The only good immigrant will require no government assistance and not take a job. Basically, the idle rich and Norwegian retirees who need a dry climate because of TB.
This is an area where we overeducated types can help individually by sending in comments. The administration will disregard them, but the more expert opinions and perspectives go against it on the public record, the better the case will be for a lawsuit against the final rule, IIRC.
When shiv came in on his visa and then applied for his greencard, I had to provide documentation as his sponsor to show that he would not become a public charge. This was 2006. What's the change? Broader application to all visas?
the regulation would put a person's lawfully obtained immigration status at risk if he or she uses -- or even applies for -- Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamps), Section 8 housing assistance or other public programs.
3 I had to do that in 1983 or 1984, for my wife, and needed my dad to sign off.
I'm not going to read the new rule, but my never-watches-tv-news view is that they want to expand the working definition of public charge to include a whole lot of benefits that would otherwise have gone under the radar. For example, I buy health insurance on the exchange, and although I've been making enough money not to get tax credits, I might well not make it next year, or the next, or whatever. Does this make my wife a public charge?
Previously "public charge" didn't mean you're barred from any and all government assistance, it was narrowly defined because it was judged these programs' services were too critical to exclude immigrants from. (E.g., if you qualify for Medicaid, you absolutely cannot afford your own private health insurance.)
Thanks. The news has been less than helpful. I also suspect that there's no longer a time limit -- shiv's been here for 12 years and would now be eligible for benefits under current rules.
I also think the news has been less than helpful. But questions I have are about the impact on children, including citizen children -- many of the benefits are for children, even when the parent applies or is involved in the application. FAFSA, for example.
Also addressed pretty forthrightly in the first link:
Children would also be hit especially hard by the public charge regulation -- again, citizen and immigrant alike. One-fourth of children in America have at least one immigrant parent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Though most are not immigrants themselves -- an overwhelming majority were born in the United States -- they would suffer the denial of basic needs alongside their parents. Children eat at the same table as their parents, and they sleep under the same roof, so if parents are too afraid to apply for help, their children will be no less hungry and no less homeless.
One-fourth of children in America have at least one immigrant parent
I've never heard this put this way before. Can this really be right?
The percentage of Trump's kids with an immigrant parent is much higher.
Minivet, do you know if it matters much what one says when sending in comments, assuming it's coherent and doesn't actually call the goddamn motherfuckers goddamn motherfuckers? Is it just the quantity of comments or the quantity making particular points?
I've heard that if you can milk your credentials as some kind of professional and base the points you make on that expert status, that makes more of a difference than copypasted material from an advocacy group.
Here's a template specific for health care professionals crafting their letters.
Target criticisms to the actions proposed. Explain the likely impact to our patients and community this proposed rule would have if finalized.
Establish your credibility in the issue area. Explain why you are uniquely qualified to offer this perspective, e.g. medical student with expertise on the health impact, care provider to immigrant patients, an immigrant or member of an immigrant community etc.
Humanize the problem by sharing a personal story. Share your insight into the lives of those who would be affected by the proposed public charge rule. You may also consider sharing your own story...
Submit separate comments in your own words. Agencies need to count how many comments they receive. Five people or organizations signed onto one comment letter counts as one comment vs. five comments if each person or organization sent in their own comments.
Write comments in your own words. Agency staff must code and organize all comments, and the process is very different if they have to pause and consider what's similar and what's different in each comment, as opposed to just counting the number of commenters saying the same thing. It's fine to work from a sample comment, but you should modify it to reflect your own thoughts and experiences so that it counts as a unique comment.
I can't post under my usual pseud for professional reasons but I can offer some guidance.
1) This would be HUGE expansion of the number of people the public charge test would be applied to. It would apply not only to people when they are applying for a green card or to first be admitted to the US, but every time they apply to extend or change any of a LONG list of visas -- such as student visas. It's easily 1 million+ people per year
2) This would a HUGE expansion of the number of "negative factors" that could cause a person to FAIL the public charge test. They are proposing to add a whole bunch of public benefits -- SNAP, Medicaid, public housing -- that haven't traditionally been counted. They are also proposing to count a whole bunch of brand-new items -- such as someone's credit score.
3) In contrast to the numerous "heavily weighted negative factors" that the public charge regulation would expand, there is only ONE heavily weighted POSITIVE factor -- having income at 250 percent of the poverty line. So they're stacking the deck.
4) They want to apply the test prospectively -- to include what may happen at ANY POINT in the future. So if you are applying for a green card now, you COULD be eligible for Medicaid in the future after you become a US citizen and they could count that against you.
5) If you want to feel better about humanity, go over to Regulations.gov. This regulation is "trending" so it's easy to see on the front page. If you click and read some of the 100,000+ comments submitted by members of the public, most people are horrified and are writing lovely, humane comments.
Bottom line: Take 90 seconds of your life and write a comment. It doesn't have to be over-thought. Just write one. Go to Regulations.gov now and submit it, before the Dec 10 deadline and before the Dec 7 government shutdown threat.
If you have professional expertise, mention it -- and there are many excellent comment templates around from a wide array of children's health, nutrition, higher education, anti-poverty, disability rights, etc. organizations that you can copy from -- but if you use at least 30% of your own words there is a better chance the comment will be counted individually.
Oh, and if you can provide literally ANYTHING on potential economic impact, please please include it. E.g. "My little college will have to spend at least 1 hour of professional development time for each of our 200 staff training them to understand how to answer student questions about this regulation, and at an average hourly wage of $X, this would equal $X in costs caused by this unfunded federal mandate."
Even if the feds don't listen to that argument, the litigation team needs it.
Oh, and if you can provide literally ANYTHING on potential economic impact, please please include it. E.g. "My little college will have to spend at least 1 hour of professional development time for each of our 200 staff training them to understand how to answer student questions about this regulation, and at an average hourly wage of $X, this would equal $X in costs caused by this unfunded federal mandate."
Even if the feds don't listen to that argument, the litigation team needs it.
Oh, and if you can provide literally ANYTHING on potential economic impact, please please include it. E.g. "My little college will have to spend at least 1 hour of professional development time for each of our 200 staff training them to understand how to answer student questions about this regulation, and at an average hourly wage of $X, this would equal $X in costs caused by this unfunded federal mandate."
Even if the feds don't listen to that argument, the litigation team needs it.
12: They take things from organizations - e.g. trade associations, but also unions, law offices, and advocacy nonprofits - more seriously than stuff from private citizens, and things with hard economic data and legal citations more seriously than anecdotes, but they have to consider everything. The more total non-redundant(1) comments they get, the longer it takes them to review and respond to them in the final rulemaking. They are required by law to address(2) every comment.
To stall things, drown them in correspondence, as long as it's non-redundant. To get the regulation changed or prevented, get a lawyer and an economist to collaborate on the best argument they can make, with a minor bonus if they can do it on a recognizable letterhead.
Source: Used to collate public comments on things like this for the Coast Guard, and edit the responses after a lawyer had drafted them.
Looking it over a tiny bit, either they're completely nuts, or the people at DHS don't actually want this passed, or they did a not-even-half-assed job due to a ridiculous deadline or something, or DHS is completely different from the Coast Guard. (All four of those are possible, of course.) Their economist estimated total costs between $495 million and $1.3 billion, and $0.00 benefits. Not literally, but they didn't bother putting a number on it. In the Coast Guard, the economist wouldn't even bother letting me look at the document at this stage.
(1) "Non-redundant": see 14.
(2) "Address": by summarizing the substantive points made and either altering the rulemaking as requested, or coming up with some explanation why they shouldn't or don't have to. Possible explanations include "some random person's claim that this will ruin their lives doesn't outweigh our expert economist's cost-benefit analysis" or "the harm this causes doesn't matter, this exact thing was mandated by Congress, our hands are tied".
Looking it over a tiny bit, either they're completely nuts, or the people at DHS CIS don't actually want this passed, or they did a not-even-half-assed job due to a ridiculous deadline or something, or DHS CIS is completely different from the Coast Guard.
Fixed.
One-fourth of children in America have at least one immigrant parent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Now I'm pretty sure this isn't right, because I just read here:
One-quarter of Texas kids live with at least one parent who is not a citizen.
But plenty of citizens are immigrants.
One-fourth of children in America have at least one immigrant parent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
It's true. Here's the Annie E. Casey Foundation KIDS COUNT website, which uses US Census data. If you scroll to the right you'll see 2016 data, showing that 25% of US kids under 18 lived with at least one foreign-born parent or were foreign-born themselves.
(Foreign adoptions by US-born parents don't amount to much more than a rounding error in this data, IIRC.)
15% of residents of urban counties are foreign-born, period.
What percentage are Russians who bitch about my parking?
I guess I'm failing to account for the very long time range involved - parents of 17 year olds who immigrated as children to parents who immigrated last year. Immigrations that span much longer than just 18 years.
Plus, experiencing freedom causes erections and ovulation.
10: I just went to a conference where I learned that 47% of CA kids have at least one immigrant parent. HALF!
I think there are people who do nothing but repeat that fact to Republican audiences.
Is this a steady statistic over time? Or has there been an uptick? Is the surge in overt racism that Trump has harnessed connected to a change in immigration patterns? Because I'd been assuming it was a latent racism revealed and nothing circumstantial had changed.
I don't know about that statistic, but the percent of the U.S. born somewhere else has been rising pretty steadily since the 70s.
35 is right. Illegal immigration peaked ten or eleven years ago.
The percent foreign born in the total US pop had it's modern peak between 1890-1910 at 15%. The modern low was circa 1965-1970 at around 4-5%. Since the 1980s it's been rising, now hovering around 13-14% nationally.
The subset of foreign born who are UNAUTHORIZED was near non-existent for most of US history, but began to grow rapidly in the 1990s due to a variety of push and pull factors. It grew quickly in the early 2000s and then began to level off at 2010. Net unauthorized migration overall has been level for 7-8 years, with the population hovering around 11.5 million. In the last year or so it dipped to roughly 10.7 million.
Net unauthorized migration from MEXICO has been negative for about 4-5 years.
There is relatively little correlation between the number of immigrants in a community and people's perception of how many there are.
However, simply mentioning that the majority of kids under 5 are nonwhite, or that the US is projected to majority nonwhite by 2042, is enough to trigger a sharp increase in support for entitlement cuts among white pol of all political stripes.
Foreign-born in the top 10 populated counties, 2017 ACS:
Los Angeles County, CA - 34%
Cook County, IL- 21%
Harris County, TX - 26%
Maricopa County, AZ - 15%
San Diego County, CA- 23%
Orange County, CA- 30%
Miami-Dade County, FL - 54%
Kings County, NY - 36%
Dallas County, TX - 24%
Riverside County, CA- 21%
Queens County, NY - 47%
I'm at the theater, Moby. The farce is about to start and I don't have time for basketball jokes.
People always seem much less aware of post-1964 immigration than I expect, given how huge a deal it actually is. I would guess that legal immigration dwarfs illegal in all of these numbers.
In CA, I think the UC/CSU percentage of students with an immigrant parent first hit 50% in the 1990s, which is what you'd expect from lots of people having kids/immigrating as young children in the 70s.
And apropos of nothing, Austin-Round Rock Metropolitan Statistical Area: 15.1%.
Total FB pop in the US is 44 million. I've been doing this for almost 15 years and audiences (including many journalists) are always astounded when I tell them 3 out of 4 immigrants in the US have legal status. The news coverage paints a dramatically different picture.
Yes, we're fine. It's been an exciting day.
Are those fjords Anchorage sits on, or rifts?
Does it sit? Or is it...anchored?
"Texas always seemed so big
But you know you're in the largest state in the union
When you're anchored down in Anchorage."
"Lone Star big, Frontier bigger."
Fjords, I guess, although I don't know the exact details of the geology. Locally they're called "arms." It's definitely an active seismic area, though, and pretty well prepared for a quake like this.
Loanwords good, English better.
51, 56: The fjord/arms are not rifts (it's a plate boundary not a rift), nor do they represent faults directly but their orientation is controlled by a series of SW to NE-tending strike-slip faults (Pacific plate meeting NA plate) in that part of Alaska (which to the east curve around and become NW-SE trending; they are in general "parallel" to the southern coastline of Alaska. Alaska is where the plate boundary changes into a subduction zone which has formed the Aleutians). It is pretty complex.
The fjords are basically flooded glacial valleys, but the whole topography of the region is controlled by the faults with ridges and valleys generally roughly parallel* to the faults--the valleys all being further scoured by glaciers (and on land filled with glacial debris).
An overview earthquake/tectonic map of Alaska. A more detailed geologic map on which you can see smaller-scale faults (you have to add that layer from the menu at top left.)
*Turnagin Arm curs across anit, however.
So how is it the Susitna River has this well-developed dendritic system but there are big patches of apparently deranged drainage all around it?
Alaska is where the plate boundary changes into a subduction zone
It's the fjord prefecture.
G.H.W. Bush was the second-least odious Republican president of my lifetime.
That's an oblique fjord reference.
1. Ford
2. Bush, GHW
4. Reagan
4. Bush, GW
5. Trump
(Steps do not have equal weight.)
Oops. I forgot how long I've been alive.
5. Nixon
6. Trump
I'm wondering where to put Nixon on that chart. As odious as Trump, yes, but at least he was interested in doing the fucking job.
I was born during the Eisenhower Administration, and I think you can fairly score him no. 1.
I just realized that my mom hasn't lived under any more Republican presidents than me.
68 I'd put Nixon a lot higher given his prolongation of the war in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia and Laos.
So how is it the Susitna River has this well-developed dendritic system but there are big patches of apparently deranged drainage all around it?
I'm sure the answer is "topography" but I'm not sure which surrounding drainages you mean.
I'd put Nixon a lot higher given his prolongation of the war in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia and Laos.
Higher? I have Nixon as the second MOST odious. Ford is the least odious, but he sure isn't perfect.
74 Right, sorry, I read that wrong (woke up late and no coffee yet).
73: The plains full of little lakes north of the city, and south on the other side of the arm.
76: Yeah, topography. Those areas are much flatter than the mountainous areas that make up most of the Susitna drainage so the water flows every which way.
The water always flows down. I looked it up.
So if teo switched back to his old line of work, he could be a fjord ranger?
Alaska should have more earthquakes. They shake all the puns from the trees.
That is just awful. Congratulations.
This affects me personally because I have section 8 housing and it's cut they've cut the amount of help I get because my wife is a legal immigrant I also have to say that like I'm less impressed with Obamacare now that I'm trying to get my wife to benefit from it it seems like everybody tells me a different story even you know when I talk with the government people who are supposed to provide the subsidy.
83: While those are exactly the kinds of things to worry about, I'm curious about the verb tenses in this comment.
I'm talking on my phone using the microphone to come out there.
"to come out there"
I like this way of putting it.
So if teo switched back to his old line of work, he could be a fjord ranger?
One of my neighbors has an electric outdoor menorah and had four lights lit. Is he just fucked up or what?
I don't want to knock on his door before I'm reassured there's no quirk in the Jewish calendar I missed.
He's just fucked up. Chanukah starts tomorrow night.
I'm basically coming around to the idea that if you aren't taking care of your own tribe you'll never convince them to take care of outsiders.
we (I) haven't fought nearly hard enough for those hit by the china shock, deindustrialization, etc. so outrage that we should allow disabled people to immigrate falls flat to me.
I agree with the sentiment - we should have much much more open borders! but we are so far from that, I don't feel heavily invested in it. It would be OK with me if one had to earn your way to full social services as a new person in a country (and I say that as someone approaching 8 years. abroad). the amount of outrage it creates in europe that people can show up on day 1 and take services without working is not worth the social benefit of those services.
OK, tell me why I'm wrong. This is more an emerging feeling than a carefully considered position.
91: I broadly agree with all of that*, but AIUI (that is, sketchily) these regulations would essentially create many new hoops migrants would be forced to jump through, with the possibility of arbitrary** loss of visa status at each point. The effect of which would be to increase precarity, and to deter the claiming of benefits or of different immigration status; quite straightforwardly to make the poor poorer, and to inhibit the gradual earning of status you describe.
*Though 91.2 overstates the importance of WWC contribution to the right-wing vote, as we've been over here so many times already.
**Just how arbitrary would depend on implementation.
90: If he has gone lights lit tomorrow, I'm going to knock and threaten to report him.
91: The one-two punch of Trump winning and the lived experience of being an immigrant to another country and seeing how hard it is -- even for someone who is immigrating on the lowest difficulty setting -- has made me feel the opposite. The people who voted for Trump deserve nothing. They deserve to be deindustrialized into a pine box.
In a democracy, it is unreasonable to expect that voters will not put their own interests and values ahead of others to a greater or lesser extent. And voting for candidates that will change the law to immigration in response to changing economic conditions doesn't bother me especially. The country is full of laws that I think are misguided or unfair, but people don't agree with me about lots of stuff and you work to change what you can.
But, it's worth noting that isn't what is happening. The Republicans had (have) the presidency and Congress while managing to do nothing. The laws are not being changed (largely) because the people driving this know that they won't get what they want out of a democratic process where others with different values have input and because they know much of what they want is unconstitutional. They want continued social-cultural dominance and are willing to destroy American institutions in their quest to control them. And then, it's also pretty clear there's a non-trivial group that either enjoy causing pain to others or use the fact that a plan causes needless pain to others as a signal that people making the plan aren't just lying about their white supremacy.
* I will defend procedural liberalism if I must and am not otherwise busy.
outrage that we should allow disabled people to immigrate
Very bad summary of what the rule does, as noted above. It's deliberately threatening the status of immigrants who might ever need any assistance whatsoever - basically all of them.
Millions of citizen children could lose coverage due to public charge rule, study says
Actual Urban Institute study
