Op-ed/Articles

GMC affiliate Kevin Johnson and Karla McKanders of Vanderbilt's Law School recently published an Op-Ed arguing the importance of recognizing how systemic racism is rooted in immigration laws.

To read the full opinion piece, click here.

GMC Graduate Student Affiliate Jeremy Rud recently published an article for Davis Vanguard stressing the current difficulties in the Sacramento Afghan community in filing Humanitarian Parole applications for loved ones still in Afghanistan.

To read the original article, click here.

For the readers who wish to get involved, contact Norcal Resist.

A new memo by GMC Director Giovanni Peri and GMC Graduate Student Affiliate Reem Zaiour notes the effect of travel restrictions related to the COVID-19 Pandemic on immigrant arrivals in the United States. The data suggests that there has been two million fewer migrants than expected based on previous trends, where one million of those would have been college educated. This drop in foreign labor supply evidently seems to be a contributor of the current job shortage and could remain as an impediment as employment recovery as the economy heats up.

A New Policy Brief by Zofia Wlodarczyk and Joanna Regulska has been added to the Policy Briefs page on the Global Migration Website. We encourage everybody to check it out!

GMC Affiliate Jeffrey Kahn wrote about the decision from the Biden administration to support Title 42 expulsions. What Kahn finds particularly disturbing is that the administration's justification demonstrates the same err in logic as it did in the 1990s - that public health safety necessitates a retraction of asylum protection to Haitian immigrants. This logic rhymes with reasoning employed in the 1990s when HIV-positive Haitian immigrants were detained in Guantánamo, despite the opposition from the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the CDC, and WHO.

GMC Affiliate Jeffrey Kahn's article on the role of Guantanamo Bay as a detention center for Haitian migrants and its connection with the ongoing events at the southern border was featured by the Boston Review. 

Read the full article here.

Robert Irwin has published a feature article, "The Biden Administration's Waning Credibility on Humanitarian Migration Policy: The Unethical Treatment of Haitians at the Texas Border," on the foreign policy news and commentary website.

Find the article here.

In his recent opinion editorial titled "Forget ICE. Tax Law is Becoming the New Border Patrol", Sarkar demonstrates how the lack of tax benefits extended to partially or entirely undocumented families may be a greater deterrent for US immigration than ICE. Sarkar argues that the ethics and legalities of denying tax credit must be placed under greater scrutiny.

Research by Pérez and coauthors found itself in a recent opinion piece by David Brooks. Brooks attempts to answer a question on the minds of many individuals in the contemporary: just how racist is America? Brooks used the research by Pérez and company in his discussion of financial mobility rates for immigrants. The research revealed that children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born. But to Brooks, is this enough to conclude that America is free of any race related sins?

Biden's plan of comprehensive immigration reform generated grievances from many anti-immigrant activists and politicians. What is lost upon these critics is how the proposed legislation pertains to two separate populations of migrants: those who have been deported and those who seek asylum. Irwin illustrates that the difference between these two groups creates a necessary dissimilarity in the proposed policies of the Biden administration.

European countries have faced a longstanding dilemma of how to best integrate refugees into their economies. Some countries elect to teach language skills to refugees while others opt to assist in job searching. The article published by Dr. Peri and coauthors investigates the impact of teaching language skills more closely. What they found was that providing language training greatly increased the employment rate and wage rate of refugees, along with many other benefits.

Irwin discusses the potential ramifications of Biden's proposed immigration overhaul. The most recent legislative pieces aim to end the practice of separating immigrant families. To illustrate the devastating effects that splitting family can have, Irwin features accounts from two immigrants who have fallen victim to family separation.

To read the full article in The Conversation, click here. 

The opinion-editorial is related to the recent minimum wage proposal by Senators Tom Cotton (R_Ark.) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah). The proposal calls for the federal minimum wage to be raised to $10 per hour by 2025. Though it seems like a substantial increase from the current $7.25 per hour  , Costa shows that this minimum wage in real terms does not even surpass the minimum wage of the 1960s. Costa discusses how this would affect wage workers in the United States and how it relates to the economic outlook for immigrants.

Kevin Johnson got his op-ed featured on the website "The Conversation" last week. His editorial focuses on the the change in rhetoric regarding immigrants under the Biden administration. He argues that exchanging the word "alien" for "noncitizen" could dramatically influence Americans' views on the rights of noncitizens. This one-word shift, Johnson claims, could lead to huge changes in laws regarding immigration and civil rights. 

A new op-ed by GMC Graduate Student Affiliates Justin Wiltshire and Derek Rury was featured in the Orlando Sentinel. They cite their paper on the economic effects of Puerto Rican migration after Hurricane Maria to outline how better immigration policy by the Biden Administration can be used to bolster the post-pandemic economic recovery.