We at CIS try to cover all pertinent migration news from here in the nation’s capital, but there is a lot going on out in the country that we do not know about and that we should be writing about, and we would welcome some help.
There are a handful of folks who write to us from time to time about things they know about but we do not. For example, and you know who you are, a couple of friends who tell us what is happening in the foreign worker field, with at least one who reads India’s business press, which often reports more about the H-1B program than any U.S. media.
Then we have a friend who apparently works for a state prison system and gives us data on the number of foreign-born in its jails. (That system, oddly enough, seems to think that our territory, in the Northern Marianas, is a foreign country.)
Then, in a different state, there is our contact who told us recently that a state just passed a law providing tax funding for the education of illegal aliens in private schools. (Public schools for decades have been obliged to provide K-12 education to illegals, but this was a new twist to us.)
In general, we need to know more about state-level activity regarding illegal aliens; little of that news reaches us here in the nation’s capital.
In addition, I have a very specific desire to learn more about the misadventures of a group of pampered (legal) aliens, those in the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, probably our second-largest foreign worker program, after H-1B. These workers are aliens who have recently graduated from America’s colleges and universities (usually on F-1 visas). They are pampered because in all cases their employers do not need to pay the usual payroll taxes, and in some cases this tax break falls on the OPT workers as well. (Yes, the federal government provides about an 8 percent tax break to employers who hire OPT workers rather than citizens, strange as it seems.)
The media is routinely vague about aliens’ legal status, so it is not much help here. What I suspect is that in any population of some 200,000 (there are that many OPT workers) there are some bad guys, and that in the even larger population of former OPT workers there are more. We would welcome any news about specific OPT workers and their tangles with the authorities.
If you have something for us, please send it to me at [email protected]; if appropriate, I will pass it on to my colleagues.
ISO Government Data, Too. Speaking of hidden migration information, a recent DHS press release on some $2 billion in anti-terrorism preparedness grants to various local, state, and tribal governments reminded me of the good old days of the Obama administration, when each specific grant was listed, along with the amount of money and a brief description of the project. This let us know, for example, which Indian tribes in Arizona, home state of then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, received how much anti-terrorist funding for the year in question. There is a modest $15 million set aside for the tribes each year in this program.
This is a continuing process, and the most recent DHS press release on the subject had only the most generalized of news, indicating, for example: “Nonprofit Security Grant Program — provides $250 million to support target hardening and other physical security enhancements for nonprofit organizations that are at high risk of a terrorist attack.”
There were no specifics about which nonprofits got this protection or why it was needed. Similarly, there is nothing on which Indian tribes received grants.
Can you see the bad guys in Moscow or Kabul, for instance, saying “Damn, DHS is not going to let us bomb either the Sioux or the Salvation Army — we have been foiled again!”
I can’t.