The new policy platform on the Harris campaign’s website comes 50 days after Biden exited the race.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign just released a new page on its website titled, “Issues,” which includes a 23-point policy platform that comes following weeks of criticism over its absence. 

Pressure has been building on the Harris campaign to put up a policy platform on its website, similar to how former President Donald Trump and others have done in the past. Upon its release this week, however, the platform was met with even more criticism over a lack of specifics.

In particular, one conservative immigration hawk took issue with the policy platform’s failure to clarify Harris’ stance on border wall funding, and whether she still views illegal border crossings as a civil enforcement issue — or rather, a criminal one.

“The Harris campaign finally has an ‘Issues’ page, but — on immigration, at least — there’s no there, there,” Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Fox News Digital. “She doesn’t say if she’d build more border barriers. She doesn’t say whether she still wants to decriminalize border-jumping. The statement just repeats the vacuous nonsense about the ‘bipartisan’ Senate border bill, which was drafted by the Biden-Harris DHS to codify its unlawful schemes to import more illegal aliens.”

Despite indicating a potential Harris-Walz administration would “bring back the bipartisan border security bill,” the new online policy platform did not indicate where Harris stands on funding additional border wall construction. Republicans have pointed to Harris’ public support for the failed bipartisan border bill as evidence she now backs a border wall after once calling it a “medieval vanity project.” 

But Harris campaign officials have said the border bill did not include any new money for border wall construction — it just extended the timeline to spend funds appropriated during Trump’s last year as president. The bill, however, has limits to ensure the money is spent on border barriers.

“Americans should believe Harris’ prior statements and current policies as Vice President,” Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told Fox News Digital in a statement Tuesday. “She has previously stated numerous times that she opposes a border wall. And on day one of the Biden-Harris Administration, they halted construction of the border wall system.”

Meanwhile, while running for president in 2019, Harris indicated during a nationally televised debate that she would not go after illegal border crossings. In a segment on ABC’s “The View,” she reiterated her stance in a riff with the late-Sen. John McCain’s daughter, Meghan. 

“I would not make it a crime punishable by jail,” Harris said. “It should be a civil enforcement issue but not a criminal enforcement issue.”

“Harris repeatedly said during her CNN interview that her values have not changed,” Ries highlighted in her statement to Fox News Digital. 

Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign for comment on the criticism from Krikorian and others about a lack of specifics in its new online policy platform, but did not receive a response.

Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called the new policy platform “a late-night, half-ass, wish list of policies.” 

“If Kamala really wanted to lower costs and secure the border — why did she cast the tie-breaking vote to cause inflation and support the war on our energy industry, and why is she allowing an invasion of illegal immigrants through our southern border as we speak?”

Not long after the Harris campaign’s “Issues” page was added to its website, social media users pointed out that the new web page contained metadata with language urging voters to reelect President Joe Biden, according to The New Republic. The Biden language was quickly removed, but not before leaving the impression that the Harris campaign copied and pasted from Biden’s documents, the outlet reported.

Source

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Source: France 24

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WASHINGTON — Most of the candidates in this year’s 2024 Republican race for the presidential nomination mirror hard-line immigration policies set by the front-runner, former President Donald Trump.

What were once considered far-right policies are now common talking points among the GOP candidates. That includes support for building a wall along the Southern U.S.-Mexico border and ending birthright citizenship for American-born children of undocumented immigrants — a protection that is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Candidates also have argued for the reinstatement of Title 42, a pandemic-era immigration policy that immediately expelled migrants and barred them from claiming asylum. The policy was ended by the Biden administration earlier this year, but GOP candidates have argued that it should be revived because of the high number of migrants claiming asylum.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has seen an increase in encounters with migrants at the U.S. Southern border, according to its data. In fiscal year 2022, there were nearly 2.4 million encounters with migrants, and in fiscal year 2023, which ended on Oct. 1, there were nearly 2.5 million encounters with migrants at the Southern border.

GOP candidates calling for increased border security have also pointed to the opioid crisis and illicit fentanyl that is smuggled into the U.S. More than  150 people die each day from overdoses related to fentanyl, a topic in the most recent GOP presidential debate.

Most fentanyl — about 90% — is seized by border officials at ports of entry, and more than 70% of people smuggling those drugs are U.S. citizens, according to James Mandryck, a CBP official.

Here’s where the Republican presidential candidates stand on U.S. immigration policy:

Former President Donald J. Trump

Trump’s current policies build from his first term, such as expanding the “Muslim travel ban,” which was an executive order he signed in 2017 that banned travel to seven predominantly Muslim countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Courts granted immigration attorneys who sued a nationwide temporary injunction on the ban, but in 2018 the Supreme Court upheld the third version of the executive order, which included barring travelers from Venezuela and North Korea. President Joe Biden rescinded the travel ban.

At an October campaign rally in Iowa, Trump said he would expand that Muslim ban to also include an “ideological screening” of immigrants coming into the U.S. and will ban anyone who is a “communist, Marxist or fascist” who is sympathetic to “radical Islamic terrorists” and people who do not “like our religion.”

The U.S. does not have a state religion and was founded on the principles of religious freedom.

At a late November campaign rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Trump stated he would undertake mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. There are roughly 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. Trump has also said he wants to place those immigrants in camps as they await deportation.

Trump has pledged to reinstate the “remain in Mexico” policy from his administration and send U.S. military to the Southern border.

The “remain in Mexico” policy forced asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their applications were being processed, which many immigration advocates criticized because it put those asylum seekers in harm. The Biden administration tried to get rid of the policy, but federal courts kept it in place until the Supreme Court ruled that the White House had the authority to end it.

Trump would also end a policy used by U.S. enforcement agencies that allows migrants awaiting their asylum hearings in court to live in the U.S., rather than be held at a detention facility.

Trump in addition has said during the campaign that he would end birthright citizenship through an executive order. Trump made the same promise while he was in office, but never acted on it.

Trump’s immigration policies during his first term were met with outcry from Democrats and advocates. They also opposed his attempts to end an Obama administration program that protects undocumented children brought into the country, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Federal courts halted the ending of DACA.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

DeSantis has said he supports policies similar to Trump’s, such as wanting to end birthright citizenship, reestablish the remain in Mexico policy and send U.S. military to the border.

During a trip to the border in the summer, DeSantis also backed mass deportations, allowing for the use of deadly force against suspected drug traffickers at the border and the indefinite detention of migrant youth — a violation of the Flores agreement that says undocumented youth cannot be detained for more than 20 days.

In that speech in Eagle Pass, Texas, DeSantis compared the border to a home invasion.

“If someone was breaking into your house, you would repel them with the use of force, right?” he said. “But yet if they have drugs, these backpacks, and they’re going in, and they’re cutting through an enforced structure, we’re just supposed to let ’em in? You know, I say use force to repel them. If you do that one time, they will never do that again.”

DeSantis also wants to continue building the border wall and use funds to do so by taxing money that migrants send home to Mexico.

In the third GOP presidential debate, DeSantis reiterated he would handle the U.S.–Mexico border by sending the military there and would authorize the use of deadly force for anyone crossing the border without authorization.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley

Haley said she would handle the border by ending trade relations with China, because the chemicals used to make fentanyl are shipped from China and made in Mexico by cartels. She would add 20,000 more border patrol and ICE agents and pull federal funding from so-called sanctuary cities, which limit cooperation with the federal government over immigration enforcement.

States that have sanctuary cities and counties include California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, Vermont and Washington.

Also like Trump, Haley said she would end a U.S. policy that allows migrants awaiting their asylum hearings in court to live in the U.S. rather than be held at a detention facility. Immigration courts currently have a more than 2-million-case backlog. 

During the third GOP presidential debate, Haley took a swipe at the Biden administration’s move to reinstate Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for nearly 500,000 Venezuelans, allowing them to live and work in the United States.

“It’s just going to have more of them come,” she said of Venezuelans, and instead advocated for placing sanctions on Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro.

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy 

Ramaswamy, who is one of the few candidates with no government experience, does not have an immigration platform on his campaign site, but has called for sending the U.S. military to the border.

On various interviews with Fox News, he’s alluded to sending U.S. troops into Mexico if the country does not get drug cartels under control. “We will come in and get the job done ourselves,” he said in a Fox News interview in September.

He has also called for the ending of birthright citizenship, even though he was born in Ohio to parents who were both noncitizens. His mother later became a citizen, but his father is not. He has also called for the mass deportation of U.S. citizens who were born from undocumented parents.

Ramaswamy has called for gutting H-1B visa programs for temporary workers, even though, he, a former pharmaceutical executive, and his own company have used them, as reported by Politico. H-1B visas allow U.S. companies to employ foreign workers in tech and other specialized jobs.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie

Christie does not have any information on his immigration stance on his official website, but in debates and interviews he has stressed the way to handle the fentanyl crisis is to secure the Southern border and to treat addiction as a disease, such as the need for treatment centers.

In the most recent GOP presidential debate, he said he wants to increase technology at ports of entry and increase the number of border officials. Christie said if he is elected president, he would sign an executive order to send National Guard members to ports of entry.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson

While the former governor did not qualify for the most recent GOP presidential debate, he has one mention on his campaign’s website of immigration. He says he backs state-based visas.

“A one-size-fits-all approach does not adequately serve America’s varied industries and regional economies,” according to his campaign website.

The policy would allow states to design their own non-immigrant visa criteria, such as fees, employment requirements and renewal processes for visas.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum

During an interview with Forbes, Burgum said he supports sending the National Guard to the U.S. Southern border, which is something he’s done as governor. During his time in office, he also signed into law the Office of Legal Immigration to address workforce challenges in North Dakota.

Burgum has also acknowledged challenges to seasonal agriculture workers and tech employees and the “red tape” in U.S. immigration law.

Pastor and entrepreneur ​​Ryan Binkley

Binkley is the CEO of a merger and acquisitions advisory firm and a senior pastor at the Create Church based in Dallas, Texas.

On his campaign website, Binkley stated he would reorganize the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to prioritize border security. He supports physical barriers along the Southern border and also wants to end sanctuary cities as well as the current program that allows asylum seekers to remain in the U.S. while they await their immigration hearings.

Binkley outlined his plan for border security that — if approved by Congress — would authorize $10 billion until fiscal year 2028 for technology at ports of entry and provide $25 billion in barriers and technology until fiscal year 2031.

Binkley would also allow DACA recipients to be eligible for a conditional permanent residence status for up to 10 years. Under his plan, those DACA recipients could become lawful permanent residents if they obtain a college or graduate degree, serve in the U.S. military for three years or are employed and working for four years. He would also extend in-state tuition for DACA recipients.

Binkley would also extend a legal pathway to citizenship for some TPS holders who have been continually present in the U.S. for three years as of March 2021. It would extend to TPS holders from  El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, but the cutoff date would not include those from Venezuela, Afghanistan, Haiti and Ukraine.

He has also called for a “Dignity Plan,” for undocumented immigrants, who would be required to pass a background check, pay any taxes owed, pay fines that total to $5,000 over seven years, and remain in good standing.

Those who complete the program would have two pathways to remain legally in the U.S. The first path allows those who complete the “Dignity Plan” to apply every five years for a lawful status and the second path allows for a lawful permanent resident status to those who learn English, pass a civics test and participate in volunteer work.

Source : Colorado News Line

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James Cleverly has said he is frustrated with the fixation on the government’s Rwanda policy, saying it is not the “be all and end all” of plans to tackle illegal immigration.

The home secretary, who replaced Suella Braverman after she was sacked almost a fortnight ago, told the Times he had become frustrated with the focus on the Rwanda plan.

“My frustration is that we have allowed the narrative to be created that this was the be all and end all,” he said.

“The mission is to stop the boats. That’s the promise to the British people. Never lose sight of the mission. There are multiple methods. Don’t fixate on the methods. Focus on the mission.”

The Rwanda scheme has faced a series of legal hurdles since it was first announced in 2020, the latest of which came on Cleverly’s second day as home secretary, when the policy was ruled unlawful by the supreme court.

Despite the setbacks, the government has not dropped the idea.

Rishi Sunak has refused to rule out leaving the European convention on human rights (ECHR) and he is thought to be considering using emergency legislation to opt out of the convention on asylum cases in an effort to force through the Rwanda scheme.

While it was a UK court that dealt the latest legal blow to the legislation, Sunak’s Tories are keen to ensure the ECHR, and the European court of human rights that rules on it, will not prevent the policy being implemented.

The new home secretary struck a more measured tone on the ECHR in contrast to his predecessor. “My argument has always been that we need to modernise, update and reform,” he said.

“What some people, I fear, do is jump to their preferred solution and hang on to that really, really tightly and say this cannot be the right answer unless you do a particular thing.

“I do not want to do anything that might undermine the key cooperation we have with countries [who] are very wedded to the ECHR for understandable reasons.

“Nothing is cost free. Everything needs to be considered, the advantages and disadvantages.”

Net migration to the UK reached a record 745,000 in the year to December 2022, according to revised estimates published by the Office for National Statistics on Thursday.

The data places migration levels at three times higher than before Brexit, despite a Conservative party 2019 manifesto pledge to bring overall numbers down.

Sunak is under pressure from Conservative MPs angered by the latest data on legal net migration. The former prime minister Boris Johnson became the latest Tory to pile pressure on the prime minister to act on immigration on Friday.

He said in his Daily Mail column the figures were “way, way too big” and that the minimum income for most migrant workers coming to the UK should rise to £40,000.

Senior Conservatives have said Sunak risks ripping up the Northern Ireland peace process if he blocks human rights laws so the UK can deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. He is under increasing pressure from right-leaning MPs and ministers to close off legal avenues to asylum seekers who have successfully challenged their removal to Rwanda.

Source : The Guardian

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During a recent speech, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida outlined his primary policy priority in simple terms — ‘economy, economy, economy’. Notably absent was any mention of foreign workers and their role in sustaining Japan’s future economic development. This is surprising, given the well-documented need to further increase the foreign workforce, which has already reached record highs in 2023.

In 2022, the Japan International Cooperation Agency outlined that Japan would need over 6.7 million foreign workers by 2040 to maintain an economic output aligned with the government’s GDP growth targets. This represents a roughly four-fold increase from current levels. Kishida re-started the large-scale admission of foreign workers in Spring 2022, following a relaxation of pandemic-related border restrictions. Yet, he has been hesitant to outline a broader vision for the long-term admittance and potential integration of migrant workers.

The reluctance to implement a formal immigration policy has long precedence among Japanese policymakers. For example, when presenting the 2018 amendment to the Immigration Control Act, the late former prime minister Shinzo Abe stated that ‘Japan would not adopt a so-called immigration policy’. Instead, the amendments established the Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) system, which aims to boost foreign worker admittance within 12 economic sectors suffering from acute labour shortages.

Japan has long relied on immigration ‘side doors’ — pathways to admit primarily lower skilled foreign workers while legally denying their presence. These channels have historically included the generous admittance of people of Japanese descent, with the Abe years seeing a rapid increase in the numbers of working international students and participants in the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP). But these ‘side doors’ have also been subject to criticism for placing foreign workers in vulnerable labour environments.

While the SSW system requires that workers pass an industry aptitude test and imposes some language requirements, the industries which the system serves and the institutions which govern it strongly overlap with the TITP. Unsurprisingly, the SSW system essentially functions as a way for employers to retain technical interns, with roughly 70 per cent of specified skilled workers coming from the TITP.

As it pertains to foreign workers, Kishida has so far opted to maintain the status quo set by Abe, preferring to adjust Japan’s primary admittance policies instead of implementing major reform. In June 2023, his cabinet passed an expansion of the SSW Residence Status Two, which allows for unlimited renewals and family reunification. While this provides an effective path to long-term settlement for lower skilled workers, the expansion has been essentially non-functional, with only 12 SSW Two status holders as of June 2023.

While the Kishida government expanded the acceptable industries that foreign students graduating from vocational schools can find employment in, one of the most significant changes may lie in the future of the TITP, which is being reviewed by a Ministry of Justice appointed panel. Currently, the TITP works under the pretext of facilitating ‘skills transfer’ to developing countries, though analysts argue that it more closely resembles a rotational migrant worker system.

The TITP has also been criticised on human rights grounds, with many ‘interns’ incurring debt to access the program and facing heavy restrictions in changing employers. The panel has suggested that the TITP be renamed and formalised as an entry point to the SSW system, abandoning the pretext of ‘skills transfer’ and making it easier for workers to change employers. This proposal is yet to be adopted into policy.

The Kishida administration has opted for incrementalism on immigration. While Kishida has mentioned the need to ‘consider a society featuring co-existence with foreigners’, he has generally avoided the topic in major policy speeches, as there is simply no political necessity for him to do otherwise. If current systems are sufficient for Japan to address its labour shortages, it is unnecessary to open the potential can of worms that a national conversation on immigration would represent. Still, the absence of a formal immigration policy means that foreign workers will continue to suffer from subpar policy outcomes.

Japan has a structural demand for foreign workers, but one major question going forward is whether there is sufficient supply. The countries from which foreign workers migrate, such as Vietnam, have experienced strong post-pandemic economic growth while the Japanese yen has weakened and wages have stagnated. As such, Japan’s attractiveness as a destination country for foreign workers has diminished.

Broader regional trends suggest that foreign labour migration to Japan will not continue to increase indefinitely and the potential effects of this will be felt by a future administration. One way to address a potential bottleneck in foreign labour supply is to boost Japan’s attractiveness by improving labour conditions, expanding pathways to permanent residence and family reunification and integrating foreigners into Japanese society — considerations that a formal immigration policy could address. But despite recent calls to pass a national ‘Immigration Act’, it is unlikely that the Kishida administration will do so. Until such a time, Kishida’s incrementalism looks set to continue.

Source : East Asia Forum

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