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The RAISE Act Would Dramatically Change U.S. Immigration Law
by Kevin Johnson
A few weeks ago, President Trump endorsed immigration reform in the name of the RAISE Act , S. 1720, which was introduced in the Senate by Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue (R-GA).
The RAISE Act would drastically reshape American immigration. In so doing, the RAISE Act will likely increase, not decrease, pressures for undocumented immigration.
Approximately a 1 million immigrants are granted lawful permanent residence annually. Visas allocated based on family members in the United States comprise about two-thirds of the annual total. Department of Homeland Security, 2015 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics The top five countries of birth for new LPRs in 2015 were Mexico, China, India, the Philippines, and Cuba. See Migration Information Source, Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States (Mar. 8, 2017),
Currently, U.S. citizens can sponsor spouses, minor children, and parents without numerical limitations. Under capped categories, U.S. citizens can also sponsor adult children and siblings; and legal permanent residents (LPRs) can sponsor spouses, minor children, and adult unmarried children.
The RAISE Act would cut the annual immigrant admissions by one-half. The bill would eliminate all family sponsorship beyond spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and LPRs, and would reduce various family categories from 226,000 green cards to 88,000. The cuts to family-based immigration would affect immigrants from a select few countries. For an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute .
The Senate bill also would change the system for employment-based lawful immigration. Under the current system, most employment based immigrants are reserved to the highly skilled. Besides dramatically reducing family-based immigration, the RAISE Act would replace the current selection scheme with a points system in which applicants would earn points based on:
·1. A relatively high-paying job offer, with more points for a higher salary
·2. High English test scores
·3. Age, with those closest to age 25 earning the most points
·4. Educational attainment, with more points for degrees earned in the United States, and for advanced degrees in a STEM field
·5. Investing at least $1.35 million in the United States
6. Extraordinary achievement, such as winning a Nobel Prize or being an Olympic-caliber athlete
The bill also seeks to eliminate the Diversity Visa program and further caps refugee admissions, cutting back lawful immigration by 100,000 a year.
In total, the RAISE Act would lead to an overall reduction of legal immigration by 50 percent over the next decade. That would exacerbate the current problem of undocumented immigration. Because of unrealistic restrictions on legal immigration in the current laws, the United States has roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. See Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn , Pew Research Center, As Mexican Share Declined, U.S. Unauthorized Immigrant Population Fell in 2015 Below Recession Level (April 2017). Reducing legal immigration as the RAISE Act does will likely increase the demand and increase pressures for undocumented immigration. This is especially the case because the merit-based system will not address the high demand in the United States for low- and medium-skilled workers, which many undocumented immigrants perform today in the agricultural, construction, and service industries.
KJ
This post originally appeared on Law Professor Blogs © 2014-2017 by Law Professor Blogs, LLC. All rights reserved.
About The Author
Kevin Johnson is Dean, Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law, and Professor of Chicana/o Studies. He joined the UC Davis law faculty in 1989 and was named Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in 1998. Johnson became Dean in 2008. He has taught a wide array of classes, including immigration law, civil procedure, complex litigation, Latinos and Latinas and the law, and Critical Race Theory. In 1993, he was the recipient of the law school's Distinguished Teaching Award.Dean Johnson has published extensively on immigration law and civil rights. Published in 1999, his book How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man's Search for Identity was nominated for the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Dean Johnson’s latest book, Immigration Law and the US-Mexico Border (2011), received the Latino Literacy Now’s International Latino Book Awards – Best Reference Book. Dean Johnson blogs at ImmigrationProf, and is a regular contributor on immigration on SCOTUSblog. A regular participant in national and international conferences, Dean Johnson has also held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools and is the recipient of an array of honors and awards. He is quoted regularly by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other national and international news outlets.
His expanded expedited removal proceedings will force millions of undocumented aliens out of the country, and not just with the deportations. Families will leave when members are deported. Others will leave because of fear that they will be deported. And so on.
Apparently, Trump envisions a country without a large foreign presence. You don't like that vision, but many of the people who put him in office do.
Nolan Rappaport
The relevant history here, as Professor Johnson and Mr. Rappaport, both of whom are distinguished immigration law scholars, must certainly know without the slightest question, is the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act with its skewed "national origin" quotas (based on the US census of 1890, more than three decades before the passage of the law, before the large wave of Jewish, Southern European and Eastern European immigration to the United States between 1890 and 1920), which discriminated in favor of the "Nordic" countries of Northern Europe and which also barred immigration from Asia, Africa and the Middle East almost entirely.
Many US politicians, chiefly but arguably not only in the Republican party, have never accepted the fact that this openly bigoted law, which was based in large part on the totally discredited "Eugenics" theory of the inherent superiority of the "Nordic" people over all other races, and which earned the praise of Adolf Hitler for that reason, was abolished by the 1965 immigration reform act. As everyone knows, the 1965 law, at least in theory, and to a large extent in results as well, opened up US immigration to qualified immigrants from all over the world, without regard to race, color or religion.
The RAISE Act (which could more accurately be called the "RACE" Act) is nothing more than a transparent attempt to take America back in the direction of the 1924 law, using the "point system" as a pretext. The main difference is that the politicians who want to abolish the 1965 law are not biased in favor of northern or western Europe, as opposed to Eastern or Southern Europe, as was the case almost a century ago.
But, as shown by Trump's own recent "Europa Ueber Alles" Warsaw speech and by the ravings of "Alt-Right" leaders such as Richard Spencer, whose neo-Nazi whites only immigration agenda was so much in evidence at the Charlottesville rally which Trump refused to condemn explicitly, there is a strong movement, especially among Trump's "base", to take our immigration system back to the white supremacist spirit of the 1924 law.
To the surprise of no one, then Republican Senator Jeff Sessions (now Trump's Attorney General), also praised the 1924 law in his January, 2015 immigration "Handbook" for Congressional Republicans. The RAISE Act is obviously part of this same agenda.
Why can't this obvious history be discussed more openly, especially by the RAISE Act's opponents, since one shouldn't be surprised that its supporters would try to hide or obscure the bill's real purpose?
Roger Algase
Attorney at Law
algaselex@gmail.com