Biden Expands MPP, UK Debates Offshoring, Ireland Offers Path to 'Regularisation', and More
What’s in Today’s Newsletter ℹ️
Migrant Protection Protocols are Back (and People are NOT Happy) 😡
UK Debates Controversial ‘Offshoring’ Policy 🇬🇧
Ireland Provides Pathway for Regularisation for Undocumented Immigrants 🇮🇪
Kolkata Declaration Calls for Protection for Refugees 📣
American Immigration Council and the New American Economy Join Forces 🔀
Immigration Court's Data on Minors Facing Deportation is Too Faulty to Be Trusted 🛑
Migrant Protection Protocols are Back (and People are NOT Happy) 😡
As I shared last week, the Biden administration stated that it had reached an agreement with Mexico to restart the Migrant Protection Protocols—and let me tell you, the criticisms of the policy and of the Biden administration have been relentless in the past few days.
The Biden administration says that it is simply complying in good faith with a federal court order. But as policy analysts pointed out last week—and Nicole Narea wrote in Vox—the Biden administration inexplicably expanded the program to include all migrants from the Western Hemisphere—a move taken by the Biden administration on its own, independently from the federal court’s ruling.
The asylum officers’ union, made up of federal staff that conduct asylum screenings and hearings, came out against MPP again. (See Alisa Reznik’s coverage here.)
"Policies like this place refugees in harm's way, and it's a source of shame, it’s really a heavy burden for our members to carry," he said. "Because they’re the ones who have to hear an individual literally begging for their life."
—Michael Knowles, Asylum Officers Union Representative
Immigration think tanks and immigrant rights organizations took to their websites and social media pages to explain the details of what some are calling MPP 2.0, to condemn the program, and to criticize the Biden administration for essentially rolling over too easily. Here are some examples from organizations and people that I rely on regularly and that you really should follow if you don’t already.
The Conference on Catholic Bishops also came out against MPP.
Adam Isaacson from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) criticized the use of the term itself and encouraged people to use a phrase that more accurately reflects its violence. He suggested RMX for return to Mexico, for example.
It remains to be seen this week just how, exactly, the Remain in Mexico 2.0 policy will be implemented in practice, so stay tuned. I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to share this week once we see it start to unfold.
UK Debates Controversial ‘Offshoring’ Policy 🇬🇧
A bill that may force asylum seekers to be held off mainland UK—a practice known as ‘offshoring’—will be debated this week in the British parliament. The term ‘offshoring’ refers to the practice of holding asylum seekers in non-territorial sites—i.e. “off shore”—to screen for asylum rather than allowing those individuals to set foot on land and request asylum while physically inside a destination country.
The reasons for offshoring are relatively simple, though the full range of consequences is more complex. Offshoring does two main things: first, it limits access to the bundle of rights that typically come with being physically present in a place; second, it limits the visibility of refugees, thereby reducing opportunities for concerned citizens and the media to highlight human rights abuses.
The practice is most associated with Australia, which has been using offshoring for years to limit access to the mainland. But the United States has also used offshoring such as processing Haitian asylum seekers at Guantanamo Bay rather than allowing them to land in Florida. The Migrant Protection Protocols operate under the same logic as offshoring but on land. Geographers tend to refer to these as various kinds of “border externalization.”
For more information on offshoring, read basically anything you can get your hands on by geographer Alison Mountz. Here’s an interview with Alison to get you started.
In any case, the reason this is important in the UK at the moment is that with the implementation of Brexit, some asylum seekers have been attempting to enter the UK directly and many have drowned.
These tragedies have prompted political responses, and the main one at the moment appears to be for the UK to formally implement offshoring policies. Critics already point out that the UK offshoring bill is unlikely to actually solve the problems it intends on solving and David Davis, Brexit secretary from 2016 to 2018, had this to say in the Guardian.
“The bill contains a proposal to grant the UK unprecedented powers to send migrants to a third country to have their asylum claims processed. This means the government could deport migrants before their applications have been considered, creating an immigration process in reverse: deport first, ask questions later.”
–David Davis
Ireland Provides Pathway for Regularisation for Undocumented Immigrants 🇮🇪
It’s not all bad news this week. The Irish Government has announced a scheme to regularise thousands of undocumented immigrants and their families, allowing eligible applicants to remain and reside in the state. (“Regularisation” is the term that is more commonly used in the European context rather than “legalization,” which tends to be used more in the US.) Remarkably, the program also applies to immigrants who have already been given a deportation order so long as they meet the criteria for regularisation. I have no doubt that there may be ways this program is inadequate or reproduces other kinds of inequalities and prejudices. At the same time, Congress can’t even get so much as the DREAM Act passed in the United States despite overwhelming support. Let this new regularisation program in Ireland at least be a lesson in what is possible.
Kolkata Declaration Calls for Protection for Refugees 📣
A multidisciplinary conference on the “Global Protection System for Refugee and Migrants” was held in Kolkata, India in November. The conference released a statement called the Kolkata Declaration which, in addition to calling for more protections for refugees, emphasized the need to “safeguard the right of the Afghans and non-Afghans who want to leave Afghanistan.”
American Immigration Council and the New American Economy Join Forces 🔀
The American Immigration Council and the New American Economy are merging. The two nonprofit organizations focus on immigration-related issues, but from different angles. The New American Economy, founded by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg over a decade ago, describes itself as a “ bipartisan research and advocacy organization fighting for smart federal, state, and local immigration policies that help grow our economy and create jobs for all Americans.” I hadn’t heard of the NAE until very recently, but then again, my research doesn’t focus very heavily on economic questions. The American Immigration Council will be more familiar to the immigrant rights community as a legal and policy-oriented non-profit in D.C. that started out as an offshoot of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Stef Knight from Axios who reported on this story says that the merger is partly a response to the growing politicization of immigration during the Trump years and the expectation that Republicans will retake the House in 2022.
Immigration Court's Data on Minors Facing Deportation is Too Faulty to Be Trusted 🛑
In case you missed it, TRAC announced at the end of the week last week that the quality of data on minors in removal proceedings is too bad to be trusted, and we are ending our updates of the juvenile tool. This is unfortunate since the deportation of children and minors is an extremely sensitive topic and an important human rights concern, particularly after the family separation policy of the Trump administration. TRAC’s announcement (available here) lays out the efforts the organization has made to alert EOIR Director David Neal, but after receiving no response, the tool has been suspended. TRAC’s juvenile data tool can be found here.
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