immigrants

 Editor’s note: David Stoll teaches at Middlebury College.  He is the author of “El Norte or Bust!  How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town” (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442220683).

After many ups and downs, comprehensive immigration reform is the grand bargain showing that Democrats and Republicans can still compromise to solve a big national issue.  In exchange for tighter border controls, an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants will receive a path to citizenship.  The biggest players in the U.S. immigration debate will get more legal immigrants, more family reunification, more guestworkers and more sophisticated enforcement.

So will the rest of us – including the 22 million Americans who, according to the Labor Department’s U6 category, are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to even look for work. What are the implications for them?  If you believe American capitalism is a rising tide that lifts all boats, there’s nothing to worry about in the long run.  Immigrants are good for business and good for economic growth.

If you look at the U.S. labor force, there is plenty to worry about. The sociologist William Julius Wilson calls it “the disappearance of work,” visible first in inner-cities and now elsewhere. Declining youth employment, declining participation in the workforce, more off-the-books employment, stagnant or declining wages for most Americans – all have multiple causes, but the causes include the preference of American employers for foreign workers.

 FLUSHING, N.Y. — Qian Wu thought the man who brutally attacked her was gone forever.

 CAGLE NEWS SYNDICATE

Slow news days like weekends or holidays are the best time for the federal government to sneak in an announcement that would otherwise outrage the public. With immigration occupying the front and center stage, a pro-illegal alien policy decision that would rile up enforcement-minded citizens is best done in the cloak of darkness.

In its non-stop effort to eviscerate immigration laws, the Department of Homeland Security operating with President Obama's blessing posted an item in the little read Federal Register stating that certain aliens would soon be granted "unlawful presence waivers." Simply put, illegal aliens who can prove they have a U.S. citizen relative will get a waiver that allows them to remain in the country until their legal residency application is processed.

Los Angeles, CA

According to a report released by Fronteras at the beginning of March, the number of Mexicans seeking political asylum in the U.S. has nearly doubled in the last year. Fronteras, a multimedia collaboration of radio stations, compared the U.S. Department of Justice Immigration Courts Asylum Statistics from 2010 and 2011, finding an increase of 2,900 applicants as a result of the country's drug war violence.