New Immigration Data Released This Week + Congress Has 9 Days to Approve Biden's Nominee to Lead ICE
Consider this your immigration data stocking stuffer. Alongside a final countdown on Biden’s nominee to lead ICE, there have also been three big releases of immigration data this week that you may not see on Twitter or in the news, but which I want to flag for you so that you don’t miss them. Read on!
What’s new:
IOM Releases Global Migration Report
Congress Has 9 Days to Approve Biden’s Nominee to Lead ICE
A Closer Look at 20 Years of Asylum Data
TRAC Releases Three New MPP Data Tools
IOM Releases Global Migration Report
The International Organization for Migration just released their Global Migration Indicators 2021 report, which provides a snapshot of international data across a range of migration topics.
The report is packed with some of the best visualizations of migration data I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a valuable work of migration research, but also a work of art in its own right which teachers, organizers, and data scientists will find valuable.
Thanks to Julia Black at IOM for working on this report and sharing it. Julia also works on the Missing Migrants Project that I rely on regularly. I met her when we were both speakers at the Border Forensic conference hosted by Bard College earlier this year. She’s definitely behind some amazing work at IOM.
Congress Has 9 Days to Approve Biden’s Nominee to Lead ICE
1,797 days. That’s how long Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been without an official director. The position requires a nomination from the president and approval by Congress. Lacking this, the ICE director is referred to simply as “acting.”
But Congress never approved a single one of Trump’s ICE directors, and Congress still has not acted to confirm Biden’s pick to lead ICE, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez from Houston, Texas. If Congress does not act by the end of the year, it appears that the nomination process will start over from scratch, says Andrew Schneider from Houston Public Media.
If Congress does not act, that could mean that we’ll soon hit the 5-year mark—5 YEARS!—since ICE had a real director.
A Closer Look at 20 Years of Asylum Data
I’m excited to share two pieces of news coming out of TRAC this week. But before I do, I want to be clear that this newsletter represents my own views, and is not a product of TRAC nor of Syracuse University. However, I do try to flag important work coming out of TRAC, especially during a week like this one when we do not have the time to put more energy into releasing full announcements for all of our updates.
TRAC just released an in-depth report on 20 years of asylum data, and when I say “in-depth”, I mean seriously in-depth. Immigration data nerds out there are going to feel like Christmas came early this year.
Two big findings are worth mentioning. First, there are a lot of asylum cases pending right now. LOTS. Second, when you look at all of the data on people who apply for asylum, quite a high percent overall get asylum or are granted some other form of temporary or permanent relief.
Please note: these general findings based on 20 years of data absolutely do not mean that Central American or Haitian asylum seekers in 2021 have some fantastic likelihood of success. They don’t. TRAC has pointed out many times that asylum depends on a variety of contingencies (nationality, court, judge, etc.). So please read the report to understand what TRAC did and did not say. But these findings do hold when looking at the big picture of asylum applications from USCIS and the immigration courts, and that’s pretty remarkable.
From TRAC’s email announcement:
“According to case-by-case records from the Immigration Courts, Immigration Judges completed close to one million cases where immigrants had applied for asylum since FY 2001. For completed cases, half of all applicants were ultimately successful in their quest to legally remain in the United States. Adding in the asylum grants by Asylum Officers in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), almost two-thirds (64%) of asylum seekers in the 1.3 million completed cases have been successful over the past two decades.
Find TRAC’s new report here: A Closer Look at 20 Years of Asylum Data: Half of Applicants Successful, but 670,000 Cases Still Pending.
TRAC Releases Three New MPP Data Tools
Also new this week, TRAC released new MPP data tools which allow the public to make better sense of how the program is affecting migrants, given that the program has been stopped, some cases have been paroled into the US, and now the program has been once again restarted.
After much consideration, we decided to organize the tools around the January 2021 “pivot point”, where the Biden administration ended new enrollments in MPP. The tools reflect the fact that we initially had a cohort of about 71,000 people who were enrolled in MPP by January 2021, and that cohort appeared to be frozen. Of those cases in January 2021, we get three significant subgroups: some were closed and remained closed, some were still pending, and some were closed and were subsequently reopened. Each of those now represents a separate cohort that you can look at specifically—so you really need to understand that crucial part to make sense of the tools. Now that MPP is being restarted, new cases go into the pending tool.
TRAC’s “about the data” page provides this summary of the four MPP tools:
TRAC's four MPP tools all start with the same data. They differ by whether they examine all MPP cases or focus just on particular subclasses of MPP cases depending upon their status at the end of the Trump administration (January 2021).
All MPP cases. This tool allows users to examine all MPP cases as a single group.
Pending MPP Cases. This tool focuses on all MPP cases that were pending at the end of January 2021 or were subsequently assigned to the program.
Reopened MPP Cases. This tool focuses on all MPP cases that were closed at the end of January 2021 but have been subsequently reopened.
Remained Closed MPP Cases. This tool focuses on all MPP cases that were closed at the end of January 2021 and that have remained closed.
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