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A Federal Defender Service for Immigrants: Why We Need a Universal, Zealous, and Person-Centered Model

By The Vera Institute of Justice

We need a federally funded universal legal defense service for immigrants — one that is deliberately modeled on the criminal federal defender system, which, while not perfect, is generally regarded as more successfully realizing the values of high-quality, appropriately funded representation than its state counterparts. This service should provide universal, zealous, and person-centered legal defense to all immigrants in any immigration proceedings. The Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) makes this recommendation based on years of experience building and managing national immigrant legal defense programs. A federal defender service built on these core values is effective and achievable, and it would help ensure that the lives, liberty, and community health of immigrants are given full and equal protection under the law, regardless of status. There is an urgent need for a federal defender service for immigrants because most immigrants are unrepresented, and the stakes in immigration proceedings are so high. Deportation can result in physical exile from home, separation from family, loss of income, and even forcible return to conditions of persecution, violence, torture, or death in a person’s country of origin. But immigrants are not entitled to publicly funded counsel in these proceedings. Currently, there are 1.25 million pending cases in the immigration court system, and people in more than 500,000 of those lack legal representation. The lack of representation is particularly staggering for people subjected to immigration detention, where over the past five years, 70 percent have had no counsel. The stakes in immigration proceedings are extraordinary: the U.S. Supreme Court has described them as no less than “both property and life, or of all that makes life worth living.”

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2021. 4p.

The Lifetime Fiscal Impact of Immigrants Report 

 By Daniel Di Martino  

This report estimates the lifetime fiscal impact of immigrants, of various ages and educational attainment, to the United States. It offers a methodological upgrade over similar analyses and estimates and evaluates the fiscal impact of various proposed immigration reforms. A clear picture of the fiscal cost of immigrants is particularly important, given the ongoing border crisis. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the border surge will number 8.7 million unlawful immigrants between 2021 and 2026. The original analysis in this report finds that the border crisis will cost an estimated $1.15 trillion over the lifetime of the new unlawful immigrants—a cost larger than the entire U.S. defense budget and almost equal to the cost of Social Security in 2023. Looking at immigrants more broadly, this report shows that the average new immigrant (lawful or unlawful) has a positive fiscal impact and reduces the federal budget deficit by over $10,000 during his lifetime. For comparison, the average native-born citizen is expected to cost over $250,000 to the federal government. Despite the average immigrant reducing the budget deficit, immigrants without a college education and all those who immigrate to the U.S. after age 55 are universally a net fiscal burden by up to $400,000. The large positive fiscal impact of young and college-educated immigrants pulls up the overall average. Each immigrant under the age of 35 with a graduate degree.   Therefore, for policymakers considering the fiscal impact of immigrants to the U.S., the characteristics of people seeking entry into the country are crucial. Certain immigrants are fiscally beneficial; others are fiscally detrimental. This report quantifies the fiscal impact of common immigration reform proposals: • Mass deportations would significantly reduce the national debt over the long run, but a policy of selective legalization, coupled with mass deportations, would be even more fiscally beneficial, reducing the debt by about $1.9 trillion. • Given the education, age, and earnings of H-1B visa recipients, doubling the number of H-1B visas for just one year would reduce the budget deficit by $70 billion over the long run—and by another $70 billion each year thereafter. • The most beneficial immigration policy change would be to exempt STEM graduate degree holders from green-card caps, increasing immigration by some 15,000 people per year and reducing the visa backlog; this would reduce the deficit by $150 billion in the first year and $25 billion each year thereafter. • Eliminating refugee resettlement and permanent immigration by parents of U.S. citizens would reduce the debt by a combined $40 billion in net present value every year. • Congress could upskill the existing immigration flow by eliminating the diversity visa category and increasing the visas available to the top employment-based categories, and requiring immigrants to have earned a high school diploma to be eligible for a family visa, reducing the national debt by over $60 billion per year. By enacting a selectionist immigration policy—which requires securing the border from unlawful immigration, reducing low-skilled immigration, and expanding high-skilled immigration—the U.S. could reduce future federal debt by trillions of dollars over the long run. This report proposes a legislative package that provides over $2 trillion in net present value during the first year and over $200 billion each subsequent year, without accounting for the additional productivity growth resulting from high-skilled immigration. Furthermore, under these reforms, the annual number of immigrants who are new permanent residents decreases by about 15% after a temporary legalization program and a partial clearing of the employment-based visa backlog. Over the long term, annual legal immigration decreases under this plan from approximately 1 million in FY 2019 to approximately 860,000 

New York: The Manhattan Institute, 2024. 58p.

Violent victimization among immigrants: Using the National Violent Death Reporting System to examine foreign-born homicide victimization in the United States

By Kayla R. Freemon, Melissa A. Gutierrez , Jessica Huff, Hyunjung Cheon, David Choate, Taylor Cox a, Charles M. Katz 

Limited research attention has focused on homicides involving foreign-born victims. Using data from the National Violent Death Reporting System, we examined 9428 homicides that occurred in 2017 in the United States across 32 states and D.C. Approximately 8% of homicide victims were foreign-born. Homicide victimization rates were substantially lower for foreign-born persons, compared to U.S.-born persons. However, foreign-born persons from Honduras, El Salvador, and Jamaica had a substantially higher risk of homicide victimization. Notably, few homicides involving foreign-born victims were gang- or drug-trade-related. With the growing number of immigrants in the United States, policy and prevention efforts should be guided by research.

Preventive Medicine Reports Volume 26, April 2022, 101714

The Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the United States 

By Alex Nowrasteh, Sarah Eckhardt, and Michael Howard

The National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published ground breaking investigations into the economics of immigration in 1997 and 2017. Both publications contained thorough literature surveys compiled by experts, academics, and think tank scholars on how immigration affects many aspects of the U.S. economy. The 2017 NAS report included an original fiscal impact model as a unique contribution to immigration scholarship. Its findings have been used by policymakers, economists, journalists, and others to debate immigration reform. Here, we acquired the exact methods used by the NAS from its authors to replicate, update, and expand upon the 2017 fiscal impact model published in the NAS’s The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration. This paper presents two analyses: a measure of the historical fiscal impacts of immigrants from 1994 to 2018 and the projected long-term fiscal impact of an additional immigrant and that immigrant’s descendants. An individual's fiscal impact refers to the difference between the taxes that person paid and the benefits that person received over a given period. We use and compare two models for these analyses: the first follows the NAS’s methodology as closely as possible and updates the data for more recent years (hereafter referred to as the Updated Model), and the second makes several methodological changes that we believe improve the accuracy of the final results (hereafter referred to as the Cato Model). The most substantial changes made in the Cato Model include correcting for a downward bias in the estimation of immigrants’ future fiscal contributions identified by Michael Clemens in 2021, allocating the fiscal impact of U.S.-born dependents of immigrants to the second generation group, and using a predictive regression to assign future education levels to individuals who are too young to have completed their education. Other minor changes are discussed in later sections. Immigrants have a more positive net fiscal impact than that of native-born Americans in most scenarios in the Updated Model and in every scenario in the Cato Model, depending on how the costs of public goods are allocated. The Cato Model finds that immigrant individuals who arrive at age 25 and who are high school dropouts have a net fiscal impact of +$216,000 in net present value terms, which does not include their descendants. Including the fiscal impact of those immigrants’ descendants reduces those immigrants’ net fiscal impact to +$57,000. By comparison, native-born American high school dropouts of the same age have a net fiscal impact of −$32,000 that drops to −$177,000 when their descendants are included (see Table 31). Results also differ by level of government. State and local governments often incur a less positive or even negative net fiscal impact from immigration, whereas the federal government almost always sees revenues rise above expenditures in response to immigration. With some variation and exceptions, the net fiscal impact of immigrants is more positive than it is for native-born Americans and positive overall for the federal and state/local governments

Washington, DC: The Cato Institute, 2023. 246p.  

Immigration Enforcement Policies and the Mental Health of US Citizens: Findings from a Comparative Analysis 

By Miguel Pinedo, and Carmen R. Valdez

We examined the differential impact of having a family member, friend, or co-worker/community member detained or deported on the mental health of US citizens. In 2019, a sample of 3446 adult participants of White, Black, and Latinx racial/ethnic descent were recruited to complete an online questionnaire. Participants completed the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 to screen for anxiety, depression, and psychological distress. Analyses were restricted to US citizens (n = 3282). Multivariable logistic and linear regressions were conducted to examine the mental health of US citizens who reported personally knowing a migrant who has been detained or deported and by their relationship to the migrant, overall and among Latinxs only. Among US citizens, 32% reported personally knowing someone who has been detained or deported. In multivariable analyses, US citizens who personally knew a detained or deported migrant were more likely to report anxiety, depression, and greater psychological distress. Associations were more pronounced among those who reported having a family member detained or deported. US-citizen Latinxs with social ties to migrants who have been detained or deported were especially more likely to report poor mental health than White and Latinx participants who did not personally know a migrant who has been detained or deported. It is critical that policy makers consider the potential mental health harms on migrants and its own citizens when designing policies targeting migrant communities. 

Am J Community Psychol (2020) 66:119–129 

Legal Violence, Health, and Access to Care: Latina Immigrants in Rural and Urban Kansas

By Andrea Gómez Cervantes, and Cecilia Menjívar

Using interviews and ethnography started in 2016 in rural and urban Kansas, we examine the consequences of an amplified immigration enforcement combined with a local limited health care infrastructure that reproduce legal violence manifesting on Latina immigrants’ health, access to care, and community participation. We highlight the conditions rooted in place that generate short- and long-term negative impacts for Latina immigrants’ health. Fear and anxiety about the deportation of themselves and their family members make them ill and also generate apprehension about contacting medical institutions, driving, and spending time in public spaces. These circumstances coalesce in women’s lives to block access to medical care and undermine women’s roles in their communities. Following gendered expectations, women turn to their informal networks to seek health care for their families. In the context that the 

Journal of Health and Social Behavior Volume 61 Issue 3 Pages 307-323, 2020

The Racialization of “Illegality”

By Cecilia Menjívar

This essay examines the intertwined nature of seemingly neutral immigration laws that illegalize certain immigrant groups and the socially constructed attitudes and stereotypes that associate the same legally targeted groups with “illegality,” to produce the racialization of illegality. These complementary factors are further sustained by other social forces, including media discourses that reify those associations. The racialization of illegality is a fundamentally situational, relational, dynamic, and historically and context-specific process. Today, Latino groups are the preeminent target group of both the social and the legal production of illegality. Thus, this essay examines Latinos' racialized illegality across geographical contexts, within their group, and in relation to other contemporary immigrants. Although expressions of racialized illegality and specific targeted

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences , 150 Issue 2 Pages 91-105, 2021

The Unequal Homeless: Men on the Streets, Women in their Place

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By Joanne Passaro

Gender and Homelessness: The book explores how gender differences contribute to the persistence of homelessness, with a focus black men in New York City.

Cultural and Moral Location: Homelessness is not just an economic issue but also a cultural and moral one, where homeless men are seen as both hypermasculinized and emasculated.

Survival Strategies: Homeless women often strategize to appear"worthy" to move through the system, while homeless men lack similar strategies and face greater stigmatization.

Impact of Family Structures: The book argues that nuclear family ideologies play a significant role in who remains homeless versus who becomes houseless.

Psychology Press, 1996, 128 pages

Our Civil Liberties

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By Osmond K. Praenkel

Importance of Civil Liberties: The document emphasizes that civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, assembly, and protection from arbitrary arrests, are fundamental to a free society.

Historical Context: It discusses the origins and development of civil liberties in the United States, particularly through the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments.

Challenges and Limitations: The text highlights the challenges in fully realizing civil liberties, including during wartime and in the face of discrimination.

Role of the Judiciary: The document underscores the critical role of courts in interpreting and enforcing civil liberties, ensuring that government actions do not infringe on individual rights.

The Viking Press, 1944, 277 pages

Homeless and Working Youth Around the World: Exploring Developmental Issues

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Edited by Marcela Raffaelli & Reed W. Larson

Focus on Street Youth: The document explores the developmental issues faced by homeless and working street youth around the world,highlighting their unique challenges and resilience.

Geographical Approach: It presents studies from different regions,including India, Brazil, Kenya, and the United States, to show the diverse experiences and factors affecting street youth.

Research and Methodology: The document discusses the methodological and ethical issues in researching street youth,emphasizing the importance of understanding their context and using appropriate research methods.

Developmental Impact: It examines how street life affects the development of street youth, including their cognitive skills, identity formation, and psychological adjustment.

Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999, 90 pages

Homeless Youth and the Search for Stability

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By Jeff Karabanow, Sean Kidd, Tyler Frederick, and Jean Hughes

Study Focus: The book explores the lived experiences of homeless in Canada, focusing on their transition from homelessness stability.

Methodology: The study used a longitudinal mixed-method approach, involving in-depth qualitative interviews and questionnaires with 51 participants over a year.

Key Findings: Factors influencing the transition include consistent support,feelings of belonging,life and social skills, and housing stability.

Challenges: Youth face significant challenges such as instability,scheduling issues, and engagement difficulties during their transition.

Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, May 30, 2018, 147 pages

Homelessness in Brent

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By Lucy Bonnerjea & Jean Lawton

Study Focus: The report examines homelessness in Brent within the context of race and housing, specifically looking at disadvantages faced by black people.

Historical Context: It provides a historical overview of homelessness legislation, highlighting the 1977 Housing Act And its impact on local authorities' responsibilities.

Current Issues: The document discusses current challenges in managing homelessness, including inadequate housing policies, discrimination, and the impact on families.

Recommendations: It offers policy recommendations to improve housing access, quality, and support for homeless families, emphasizing the need for equal opportunities and better planning.

Policy Studies Institute, 1987, 88 pages

Evaluating Programs for the Homeless

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Edited by Debra J. Rog

Complexity of Homelessness: Homelessness is a multifaceted issue involving various subgroups such as mentally ill individuals, families with children, and those with substance abuse problems. Understanding These complexities is crucial for effective interventions.

Mixed-Method Approaches: Estimating the number of homeless individuals requires mixed methods to produce reasonable estimates, as highlighted by David S. Cordray.

Evaluation Challenges: Evaluating programs for the homeless, such as those targeting substance abuse or mental health, involves significant methodological and practical challenges, including diverse evaluation designs and data collection issues.

Program Evaluations: The document reviews several large-scale national demonstration programs, emphasizing the importance of both individual and system-level evaluations to improve service delivery and policy implications.

Jossey-Bass, 1991, 94 pages

Homeless Families: Failed Policies and Young Victims

By Lisa Klee Mihaly

Homelessness Impact: Homelessness severely affects children's health,emotional well-being, and development, often leading to long-term consequences.

Causes of Homelessness: Major causes include inadequate income,lack of affordable housing, and insufficient family support systems.

Policy Failures: Current policies and emergency shelters are insufficient to address the needs of homeless families.

Recommendations: The document suggests increasing affordable housing, improving income support, and providing comprehensive services to prevent and address homelessness.

Children’s Defense Fund, 1991, 25 pages

The Homeless Problem

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Edited by Matthew A. Kraljic

Homelessness Statistics: The document discusses the challenges inaccurately quantifying the homeless population, highlighting discrepancies in data sources and the implications of these numbers.

Causes of Homelessness: It identifies multiple causes, including urban renewal, lack of affordable housing, insufficient mental health care, and economic disparities.

Impact on Different Demographics: The document emphasizes that homelessness affects various groups, including former middle-class individuals, children, and rural populations.

Potential Solutions: It explores potential solutions, such as combining volunteerism, private sector aid, and public policy initiatives to address homelessness more effectively.

The H.W Wilson Company, 1992, 162 pages

ICE Annual Report FY 2023

By U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Annual Report provides an overview of the agency’s key programs, enforcement metrics, and accomplishments. It represents the agency’s commitment to transparency and accountability, and meets and exceeds the requirements in the Joint Explanatory Statement accompanying the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Appropriations Act, 2023, which states: ICE is directed to continue issuing annual Fiscal Year ERO and HSI reports by not later than 90 days after [the] end of each fiscal year. The reports should compare data for the reporting fiscal year to the prior five fiscal years in a sortable, downloadable, and printable format, with a description of any significant deviations in data representation when compared to prior years. ICE was created in 2003 through the merger of the investigative and interior enforcement elements of the former U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Today, it is a premier federal law enforcement agency with over 20,000 law enforcement and support personnel in more than 400 offices across the United States and around the world. Its mission is to promote homeland security and public safety through the criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration. In support of this mission, ICE works to uphold hundreds of federal statutes, administer U.S. immigration laws, oversee the cases of more than 6.2 million noncitizens on the agency’s national docket, combat fentanyl and other illegal narcotics, prevent terrorism, and combat the illegal movement of people and goods across the U.S. border. The agency is one of the three principal operational components charged with the immigration and customs authorities Congress placed in DHS under the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and is a member of the federal law enforcement community. ICE’s unique combination of legal authorities and intelligence-driven law enforcement capabilities position the agency to respond to a range of increasingly complex cross-border and domestic threats. The agency has an annual budget of approximately $8 billion, primarily devoted to three operational directorates: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA). A fourth directorate — Management & Administration (M&A) — supports the three operational branches to advance ICE’s mission, while the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) promotes integrity and accountability by conducting independent reviews of ICE programs and operations. Additionally, several support programs within the ICE Office of the Director (OD) are devoted to improving the agency’s operational and policymaking capabilities, enhancing stakeholder relationships, cultivating a professionally trained and diverse workforce, and ensuring safe and humane conditions for those in ICE custody.    

Washington, DC: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2023. 99p.

Media, Migration and Public Opinion: Myths, Prejudices and the Challenge of Attaining Mutual Understanding between Europe and North Africa

Edited by Ivan Ureta

Sensitive issues like migration and human mobility provoke paradigms and prejudices in public opinion. Media, Migration and Public Opinion is a collective effort of academic criticism to overcome these myths. The main motive of this book is linked to the fact that migration, media and public opinion related issues focusing on North Africa have not been addressed properly by available literature. Against this background, the objective of Media, Migration and Public Opinion pursues three aims: Firstly, it fills a gap in the scholarly literature regarding media, political communication and migration by shifting the focus to the North African countries Morocco, Algeria and Libya. Secondly, it assesses to what extent the paradigms of the «other» and its characterization as a source of problems established in receiving countries are also present in sending and transit countries. Thirdly, the book puts North African issues in relation to European countries by presenting case-studies focused on Spain, Malta and Switzerland in order to raise commonalities and differences.

Bern, SWIT: Peter Lang, 2011. 292p.

Excluding Diversity Through Intersectional Borderings: Politics, Policies and Daily Lives

Edited by: Laura Merla, Sarah Murru, Giacomo Orsini , Tanja Vuckovic Juros 

This open access book critically examines how discourses and policies target and exclude migrants and their families in Europe and North America along racial, gender and sexuality lines, and how these exclusions are experienced and resisted. Building on the influential notion of intersectional borderings, it delves deep into how these discourses converge and diverge, highlighting the underlying normative constructs of family, gender, and sexuality. First, it examines how radical-right and conservative political movements perpetuate exclusionary practices and how they become institutionalized in migration, welfare, and family policies. Second, it examines the dynamic responses they provoke—both resistance and reinforcement—among those affected in their everyday lives. Bringing together studies from political and social sciences, it offers a vital contribution to the expanding field of migrant family governance and exclusion and is essential for understanding the complex processes of exclusion and the movements that challenge and sustain them. It expands academic discussions on populism and the politics of exclusion by linking them to the politicization of intimacy and family life. With diverse case studies from Europe, North, and Central America, it appeals to students, academics, and policymakers, informing future mobilizations against discriminatory and exclusionary tendencies in politics and society.

IMISCOE Research Series Cham: Springer Nature, 2024. 183p.

Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism: Narrative Analysis for Social Change

By Simone Drake, James Phelan, Robyn Warhol, and Lisa Zunshine

Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism puts literary narrative theory to work on an urgent real-world problem. The book calls attention to African American women’s everyday experiences with systemic racism and demonstrates how four types of narrative theory can help generate strategies to explain and dismantle that racism. This volume presents fifteen stories told by eight midwestern African American women about their own experiences with casual and structural racism, followed by four detailed narratological analyses of the stories, each representing a different approach to narrative interpretation. The book makes a case for the need to hear the personal stories of these women and others like them as part of a larger effort to counter the systemic racism that prevails in the United States today. Readers will find that the women’s stories offer powerful evidence that African Americans experience racism as an inescapable part of their day-to-day lives—and sometimes as a force that radically changes their lives. The stories provide experience-based demonstrations of how pervasive systemic racism is and how it perpetuates power differentials that are baked into institutions such as schools, law enforcement, the health care system, and business. Containing countless signs of the stress and trauma that accompany and follow from experiences of racism, the stories reveal evidence of the women’s resilience as well as their unending need for it, as they continue to feel the negative effects of experiences that occurred many years ago. The four interpretive chapters note the complex skill involved in the women’s storytelling. The analyses also point to the overall value of telling these stories: how they are sometimes cathartic for the tellers; how they highlight the importance of listening—and the likelihood of misunderstanding—and how, if they and other stories like them were heard more often, they would be a force to counteract the structural racism they so graphically expose.

London; New York: Routledge, 2024. 137p

Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London

By Simon P. Newman

Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London reveals the hidden stories of enslaved and bound people who attempted to escape from captivity in England’s capital. In 1655 White Londoners began advertising in the English-speaking world’s first newspapers for enslaved people who had escaped. Based on the advertisements placed in these newspapers by masters and enslavers offering rewards for so-called runaways, this book brings to light for the first time the history of slavery in England as revealed in the stories of resistance by enslaved workers. Featuring a series of case-studies of individual "freedom-seekers", this book explores the nature and significance of escape attempts as well as detailing the likely routes and networks they would take to gain their freedom. The book demonstrates that not only were enslaved people present in Restoration London but that White Londoners of this era were intimately involved in the construction of the system of racial slavery, a process that traditionally has been regarded as happening in the colonies rather than the British Isles. An unmissable and important book that seeks to delve into Britain’s colonial past.

London: University of London Press, 2022.