Current Events on Immigration

Paul Ryan began his term as the youngest Speaker of the House of Representatives in living memory by tweeting "we are not settling scores. We are wiping the slate clean." The policy slate that needs the deepest sterilization is immigration. Speaker Ryan has been supportive of moderate immigration reform in the past, so here are some new conservative immigration reform ideas to help him get the ball rolling.Immigrant use of welfare benefits is a great place to start. Non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants have access to few means-tested welfare benefits under current law. President Obama's Justice Department actually sued the state of Pennsylvania for giving Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and food stamps to a handful of unauthorized immigrants winning a $48.8 million settlement in early 2015.

Poor immigrant individuals are less likely to use means-tested welfare than poor native-born Americans. When eligible poor immigrants do use those programs, the dollar value of the benefits they consume also tends to be lower.

However, any use of welfare by non-citizens is a drain on taxpayers that could easily be remedied by building an even higher wall around the welfare state. A 2013 paper I wrote with Sophie Cole entitled "Building a Wall around the Welfare State, Instead of the Country," lays out the economic and fiscal benefits of further restricting welfare use, explains why the public is worried about immigrant welfare use, and identifies the specific statutes that govern immigrant eligibility for benefits.

Fixing our legal immigration system is the key to stopping unauthorized immigration and allowing our economy to attract the workers it demands. However, most federal visas get so hopelessly bogged down in regulations that they become practically unusable. Speaking of the federal H-2A visa for agricultural workers, Elaine Chao, President George W. Bush's secretary of Labor, said that "Many who have tried [the H-2A visa] report such bad experiences that they stopped using it altogether."

Supreme Court Case on Immigration

The first case, Kerry v. Din, discusses the rights of Kanishka Berashk, the spouse of Fauzia Din, to be able to immigrate to the U.S. to join Din, who is a U.S. citizen.  After the U.S. State Department denied Berashk’s visa application, citing a broad terrorism-related statute because he used to work in the Taliban-controlled government, he sued Secretary of State John Kerry and tried to get the high court to review that denial.

The Supreme Court held that because Berashk is not a U.S. citizen, he did not have the right to get a court review, and his U.S. citizen wife also did not have a due-process right to get the visa denial challenged in a federal court.Steven Yale-Loehr, a law professor at Cornell University, said the Supreme Court’s decision on this case has a much broader impact on immigration to the U.S.  

“If a U.S. citizen marries a Chinese citizen in China and tries to petition through the green-card process to have the foreign spouse come over to the United States, and if the U.S. (consulate) in Guangzhou were to deny the visa because the foreign spouse is a former member of the Communist Party, or they allege maybe the Chinese citizen committed some crimes in the past even though it is unproven, that would not be reviewable in the U.S. court,” Yale-Loehr said.That means the couple would be either separated or the U.S. citizen spouse would have to move to China to live there with his or her spouse, he added.

Kerry William Bretz, a New York-based immigration attorney, said the court clearly separated the rights for people inside and outside the U.S.“Due process applies to people who are in the United States, whether you are a citizen, not a citizen and you cross the border without inspection,” Bretz said. “It does not apply to people abroad.

"Most of the folks that are looking for review of the denial of visas are abroad and they are asking for a nonimmigrant visa, and any nonimmigrant visa is at the discretion of the Department of State," he said.

Political Views on Immigration Reform

Donald Trump knocked former Florida governor Jeb Bush, calling him "weak on immigration." Trump specifically mentioned a view Bush espoused in a 2014 Fox News interview that immigrants cross the U.S.-Mexico border as an "act of love." "We need strong borders. We need a wall," Trump said, addressing his solutions to the immigration issue. "The king of building buildings, the king of building walls--none of them can build them like Donald Trump."

Ben Carson has not directly said if he supports a pathway to citizenship, but in his book America The Beautiful, Carson seemed to imply that a pathway to citizenship is the "moral" thing to do. "Is it moral for us, for example, to take advantage of cheap labor from illegal immigrants while denying them citizenship? I'm sure you can tell from the way I phrased the question that I believe we have taken the moral low road on this issue," he wrote. Carson has also said the United States should model its immigration reform after Canada's guest-worker program. "People already here illegally could apply for guest-worker status from outside of the country," Carson wrote in November. "This means they would have to leave first."

Hillary Clinton Hillary Rodham Clinton took a stand on immigration policy when she sat down with a group of students in Las Vegas on Tuesday. She aligned herself with President Obama’s controversial executive actions on immigration. She signaled that she would go beyond to “fight for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship.” She suggested that Republican candidates who are proposing anything short of a “full and equal” path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants are talking about “second-class status.”

Bernie Sanders believes America's current immigration system is broken and requires comprehensive reform. An important aspect of immigration reform, according to Bernie, is to establish some pathway to legal residency or citizenship for the 11 million undocumented workers living in the United States so that they need not work and live in the shadows.