The new RAND Corporation report, Neither Deportation nor Amnesty: An Alternative for the Immigration Debate Building a Bridge Across the Deportation-Amnesty Divide, released Feb. 26, charts a third path between the deportation and amnesty sides of the immigration debate.
Author Douglas C. Ligor, senior behavioral and social scientist at RAND Corporation, suggests a statutory approach to the debate that he says might appeal to decision-makers on opposite sides of the issue.
In the report, he notes a “little-known section” of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) called “Cancellation of Removal,” that allows some individuals in the country illegally to become a lawful permanent resident. Among its provisions are requirements that the individual must have been in the country continuously 10 years before applying, must have no conviction of INA-specified crimes, is “of good moral character,” and deportation “would result in exceptional and extremely unusual hardship to his or her U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident spouse, parent, or child,” Ligor writes. “Updating the existing cancellation-of-removal statutory provision in order to apply it more readily to the population it was intended to address … is not a new act of forgiveness on the part of the government but rather an adjustment of procedure that permits those covered by it to access the benefits of the existing law more easily and at lower expense to the government.”
In the law, the attorney general is the individual who can grant this benefit. As such, a Department of Justice (DOJ) employee—an immigration judge—is the primary adjudicator in such a case. Ligor suggests changing the law to allow the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to participate in this process.
“Giving DHS adjudication authority would enable the secretary to deploy the assets of [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)]—the immigration benefits arm of the department—to determine who is and who is not eligible for cancellation of removal,” he writes. “With approximately 19,000 employees, USCIS is far better equipped than the immigration court’s 330 judges to tackle this problem from a human resources perspective.”
Ligor also suggests that Congress either increase the number of cancellation of removal cases permitted per year or eliminate the limits altogether, as well as have Congress amend the “exceptional hardship” provision of the INA to increase the number who might qualify. Ligor stipulates the law also include a “penalty provision.”
“These minor statutory adjustments,” Ligor writes, “can result in at least one impactful solution within the current panoply of immigration dilemmas dividing the nation and polarizing its political process.”
The entire report is available for download here.
© 2018 Homeland411
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