The Associated Press (June 15, 2012)

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and have since led law-abiding lives. The election-year initiative addresses a top priority of an influential Latino electorate that has been vocal in its opposition to administration deportation policies.

The policy change, described to The Associated Press by two senior administration officials, will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants who have lived in fear of deportation. It also bypasses Congress and partially achieves the goals of the so-called DREAM Act, a long-sought but never enacted plan to establish a path toward citizenship for young people who came to the United States illegally but who have attended college or served in the military.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was to announce the new policy Friday, one week before President Barack Obama plans to address the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials’ annual conference in Orlando, Fla. Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney is scheduled to speak to the group on Thursday.

Obama planned to discuss the new policy Friday afternoon from the White House Rose Garden.

Under the administration plan, illegal immigrants will be immune from deportation if they were brought to the United States before they turned 16 and are younger than 30, have been in the country for at least five continuous years, have no criminal history, graduated from a U.S. high school or earned a GED, or served in the military. They also can apply for a work permit that will be good for two years with no limits on how many times it can be renewed. The officials who described the plan spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it in advance of the official announcement.

The policy will not lead toward citizenship but will remove the threat of deportation and grant the ability to work legally, leaving eligible immigrants able to remain in the United States for extended periods. It tracks closely to a proposal offered by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as an alternative to the DREAM Act.

“Many of these young people have already contributed to our country in significant ways,” Napolitano wrote in a memorandum describing the administration’s action. “Prosecutorial discretion, which is used in so many other areas, is especially justified here.”

The extraordinary move comes in an election year in which the Hispanic vote could be critical in swing states like Colorado, Nevada and Florida. While Obama enjoys support from a majority of Hispanic voters, Latino enthusiasm for the president has been tempered by the slow economic recovery, his inability to win congressional support for a broad overhaul of immigration laws and by his administration’s aggressive deportation policy. Activists opposing his deportation policies last week mounted a hunger strike at an Obama campaign office in Denver, and other protests were planned for this weekend.

The change is likely to cause an outcry from congressional Republicans, who are sure to perceive Obama’s actions as an end run around them. Republicans already have complained that previous administration uses of prosecutorial discretion in deportations amount to back-door amnesty. Romney and many Republican lawmakers want tighter border security measures before considering changes in immigration law. Romney opposes offering legal status to illegal immigrants who attend college but has said he would do so for those who serve in the armed forces.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll last month found Obama leading Romney among Hispanic voters 61 percent to 27 percent. But his administration’s deportation policies have come under fire, and Latino leaders have raised the subject in private meetings with the president. In 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported a record 396,906 people and is expected to deport about 400,000 this year.

A December poll by the Pew Hispanic Center showed that 59 percent of Latinos disapproved of the president’s handling of deportations.

The changes come a year after the administration announced plans to focus on deporting serious criminals, immigrants who pose threats to public safety and national security, and serious immigration law violators.

One of the officials said the latest policy change is just another step in the administration’s evolving approach to immigration.

Under the plan, immigrants whose deportation cases are pending in immigration court will have to prove their eligibility for a reprieve to ICE, which will begin dealing with such cases in 60 days. Any immigrant who already has a deportation order and those who never have been encountered by immigration authorities will deal with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The exact details of how the program will work, including how much immigrants will have to pay to apply and what proof they will need, still are being worked out.

In making it harder to deport, the Obama administration is in essence employing the same eligibility requirements spelled out in the proposed DREAM Act.

The administration officials stopped short of calling the change an administrative DREAM Act – the name is an acronym for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors – but the qualifications meet those laid out in a 2010 version that failed in the Senate after passing in the House. They said the DREAM Act, in some form, and comprehensive overhaul of the immigration system remained an administration priority.

Illegal immigrant children won’t be eligible to apply for the deportation waiver until they turn 16, but the officials said younger children won’t be deported either.

Last year, Napolitano announced plans to review about 300,000 pending deportation cases and indefinitely suspend those that didn’t meet department priorities. So far, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reviewed more than 232,000 cases and decided to stop working on about 20,000. About 4,000 of those 20,000 have opted to keep fighting in court to stay in the United States legally. For the people who opted to close their cases, work permits are not guaranteed.

by Jeffrey Passel, D’Vera Cohn and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera
Pew Research Center (April 23, 2012)

To download the complete report, click here

The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill. After four decades that brought 12 million current immigrants-more than half of whom came illegally-the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped-and may have reversed, according to a new analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center of multiple government data sets from both countries.

The standstill appears to be the result of many factors, including the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and changing economic conditions in Mexico.

The report is based on the Center’s analysis of data from five different Mexican government sources and four U.S. government sources. The Mexican data come from the Mexican Decennial Censuses (Censos de Población y Vivienda), the Mexican Population Counts (Conteos de Población y Vivienda), the National Survey of Demographic Dynamics (Encuesta Nacional de la Dinámica Demográfica or ENADID), the National Survey of Occupation and Employment (Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo or ENOE), and the Survey on Migration at the Northern Border of Mexico (Encuesta sobre Migración en la Frontera Norte de México or EMIF-Norte). The U.S. data come from the 2010 Census, the American Community Survey, the Current Population Survey and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Among the report’s key findings:

* In the five-year period from 2005 to 2010, about 1.4 million Mexicans immigrated to the United States and about 1.4 million Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children moved from the United States to Mexico.

* In the five-year period a decade earlier (1995 to 2000), about 3 million Mexicans had immigrated to the U.S. and fewer than 700,000 Mexicans and their U.S. born-children had moved from the U.S. to Mexico.

* This sharp downward trend in net migration has led to the first significant decrease in at least two decades in the number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants living in the U.S.-to 6.1 million in 2011, down from a peak of nearly 7 million in 2007. Over the same period the number of authorized Mexican immigrants rose modestly, from 5.6 million in 2007 to 5.8 million in 2011.

* Mexicans now comprise about 58% of the unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. They also account for 30% of all U.S. immigrants. The next largest country of origin for U.S. immigrants, China, accounts for just 5% of the nation’s stock of nearly 40 million immigrants.

* Apprehensions of Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally have plummeted by more than 70% in recent years, from more than 1 million in 2005 to 286,000 in 2011-a likely indication that fewer unauthorized immigrants are trying to cross. This decline has occurred at a time when funding in the U.S. for border enforcement-including more agents and more fencing-has risen sharply.

* As apprehensions at the border have declined, deportations of unauthorized Mexican immigrants-some of them picked up at work or after being arrested for other criminal violations-have risen to record levels. In 2010, nearly 400,000 unauthorized immigrants-73% of them Mexicans-were deported by U.S. authorities.

* Although most unauthorized Mexican immigrants sent home by U.S. authorities say they plan to try to return, a growing share say they will not try to come back to the U.S. According to a survey by Mexican authorities of repatriated immigrants, 20% of labor migrants in 2010 said they would not return, compared with just 7% in 2005.

* Looking back over the entire span of U.S. history, no country has ever sent as many immigrants to this country as Mexico has in the past four decades. However, when measured not in absolute numbers but as a share of the immigrant population at the time, immigration waves from Germany and Ireland in the late 19th century equaled or exceeded the modern wave from Mexico.

By Michael J. Trejo
The Harvard Crimson (April 18, 2012)

This weekend’s 15th Annual Latino Law Policy and Business Conference celebrated the rise of Latinos in the U.S. and Latin America, but also revealed Harvard’s most glaring weakness: After forty years, a Latino Studies Center is still missing on campus.

Among the topics discussed at the Conference, which featured former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, was a session focused on the possibility of a Latino Studies Center at Harvard and hosted by the Harvard Latino Student Alliance, a university-wide student organization. The session is part of a wider HLSA campaign that aims to establish a Latino Studies Center at Harvard University.

The motivation is simple: If you were a Colombian student or professor, would you go to the Argentine Center for support? If you were Ghanaian, would you get a degree in Nigerian Studies? Why should a U.S. Latino restrict themselves to issues and studies about Latin America? It essentially neglects their experience north of the border and ignores the fact that Latinos have a range of identities that include aspects of their countries of origin and the United States.

Since 1994, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies has been a great resource to students on campus. But the Center’s leadership also recognizes that their charter, focused on Latin America, cannot provide adequate coverage of the “U.S.” part of the Latino identity. In fact, in our Spring 2011 efforts to establish HLSA, the Rockefeller Center was unable to serve as our sponsoring entity because of this very issue. Fortunately, our application to become a university-wide organization received the support of Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, which has been an incredible resource and partner and is a key reason why HLSA exists today.

If the proposition is so clear, then why doesn’t Harvard already have a Latino Studies Center? For nearly forty years, students, faculty and staff have asked the same question. Earlier attempts to establish a Center in 1971, 1979, 1993, 2001, and 2005 were all rebuffed by Harvard administration.

Resistance to the creation of a Latino Studies Center has taken several different forms. One argument, called “Balkanization,” holds that focusing on a single ethnic group encourages disunity. But this argument has already been played out and found its conclusion. Nearly every other elite institution long ago established a center for Latino Studies. Both Yale and Stanford founded centers in 1977 and Columbia founded theirs in 1920.

What seems like just an academic argument is becoming an explicit strategic imperative. Harvard is simply losing out in the battle to attract and retain the nation’s top Latino talent. The Medical School is training fewer Latinos to become future physicians than the national average, at a time when the needs of the healthcare system demand the opposite. And in 2010, Harvard ranked 3rd among elite institutions, behind Columbia and Stanford, in the number of Hispanic Ph.Ds graduated, despite graduating more Ph.Ds in total.

This inability to maintain pre-eminence among students extends to faculty as well. Harvard’s vaunted History department has been without a tenured professor of Latin American history for years. The Business School and the Law School have a dearth of faculty with core expertise on U.S. Latino issues. Of those faculty members who led previous proposals for a Center in 2001 and 2005, many have left for opportunities at competing universities.

And we have yet to mention the growth of the Latino population. By 2020, the U.S. Department of Education projects that Latinos will make up more than one out of every six postsecondary students. This will affect Harvard’s future candidate pool and therefore its campus environment. Current Latino students are disillusioned with the University’s continued refusal to make a commitment, and Latino alumni-of all schools-are growing tired as well.

But despite our frustration with the lack of support, we care deeply about Harvard. For HLSA and its members, it is as much in our interests, as well as in those of the University, to maintain Harvard’s pre-eminence among all groups domestic and international. There have been enough discussions and proposals of what a Latino Studies Center could look like to be able to launch an initiative very quickly. All that is needed is a commitment from the University.

We urge President Drew Faust to put aside the mistakes of previous administrations and work with us in establishing, after so many years, a Latino Studies Center at Harvard. Students, faculty, staff and alumni want it. And the University needs it.

Michael J. Trejo is pursuing a joint Master’s in Public Policy and Master’s in Business Administration at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, graduating in 2013. He is the President of the Harvard Latino Student Alliance, a university-wide student organization.