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Friday Immigration Bulletin: Cardenas, Semiconductors, Wyden

Added 2022-10-28 18:55:12 +0000 UTC

Rep. Cardenas of Los Angeles introduces a House bill focused on transparency in USCIS wait times; NYT reports the stateside semiconductor industry is slowing down despite the CHIPS Act; and Senator Wyden of Oregon posts an unredacted report on a controversial DHS operation in Portland. Happy Friday!

Cardenas (Re)introduces Backlog Bill

Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-CA) introduced a bill this week that would create a degree of transparency for backlog wait times at United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) run by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (Cardenas’ fellow Los Angelo) .

The Case Backlog and Transparency Act (H. R. 9225) would require DHS to publish on its website quarterly reports and a biennial report with the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) on the state of the backlog - a list of immigration applications that grew from 3.2 to 5.8 million between 2015 and 2020, according to Cardenas’ office.

The bill is a 17 page bill with no cosponsors that has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY). The Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship for House Judiciary is chaired by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).

There’s probably not enough time in the lame duck to pass the bill, which got three GOP cosponsors in the House last Congress … but the thinking behind this backlog relief effort is interesting. USCIS is the federal gatekeeper for immigrants looking to come or stay in the U.S. legally. If passed, Cardenas’ bill would codify a degree of accountability from an agency with a huge amount of highly subjective decision making power over immigrants and their families.

The bill requires GAO publish recommendations every two years on addressing the status of the backlog and related challenges. More-importantly, it requires a quarterly report from USCIS that includes “the average processing time for each type of immigration benefit application along with any change in that time relative to the prior quarter.”

In other words, Cardenas is suggesting that immigrants should know on the front-end how long their paperwork takes to process … and the public should know which paperwork has the longest and shortest processing times. While it’s unlikely to pass during this Congress, I’ll keep watching this and other backlog-focused newsletters here at Pablo Reports.

NYT: Biden’s Stateside Semiconductor Slump

The New York Times reports an unexpected dip in demand for consumer gadgets. Along with new red tape on trade with China, stateside semiconductor manufacturers are left “suddenly grappling with immense challenges.” This comes barely a month after Congress authorized $52 billion for the industry, ostensibly to boost American competitiveness with China.

In August, President Biden signed the CHIPS iand Science Act into law. The bill passed both chambers of Congress on simple rhetoric about competitiveness with China. Proposed immigrant relief provisions in the CHIPS Act allowing STEM PhD workers in the semiconductor industry a citizenship pathway were stripped by GOP Senators Chuck Grassley (IA) and bill conferee Todd Young (IN).

Young told me after the CHIPS bill was enacted that the American economy would benefit from STEM PhD immigrants. “Republicans, on balance, support inclusion because they’re waiting to do this next Congress,” said Young, adding it was Grassley’s desire to wait until the next Congress.

The ink had barely dried on the president’s signature when the CEOs of the major U.S. semiconductor companies wrote a letter advocating for immigrant relief for the STEM workers left behind by the bill.

To be fair, the semiconductor industry has been asking the White House for immigrant relief policies since Barack Obama’s presidency, but to no avail. Of course, that hasn’t stopped Biden from hyping the CHIPS bill by traveling to several manufacturing facilities this week with a message of domestic job creation and competitiveness with China.

Wyden’s Unredacted DHS Report

Senator Ron Wyden continues to scrutinize DHS agents’ actions in Portland at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, according to a newly unredacted version of the April report the Oregon Democrat released this week.

The report paints a troubling portrait of the bureaucracy behind DHS field agents in unmarked vehicles arresting protesters off the street in Portland and other U.S. cities after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police in Minneapolis.

Acting Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Brian Murphy is named as a particularly bad actor. According to the report, Murphy suggested creating “baseball cards” of data on dissidents, including their immigration status.

The report shows Homeland Security analysts and agents with little experience in crowd control were deployed to Portland to control crowds and gather intelligence on protesters. Murphy helmed the one-month operation for DHS, telling analysts to say the protests were “Violent Antifa Anarchist Inspired”, a claim the analysts themselves had already determined was baseless.

What struck me most about the protests in the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency were videos of dissidents disappearing into unmarked vans full of unidentified law enforcement agents. It was a familiar tactic. By 2020, it was a familiar terror tactic ICE has deployed in immigrant communities for over a decade. My father was detained this way into the trunk of an unmarked car by agents of a Chilean dictator in the 1980s (thankfully, he survived his interrogations).

Through the report, Wyden provides a small window into how this hodgepodge of DHS analysts and field agents were deployed to put down the protests for Black lives a little over two years ago. The operation set a dangerous precedent of a president deploying immigration enforcement agents to control citizen protesters.

Note: Durbin/Cramer Amendment to NDAA

As several of you pointed out, my last bulletin talked about how Congress has stymied relief for STEM PhDs but omitted some excellent reporting by Haley Byrd for The Dispatch. Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) or Kevin Cramer (R-ND) have an amendment to the must-pass defense bill to help STEM PhD immigrants. I will continue to poke around and see what I can find out before Congress returns to Capitol Hill on November 14th…