This Week In Immigration

On today’s episode, we feature audio from our most recent event on challenges with the current legal immigration system and potential pathways for reform. Moderated by Bloomberg Law’s Andrew Kreighbaum, Jon Baselice with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Martin Kim with Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC, David Bier with Cato Institute, and Dip Patel with Improve The Dream assess issues raised by the system’s current status quo and share their best ideas for reform.

In this episode we welcome Representative Salud Carbajal to tell us all about his bipartisan bill, the Protect Patriot Parents Act, which would make parents of U.S. military service members eligible for green cards, preventing potential deportations or separations of military families. After this, podcast regular Theresa Cardinal Brown breaks down the latest border numbers and recent Biden administration restrictions on who is eligible to apply for asylum.

To mark a very special podcast milestone—our 150th episode—podcast regular Theresa Cardinal Brown sits down with Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) to discuss the Dignity Act. Then, Theresa and host Hanadi Jordan reflect on six years of the podcast. Featuring clips from some of our favorite episodes, we cover the highlights, the challenges, and hopes for the future!

In this edition, Julie Stufft, deputy assistant secretary for visa services at the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department, walks listeners through life in visa services. Joined by podcast regular Theresa Cardinal Brown, Stuff covers her career in the State Department, current challenges in visa services, and recent reports of State Department efforts to streamline visa applications for Indian nationals.

Having trouble keeping up with key immigration litigation? This latest episode of TWII has you covered with another edition of The Gavel! Joined by podcast regular Theresa Cardinal Brown, Cornell Law Professor Steve Yale-Loeher breaks down the Supreme Court’s latest decision to uphold the Biden administration’s deportation priorities in U.S. v. Texas. Then, both podcast guests walk listeners through upcoming cases concerning the future of the DACA program and the administration’s new asylum restrictions.

To mark graduation season, we’re covering immigrants and higher education this episode. Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, joins to discuss the Presidents’ Alliance and the concerns of higher education institutions regarding immigrant students and scholars. Then, podcast regular Theresa Cardinal Brown provides an update on the border post-Title 42, and why the numbers of encounters aren’t what many predicted.

Today, we sit down with Jon Baselice, vice president of immigration policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to discuss the Chamber’s recently launched LIBERTY campaign which calls for both border and legal immigration reform. Then, as we start summer and all the activities that go along with it, podcast regular Theresa Cardinal Brown walks listeners through who seasonal workers are, the visa process these workers rely on, and challenges in meeting the workforce needs of seasonal employers.

On today’s episode, we examine the pause on nursing visa applications, overall health care workforce issues, and the impact of these challenges on the health care industry. Lisa Harootunian, BPC associate director of health policy, joins alongside “This Week” regular Theresa Cardinal Brown to break down the workforce shortage and how immigration can be part of the solution.

How do immigrants support U.S. competitiveness? On today’s episode, we recap our latest event, “National Security and Competitiveness: Can Skilled Immigration Help?” with audio from the webinar. Our panel includes Kai Hirabayashi, senior manager of public policy at Amazon, Divanysh Kaushik, associate director at the Federation of American Scientists, Margaret Stock, attorney at Cascadia Cross-Border Law Group, and BPC’s Dane Stangler, director of strategic initiatives.

We mark the end of tax season with a discussion on taxes and immigrants—do undocumented immigrants file taxes and, if so, how and why? We cover the consequences and challenges for undocumented immigrants who file and what policy changes have been proposed to address the issue. Then, we catch listeners up on the latest news in the immigration world, from the return to pre-pandemic levels of U.S. immigration to new border bills from House Republicans to the impending expiration of Title 42.  

On today’s episode, we are joined by CBC reporter Verity Stevenson and podcast regular Theresa Cardinal Brown to discuss the Safe Third Country Agreement between the U.S. and Canada. We discuss what the policy is, how it’s impacting migrants, and why it has elicited so much controversy as it awaits its fate in the Canadian court system.

On this week’s episode, host Hanadi Jordan speaks with Theresa Cardinal Brown and BPC Action Managing Director Laura Hall about the president’s budget, the budget and appropriations process and why it matters for immigration policy, as well as the details of what President Biden proposed for immigration. Is there a federal budget for “immigration” as a whole? What makes it so hard for Congress to pass the federal budget on time? And will the divided Congress support President Biden’s immigration priorities? Theresa and Laura break it all down.

On this week’s episode Theresa Cardinal Brown fills in for Hanadi Jordan who is out this week.  We dive into the state of the American workforce and how immigration plays into it with Ben Gitis, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Associate Director for economic and workforce policy. We talk about a recent Morning Consult survey for BPC on high-skilled immigration, the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the state of employment, unemployment and how we define labor shortages.  We also talk about immigrants in the labor force, high-skilled and lesser skilled immigration, and what may be keeping immigrants and Americans from getting back into the labor market post-COVID.

In today’s edition of “This Week in Immigration,” we catch listeners up on the latest news dominating the immigration space. Podcast regular Theresa Cardinal Brown addresses the removal of Title 42 from the Supreme Court’s argument calendar and how the Biden administration has been prepping for the fall of the public health order. Then, we walk through the president’s immigration comments during the State of the Union address and immigration bills floating through the halls of Congress.

On this Valentine’s Day episode of This Week in Immigration we explore some of the immigration challenges faced by binational couples and their families both in the United States and in Mexico with Tran Dang of the Rhizome Center for Migrants and Tony Payan of the Rice University Baker Institute. Then we do a round of “fact or fiction” to tackle myths about getting a green card by marriage, many of which have been part of Hollywood films such as The Proposal and Green Card. Joining us in this myth busting exercise is Jeremy McKinney, the current elected president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

In this episode of This Week in Immigration we focus once again on the US-Mexico border.  First, Hanadi Jordan speaks with David Stout, a county commissioner from El Paso County Texas, and chair of the National Association of Counties’ Immigration Reform Task Force to get the local perspective on the situation at the border, what counties like El Paso are doing to manage the arrivals of immigrants, the recent visits to El Paso of President Biden and a bipartisan group of Senators and what he thinks needs to be done.  Next, Theresa Cardinal Brown interviews Andrew Selee, President of the Migration Policy Institute about the issue of migration in the hemisphere, US-Mexico cooperation at the North American Leader’s Summit and what else needs to be done to manage what is an increasingly complex issue for all the countries of Latin America.  This episode was recorded on January 20 and January 24, 2023.   Follow @BPC_Bipartisan on Twitter, and see more of our work at www.bipartisanpolicy.org/immigration .

Happy New Year! This Week in Immigration starts off the new year by looking back at the lame duck Congress of 2022, and how immigration issues fared, and a brief look at what the long set of votes for Speaker of the House might mean for the prospects of immigration legislation in the new congress. We then chat with Christopher Sands of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Canada Institute about the North American Leaders Summit between Canada, Mexico and the United States, immigration issues between Canada and the U.S. and what Canada might do to assist with the challenge of migration in the hemisphere.  We also welcome new TWII host, Hanadi Jordan to the podcast.  This episode was recorded on January 11, 2023.

In our annual year-end wrap-up, we are joined by Ellen Gilmer, senior reporter at Bloomberg Government, Michelle Hackman, reporter at the Wall Street Journal, Camilo Montoya-Galvez, reporter at CBS News, and podcast regular Theresa Cardinal Brown to break down this year’s top immigration stories. We delve into Title 42, DACA, the courts’ impact on immigration policy, Ukrainian refugees, migrant busing, and more. A note for listeners: this episode was recorded on December 7, 2022.

In this week’s special Thanksgiving episode, we continue our tradition of looking at this most American of holidays from the perspectives of new Americans. Theresa Cardinal Brown is joined by Anya McMurray, President and COO of Welcome.US, to talk about how America has welcomed diverse immigrants over the last two years, from Afghans, to Ukrainians, to Venezuelans, to the people of New York City and Martha’s Vineyard who welcomed migrants bussed there from the border. Then, we welcome Lucija Bebek, BPC’s spring immigration intern, who shares her own immigrant Thanksgiving story.   If you are interested in the work of welcome.us, please find their website here: https://welcome.us/.   This podcast can also be found on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

In this week’s episode, we’re breaking down the midterms, and what they might mean for the issue of immigration. Theresa Cardinal Brown is joined by Laura Hall, the managing director of BPC Action, and Casey Christine Higgins, Senior Counsel at Akin Gump to chat about how the issue of immigration played in the midterms, what the election might signal about lame duck legislation on immigration, and how the next Congress might approach immigration. The episode was recorded on Wednesday, November 9, before all the races had been called, so we explored multiple different scenarios of House and Senate control and their impact on possible immigration legislation.