnation of this idea and numerous lawsuits. The policy would have denied places in colleges and universities for tens of thousands of talented students and future leaders while choking off tuition revenue at a time when many schools are struggling financially. We supported the lawsuit filed by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that ultimately led to the administration rescinding this policy.
“It’s basically a ‘Not Welcome Here’ sign for engineers, executives, specialists, doctors, nurses, etc — and we cannot do that.”
The administration also can learn from its ill-fated attempt to repeal the DACA program. The program protects young people who have lived here since they were children. Last month, the Supreme Court gave the administration an out — blocking on procedural grounds the administration’s 2017 decision to rescind the DACA program. Rather than taking the opportunity to work with Congress on a permanent fix for Dreamers, the administration is considering another effort to end the program, pulling the rug out from 700,000 DACA recipients.
Taken together, these decisions form a broader policy that essentially says, “keep out the skilled, the brilliant, the young seeking to help us grow.” The administration prudently changed course on the student visa issue; it should now take the opportunity to promote economic growth and job creation by rescinding last month’s proclamation limiting legal immigration and abandoning its efforts to repeal DACA.
The Chamber hopes to work productively with the administration on these issues, as we have on a broad array of other policies like tax reform and streamlining regulation. But if the administration persists with its job-killing immigration restrictions, we will see them in court.
Thomas J. Donohue is the chief executive officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
President Trump issued an executive order on June 21 that laid out a plan to violate the U.S. Constitution by excluding undocumented immigrants from the 2020 Census. An accurate census count is vital to ensuring that each state receives their fair share of seats in the U.S House of Representatives. It also directs hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding for more than 100 programs.
Today’s Executive Order is another attempt to exclude people from being counted in the Census based on their immigration status. It is wrong and unconstitutional. We must make sure #EveryChildCounts in the #2020Census. https://t.co/eBSTWzjgpk
— Amer Acad Pediatrics (@AmerAcadPeds) July 21, 2020
1. What Does the Census Executive Order Say?
The executive order states that in January 2021, the president intends to submit a reapportionment plan to Congress that excludes all undocumented immigrants. Under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the census counts “the whole number of persons in each State” every 10 years. Between January 3 and January 10 following a census year, the president is required by law to submit a statement with that number to Congress. After that point, Congress uses the count to reapportion seats between states for the House of Representatives.
The order says that when the president submits that statement next January, he will exclude all undocumented immigrants from the count. He declares he has the discretion to determine that the word “persons” does not include undocumented immigrants. The executive order compares immigrants to tourists, who aren’t counted. That ignores that the average undocumented immigrant has been in the United States for over 15 years.
Why did President Trump issue this order? It might be to retaliate against sanctuary cities and liberal states that disagree with his immigration priorities.
Parts of the executive order strongly suggest this. The president declares that “States adopting policies that encourage illegal aliens to enter this country and that hobble Federal efforts to enforce the immigration laws passed by the Congress should not be rewarded with greater representation in the House of Representatives.” The order also says, without naming it, that one state gets additional members of Congress because it has over two million undocumented immigrants living in it. That state is California, which has long been a target for the president.
The census therefore becomes a weapon against these cities and states, which could lose out on representation and funding with an inaccurate census count.
Trump may use executive order on census question (YouTube July 2019)
The president’s extreme argument is legally indefensible.
Since the late 19th century, the Supreme Court has been clear that the word “persons” in the Constitution refers to all people, regardless of immigration status. In 1982 in Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court also made clear that the protections of the 14th Amendment, which apply to all “persons” in the United States, also apply to undocumented immigrants. And since 1790, the U.S. Census Bureau has counted every person residing in the United States during the census, regardless of immigration status. Even international students attending a university during a census year are counted.
But even if the executive order was legal, it would still be almost impossible to carry out. In 2019, the Supreme Court blocked the Census Bureau from adding a citizenship question. This means the Census Bureau will be unable to accurately determine who is or is not an immigrant and further, who is or is not undocumented.
President Trump’s abuse of power shows the lengths to which he will go to distract and divide the country in his war on immigrants. Hopefully, this illegal plan will be swiftly squashed in court.
President Trump directed the federal government on Tuesday not to count undocumented immigrants when allocating the nation’s House districts, a move that critics called a transparent political ploy to help Republicans in violation of the Constitution.The president’s directive would exclude millions of people when determining how many House seats each state should have based on the once-a-decade census, reversing the longstanding policy of counting everyone regardless of citizenship or legal status. The effect would likely shift several seats from Democratic states to Republican states.
“There used to be a time when you could proudly declare, ‘I am a citizen of the United States,’” Mr. Trump said in a written statement after signing a memorandum to the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau. “But now, the radical left is trying to erase the existence of this concept and conceal the number of illegal aliens in our country. This is all part of a broader left-wing effort to erode the rights of Americans citizens, and I will not stand for it.”
The action directly conflicts with the traditional consensus interpretation of the Constitution and will almost surely be challenged in court, potentially delaying its effect if not blocking its enactment altogether. But it fit into Mr. Trump’s efforts to curb both legal and illegal immigration at a time when he is anxiously trying to galvanize his political base heading into a fall election season trailing his Democratic opponent.
“I think the Donald Trump view is: ‘I can look like I’m trying to do something by stoking anti-immigrant fervor, and if I lose in court then, I just stoke anti-court fervor too,’” Joshua A. Geltzer, the director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown, said in an interview. “It should be legally impossible as well as factually difficult to do.”
The move comes a year after Mr. Trump was blocked by the Supreme Court from adding a citizenship question to the census on the grounds that its ostensible reasoning “seems to have been contrived.” The administration has been trying ever since to collect information on undocumented immigrants through separate means like driver’s license files.
A study last year by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports limits on immigration, found that excluding immigrants from the count for purposes of drawing congressional districts would take away seats from some states while giving more to others.
Excluding unauthorized immigrants in 2020 would redistribute three seats, the study found, with California, New York and Texas all losing a seat that they would have had otherwise, while Ohio, Alabama and Minnesota would each gain one. The study found even more sweeping effects if the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants were excluded, but the president’s directive made no mention of them.
Steven Camarota, the research director for the center, said the administration’s effort would be difficult administratively and likely tied up in court. “Nevertheless,” he said, “the president has done the country an important service by reminding us that tolerating large-scale illegal immigration creates a number of unavoidable consequences, including diluting the political representation of American citizens in Congress and the Electoral College.”
The White House separately asked congressional appropriators last weekend to include $1 billion into the next coronavirus relief package for the purpose of conducting a “timely census.” The Census Bureau had previously sought permission to extend the tally of the hardest-to-count people into October and delay delivery of reapportionment population totals to next year.
The $1 billion could allow the bureau to abandon that plan and accelerate the counting to deliver a reapportionment count to Congress in December, before Mr. Trump leaves office if he loses the election to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. It could mean that less time is devoted to counting the marginalized people than in a normal census, which experts believe would benefit Republicans.
The president’s directive on Tuesday amounted to his latest election-year effort to restrict immigration and immigration rights in the United States, lately predicated on the need to stem the spread of the coronavirus.
The administration decided last month to suspend new work visas and bar hundreds of thousands of foreigners from seeking employment in the United States, drawing immediate opposition from business leaders and several states.
But last week administration officials backed away from a separate plan to strip international college students of their visas if they did not attend at least some classes in person. Earlier this month, Mr. Trump told Telemundo that he would sign a “much bigger bill on immigration” through an executive order, although that has not come to fruition.
The president’s move to exclude unauthorized immigrants from congressional apportionment upends a long history. Even as he signed his memorandum on Tuesday, the Census Bureau’s own website continued to say in a question-and-answer section that undocumented residents are to be counted: “Yes, all people (citizens and noncitizens) with a usual residence in the 50 states are to be included in the census and thus in the apportionment counts.”
The president’s policy appeared at odds with the Constitution, which requires the government to conduct an “actual enumeration” of all people living in the United States without distinguishing whether they are citizens. But the memorandum signed by Mr. Trump argued that the government has always made distinctions like not counting foreign diplomats or temporary visitors even though they are in the United States physically. Therefore, the memorandum argued, the government can make the further distinction of not counting people who have no legal right to be in the country in the first place.
Critics said the administration’s efforts first to include a citizenship question and now to disregard undocumented immigrants from apportionment would lead to undercounts of even legal noncitizens and minority residents, resulting in less representation and federal funding in areas where they live, which tend to vote Democratic.
Marielena Hincapié, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center Immigrant Justice Fund, said that regardless of whether Mr. Trump’s latest action was legal, it would discourage compliance with the census among Latinos, who already complete the survey at lower rates than people of other races.
“This is his go-to play every time that he’s feeling cornered or he’s feeling like he’s losing,” Ms. Hincapié said. “He uses immigrants and immigration to divide and distract, and at the same time he sends that chilling effect through all immigrant communities who have already been living in fear under his administration.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced last week that it was launching a “Citizens Academy” in Chicago. The move justifiably generated everything from confusion to anger and fear from elected officials and community members. The program is already the subject of recently introduced bills to ban funding for it.
ICE describes the program as a six-day training that will launch on September 15. The program is targeted toward stakeholders, including religious leaders, community-based organizations, and local, state, and federal public officials. ICE’s Enforcement & Removal Operations (ERO) unit will run the program. The ERO office is tasked with arresting, detaining, and deporting people from the United States.
The agency claims “participants will hear directly from ERO officers and learn about ICE policies and procedures.” The program will also afford ICE “the opportunity to hear from participants, understand their perspectives and debunk myths.” But the invitation letter addresses another component of the program:
Those who attend will have the opportunity to “participate in scenario-based training and exercises conducted in a safe and positive environment,” which will include “defensive tactics, firearms familiarization, and targeted arrests.”
The public has good cause to reject what ICE has pitched as an effort at transparency and engagement.
Many communities have been subjected to stepped-up immigration enforcement during the Trump administration.
They know firsthand that ICE can and will escalate its tactics to continue to arrest, detain and deport more and more people from the United States.
According to ICE, the program includes visiting a detention center and learning more about ICE’s health care system. Participants will also hear about ICE’s “role in ensuring dignity, respect and due process of an immigration case from start to finish.” Actions speak louder than words, however, and ICE’s past track record speaks for itself.
ICE has a poor track record with ensuring “dignity, respect, and due process” too. In Chicago, where the pilot program take place, a lawsuit alleging that ICE violated the immigration statute and the Constitution has been allowed to proceed by a district court judge. The lawsuit alleges that ICE engaged in unlawful tactics during a week of enforcement operations in May 2018, which include racial profiling and forcing Latino residents to get fingerprinted.
16-Jul: ICE is creating armed civilian militias and training them to “detain immigrants” on America’s streets.
ICE’s six-week, invite-only “Citizens Academy” course includes training on “defensive tactics, firearms familiarization and targeted arrests.” https://t.co/UxfmMGqkmM
The description of the “Citizens Academy” training has rightly prompted the Chicago mayor as well as members of Congress to denounce any effort to train community members to target friends and neighbors for immigration enforcement or to otherwise encourage vigilantism.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a scenario in which the public and targeted communities can trust ICE’s motives. But ICE’s “Citizen’s Academy” is certainly not a welcome move.
Steven A. Camarota is the director of research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center. Jason Richwine, PhD, is a public policy analyst based in Washington, D.C., and a contributing writer at National Review.
An analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies of public-use data released earlier this month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that while there was some improvement in the number and share of native-born Americans and immigrants (legal and illegal) out of work, unemployment remains extraordinarily high. The unemployment rate improved slightly more for immigrants than for the native-born between May and June, but native unemployment at 10.7 percent remains a good deal lower than the 13.8 percent for immigrants. Despite the recent improvement, the 18.1 million unemployed immigrants and natives in June is still nearly three times what it was in June last year. While workers of every education level have experienced significant job losses during the Covid-19 shutdown, the situation for workers without a college education is especially bleak. It remains extremely difficult to justify the continued entry of new immigrants on the grounds of any “labor shortage”.
Among the findings:
The unemployment rate for native-born Americans (ages 16-plus) was 10.7 percent in June. While lower than the 12.4 percent in May, it is still almost three times what it was before Covid-19 hit. Among immigrants (ages 16-plus), the rate was 13.8 percent in June, compared to 15.8 percent in May. The immigrant rate is still nearly four times what it was before Covid-19. (Figure 1, Table 1B)
The number of natives and immigrants unemployed declined by about 12 percent for both groups between May and June. Still, the number of natives and immigrants unemployed stood at 18.1 million, nearly three times what it was in February, before Covid-19 hit. (Figure 2, Table 1A)
In addition to the unemployed, there were 45.7 million working-age (16-64) native-born and 9.4 million working-age immigrants entirely out of the labor force — neither working nor looking for work. This is still 1.7 million higher for the native-born and 800,000 higher for immigrants than it was in February. (Table 2A)
We estimate the unemployment rate for legal immigrants in June was 13.3 percent, an improvement from the 15.6 percent in May. The rate for illegal immigrants was 15.1 percent, an improvement from 16.4 percent in May. (Our estimates by legal status are approximations only.) (Table 4B)
Among the less-educated:
The unemployment rate for the native-born (ages 25-plus) without a bachelor’s degree was 10.8 percent in June, compared to 6.6 percent for those with at least a bachelor’s. Among immigrants (ages 25-plus), 16.3 percent without a bachelor’s degree were unemployed, compared to 8.9 percent with a bachelor’s. (Table 1B)
The unemployment rate (combined immigrant and native-born) in many jobs typically performed by the less-educated has improved but remains high. (Table 3C)
28.5 percent for food preparers and servers
21.4 percent for maids and housekeepers
20.1 percent for retail salespersons
15 percent for construction laborers
7.2 percent for health care aides and nursing assistants
The Covid-19 shutdown has exacerbated the long-term decline in the labor force participation rate (share working or looking for work) of the less-educated. In June 2020, only 67 percent of working-age (16-64) natives without a bachelor’s degree were in the labor force, down from 72 percent in 2007 and 76 percent in 2000. (Figure 5)
Focusing only on men who are of prime working age (25 to 54) still shows a long-term decline in labor force participation. The share of these native-born men without a bachelors in the labor force was 83 percent in June 2020, compared to 88 percent in June 2007 and 90 percent in June 2000. (Figure 6)
Data and Methods
This report uses the Current Population Survey (CPS) to examine the employment situation in the United States as of June 2020, with particular attention paid to differences between immigrants and natives. Based on a monthly survey of 60,000 households, the CPS is the nation’s primary source for the unemployment rate and other labor force statistics. The sample is weighted to reflect the actual size and demographic makeup of the civilian non-institutionalized population. The raw data used in this analysis comes directly from the Census Bureau, which collects the data for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.1
Key Concepts and Terms. The labor force includes all workers, plus non-workers who have actively looked for work in the four weeks prior to the survey. The standard unemployment rate, referred to by the BLS as the U-3 rate, is calculated by dividing the number actively looking for work by the number in the labor force. The labor force participation rate is simply the share of people in the labor force.
Definition of Immigrant. The foreign-born in the CPS are all persons who were not U.S. citizens at birth. They include naturalized citizens, permanent residents (green card holders), temporary visitors, guestworkers, and illegal aliens. We use the term “immigrant” to encompass all of these foreign-born individuals. In Tables 1A, 1B, 2A, and 2B we report figures separately for non-citizens and naturalized citizens. Tables 4A, 4B, 5A, and 5B report figures for legal immigrants and illegal immigrants separately.
Identifying Illegal Immigrants. Prior research indicates that most illegal immigrants are included in Census data. To determine which respondents are most likely to be illegal aliens, CIS first excludes immigrant respondents who are almost certainly not illegal aliens — for example, spouses of native-born citizens; veterans; people who have government jobs; Cubans (because of special rules for that country); immigrants who arrived before 1980 (because the 1986 amnesty should have already covered them); people in certain occupations requiring licensing, screening, or a government background check (e.g., doctors, pharmacists, and law enforcement); and people likely to be on student visas.
The remaining candidates are weighted to replicate known characteristics of the illegal population (population size, age, gender, region or country of origin, state of residence, and length of residence in the United States). CIS has previously used the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the source of those known characteristics; however, DHS data were last published in 2015. For more recent data, we turn to 2018 estimates from the Center for Migration Studies (CMS), including their estimates of educational attainment.2 The resulting illegal population, which consists of a weighted set of CPS respondents, is designed to match CMS on the characteristics listed above. However, we do not adjust the number of illegal immigrants for undercount in the CPS.3 Estimates for legal immigrants are calculated simply by subtracting estimated counts of illegal immigrants from the total immigrant population.
All of our findings that separate immigrants by legal status should be considered rough approximations only. Because we do not have information about the illegal immigrant population in 2020, we are forced to take the known characteristics of illegal aliens from 2018 and apply them to the new labor market data in 2020. The primary weakness of this approach is that it assumes the illegal immigrant population still has the same demographic profile (population size, age, gender, etc.) as it did in 2018.
Matching Published BLS Tables. In this report, all statistics covering the entire population, such as the headline unemployment rate, match those published by the BLS. However, the counts and percentages for sub-populations will in some cases be slightly different. The reason is that the Census Bureau adds “perturbations” to the public-use microdata to protect respondent confidentiality. Fortunately, the Census Bureau states that any differences between published figures and those calculated from the public-use data will be so small that they “fall well within the sampling variability associated with CPS estimates”.4 In other words, there should be no meaningful difference between statistics calculated from the pubic-use data and those published by the BLS.
Finally, the figures in this report are not seasonally adjusted. Unadjusted figures are conceptually simpler and easier for other researchers to replicate.5 Also, the limited number of statistics on the foreign-born published in the BLS monthly “Employment Situation” reports are also not seasonally adjusted.
Potential Problems with the Data. The BLS reports a potential problem with the CPS for March, April, May, and June.6 First, the response rates in all these months were significantly lower than prior months. This increased the sampling error of the surveys for these months. However, “BLS was still able to obtain estimates that met our standards for accuracy and reliability,” according to statement from the bureau. Second, interviewers who administered the survey miscoded some respondents as employed when they were on furlough temporarily laid off, or in similar situations. They should have been considered temporarily laid off and coded as unemployed. The number unemployed and the unemployment rate would be higher in March through June if these individuals were counted as unemployed. Neither the Census Bureau, which collects the data, nor the BLS has altered the data in response to these issues. Our analysis takes the raw CPS data as provided; and our results match published non-seasonally adjusted figures, with the caveats about perturbations in public use data discussed above.
3 In 2018, CMS estimated a total illegal immigrant population of 10.6 million, which includes an undercount adjustment for those missed in Census Bureau data. Our analysis of the CPS totals to 9.8 million illegal immigrants, reflecting a 7.5 percent undercount.
6 For a brief discussion of the problems with the CPS beginning in March, see the section entitled, “Coronavirus (COVID-19) Impact on June 2020 Establishment and Household Survey Data” at the bottom of the June Employment Situation press release. For a more detailed look at the issues see the statement issued by BLS on the matter for June.
