Tag Archives: texas

Recent News for immigration
X
  • Immigration and crime: What does the research say?
  • 11-Page Memo Proposes Using National Guard To Round Up Immigrants

    • How the Supreme Court decision on United States v. Texas will affect millions of families

     Share
     Tweet
     Pin
     Vote

    “We are just waiting,” says Lisa, a 19-year-old college student, the anxiety palpable in her voice. Lisa is a U.S. citizen, born and raised in South Texas. Her parents and older brother, however, are undocumented.

    The entire family’s lives may be turned upside down in just a few days.

    This month, the Supreme Court will issue a decision in the case of United States v. Texas. The court will decide on whether to uphold two immigration initiatives announced by President Barack Obama in 2014 – Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, also known as DAPA, and the expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA+.

    A long legal battle

    As many as five million people nationwide are eligible to apply for protection under these programs. However, these actions have been on hold since February 2015, when a federal judge in Texas and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed to hear a challenge from 26 states. They questioned Obama’s authority to use executive actions to shield undocumented immigrants from deportation.

    The actual focus of the case is quite mundane: driver’s license fees. The state of Texas has argued that is would suffer significant
    financial impact if required to subsidize the cost of licenses to people qualifying for the president’s programs.

    On the other hand, the federal government has argued that the president’s actions are a lawful use of “prosecutorial discretion” – that is, the power to influence a deportation case by deciding whether and which charges to pursue. They also argue that the states lack “standing,” or legal capacity, to file the lawsuit.

    The impact of these programs is expected to extend beyond the eligible immigrants. More than 10 million people live in a household with at least one DAPA-eligible adult. These are typically “mixed-status” families, which include various combinations of U.S. citizens, permanent legal residents, undocumented immigrants, individuals in legal limbo or in temporary statuses. The majority of children in mixed-status families – an estimated 4.3 million children – are U.S. citizens by birth, like Lisa.

    Since 2013, I have been investigating the experiences of mixed-status families to understand how the undocumented legal status of just one person in a household can impact the other members of the family. This includes differences in health care access, educational attainment, economic stability, social mobility and general well-being. People like Lisa are often unable to experience the full rights of citizenship, and live in fear and uncertainty because of their family members’ susceptibility to deportation.

    In other words, children who are U.S. citizens are directly impacted by their parents’ undocumented status on a daily basis.

    What is deferred action?

    Deferred action provides short-term relief from deportation for select individuals. Prior programs, such as the 2012 DACA program, offered some of those who arrived in the U.S. as children (often called “DREAMers”) the ability to apply for two years of deportation deferral. The current executive actions before the Supreme Court expand this program in two ways.

    Families attend a legal workshop on immigration in Chicago.
    REUTERS/Joshua Lott

    First, they widen the eligibility criteria to more groups of childhood arrivals. Second, and most notably, they expand the program to parents of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. These programs do not represent amnesty, do not lead to permanent residency or citizenship and have clearly delineated eligibility criteria and cutoff dates, such as age and date of entry to the U.S. Each case is reviewed individually. Not everyone who is eligible will be approved.

    The programs allow some undocumented immigrants to temporarily remain in the country and obtain work permits and a social security number, if they have been here for at least five years and have not committed felonies or repeated misdemeanors. An estimated 70 percent of adults eligible for DAPA have lived in the U.S. for 10 or more years, and one-quarter have lived here for at least 20 years.

    In the coming days, three possible scenarios emerge. If the Supreme Court sides with the Obama administration, DAPA and DACA+ will go into effect, and up to five million people will be eligible for temporary relief.

    The second possibility is that the court will rule against the Obama administration: measures will remain blocked and the status quo upheld.

    The third possibility is a 4-4 tie, which is not an unlikely scenario because of the unusual current makeup of the nation’s highest court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. In this case, the decisions of the lower courts would remain in place and the initiatives blocked, for now.

    A $100 billion difference

    Mixed-status households experience high levels of poverty, since undocumented adults are generally forced to find jobs in low-paying, unregulated sectors of the economy. These measures would provide individuals with work authorization for three years, and could raise the average family’s income by 10 percent.

    The White House Council on Economic Advisers has conservatively estimated that DAPA and DACA+ would raise the nation’s GDP by 0.5 percent after 10 years. That’s equivalent to an additional US$100 billion in real GDP in today’s dollars, and would cut federal deficits by $30 billion in 10 years. Overall, this would result in an economic boost, increased productivity and a greater tax base, since recipients of deferred action would pay taxes.

    Not only does a work permit provide the opportunity for holders to earn money in fields suitable to their skill level, but it protects people from crimes such as wage theft and labor trafficking. It would also allow many recipients to open bank accounts, establish credit and obtain auto or home loans for the first time. The original DACA program, announced in 2012, helped recipients increase participation in the labor force and earn higher wages than they did before.

    Easing burdens on families

    Under these programs, many men and women will be able to obtain driver’s licenses for the first time, depending on the state in which they live. This ensures every driver is trained, tested, licensed and insured. It also increases their ability to get to work, school or doctor appointments. Additionally, deferred action recipients would have the ability to petition for travel to their home countries for family emergencies, such as illness or funerals.

    A student who has benefited from DACA speaks.
    REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

    While recipients of deferred action are not eligible for any health care provisions under the Affordable Care Act, some states have offered plans for low-income individuals with this status. With a work permit, many would gain access to employer-based health insurance plans.

    In addition, eliminating parents’ susceptibility for deportation can reduce barriers to accessing medical care for their children. Despite eligibility for benefits such as Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Programs, children of undocumented parents access these programs at a lower rate than those with citizen parents.

    Young adults are more likely to seek out and be successful with a college education or vocational training if they have deferred action status. While exclusion from federal financial aid still applies, some states offer assistance to these students. A work permit and driver’s license increase their ability to pay for and attend college.

    Overall, the benefits of deferred action programs are temporary and only partial. The men, women and children these programs will affect live daily knowing that their ability to remain in the country can be stripped from them at any moment, including by the next president. Nonetheless, deferred action initiatives offer significant benefits to families, and to a nation struggling to find solutions for a growing number of individuals living with the threat of deportation.

    Those who will be impacted by the Supreme Court’s decision are optimistic but cautious.

    “[I have] mixed feelings. I know my parents and brother would really benefit. But at the same time, we’ve been disappointed before,” Lisa says, referencing the stalled efforts at comprehensive immigration reform in years past.

    The Conversation

    Heide Castañeda, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of South Florida

    This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

    Could ‘Outbreak’ Really Happen? How Climate Change Could be Behind Spread of Deadly Diseases

     Share
     Tweet
     Pin
     Vote

    As much as last summer’s Ebola outbreak was politicized after it hit American shores, it left a significant deal of damage at its epicenter in West Africa, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands. Although several treatments have been proposed, the question is whether such an event could happen again. As climate change brings about warmer temperatures into new regions, some researchers that it may be carrying tropical diseases to new places, and ignite a series of global epidemics.

    Ebola and that much unwelcome staple of summer known as the West Nile virus are only two prime examples of invasive pathogens brought to new places. Zoologist Daniel Brooks and his team propose that the rising sea levels and increased warm weather leave us much more vulnerable than we realize, in a new paper he published in a British research journal.

    You might wonder why a zoologist is so concerned with global warming – but the answer is pretty apparent, and further reinforces the impact that climate change has on most bodies of science. One of the prime symptoms of climate change has been the migration of species to new regions – such as South American birds recurring in more temperate forests. These species often bring parasites with them, capable of infecting new species – either affecting humans directly or through species we may use as a food source.

    “Climate change does result in species moving around, and with respect to pathogens those movements actually create an enormous number of opportunities for parasites to jump into hosts they’ve never seen before,” said Brooks in an interview with VICE News.

    Prior to Brooks’ work, many researchers thought parasites were specific to only one species. The new study, however, demonstrates a number of instances in which parasites successfully transitioned themselves onto other, similar organisms. One that affects rodents could just as easily infect other kinds of rodents — and would be successful because the new host has not had the evolutionary advantage of developing resistance.

    Brooks’ specialty is reconstructing genealogies of species. His work brought him to investigate the last 30 years of related research and even his previous work in identifying vector-borne diseases, some of which date back to the last Ice Age.

    “These host switches don’t happen at random. They’re actually clumped at particular times,” said Brooks. The end of the last Ice Age was particularly disastrous for a number of animals after the glaciers melted, increasing sea levels and driving species to higher grounds.

    The West Nile outbreaks in the early 2000s are a prime warning of what could happen – their presence being detected by songbirds as they made their way across the Western Hemisphere. Although the songbirds began developing resistance rather quickly, people have not, and the virus is now considered a chronic illness for those affected. The parasite, however, remains, continuing to evolve.

    So what is the best way to avert any potential outbreaks? “As long as we think of ebola as a human-to-human problem, we’re missing the possibility that if some non-human picks up ebola we never get rid of it,” Brooks continued. “We need to pay more attention to natural history.”

    At some time in the not too distant past, AIDS was a simian virus before it managed to cross species. Not much was known about phylogeny at the turn of the twentieth century, but today focusing on the pathogens in animals and their genetic history might be beneficial.

    Salvatore Agosta, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth’s Center for Environmental Studies, supported the paper’s claims, as parasites are a great deal more adaptive than previously thought. Another prime example is Lyme Disease – once known only in the American Midwest but in the last several decades it moved not only to the Northeast but south as well.

    Ben Beard of the CDC also agrees: “The simple statement is that changes of climate will affect the environment,” he told VICE News. “What’s more difficult is to say precisely where and how.”

    As critical as predicting where and how any potential outbreaks will happen is to the CDC, it often receives the least amount of attention due to its speculative nature, further complicating the problem of migrating and invasive species. Texas, in particular, has withstood several epidemics of mosquito borne illnesses – many of which, such as chikungunya, are still relatively mysterious to many health care professionals.

    The CDC was hit by budget cuts last year, which significantly affected the state’s trouble with tackling the number of Ebola cases it confronted over a short period of time.

    James Sullivan
    James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and a contributor to Truth Is Cool and OMNI Reboot. He can usually be found on TVTropes or RationalWiki when not exploiting life and science stories for another blog article.