By Chris S. Nishiwaki
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Attorneys and immigrant rights advocates warn that a second term under President Donald Trump will be more extreme and aggressive in expelling immigrants from the United States, impacting the growing South Asian immigrant community both locally and nationally.
Muzaffar Chishti, Migration Policy Institute Senior Fellow and Director of the MPI office at New York University School of Law, and Jeff Lande, president of advisory firm The Lande Group and an expert on public policy and politics, spoke during a Roundglass India Center webinar earlier this month. The webinar was hosted by Sital Kalantry, founding director of the Roundglass India Center and Associate Dean and Professor of Law at the Seattle University Law School.
The speakers focused on recent immigration trends and possible impacts of the current White House.
The last few decades have seen a boom in Indian immigration, largely in the tech sector and other similar industries, the Roundglass India Center said in its description of the webinar. According to the most recent U.S. government report, Indians are the largest beneficiary group of the H-1B visa, the skilled-labor visa that allows foreign workers to enter the U.S.’s skilled industries, such as the tech sector. There are at least 2.9 million people living in the U.S. who emigrated from India. Another 2.1 million people can trace their roots back to India, the Roundglass Center said in its webinar description.
Indian flags.
“Many of these people came on employment-based visas, and now are trapped in jobs waiting decades for green cards due to unfair American laws,” the Roundglass Center continued.
There is a new trend of undocumented immigration from India to the U.S.
During a one-year period, from October 2022 to September 2023, nearly 100,000 Indians were apprehended, expelled, or denied entry at U.S. borders having entered the country without documentation, the Roundglass Center said. Indian immigrants now constitute the third largest undocumented community in the United States, around 1 million.
A second Trump administration is more determined to advance anti-immigrant policy and is more dangerous, warns Chishti.
“People in the United States who are unauthorized obviously should be concerned,” Muzaffar said, during the webinar. “This is a different regime. The message is that the old sheriff is back in town and the old sheriff has different priorities, and to sound muscular this time is more important than the last time.”
I would say anyone who’s unauthorized or anyone who has a family member or a friend who’s unauthorized should be in touch with a lawyer,” Muzaffar continued.
Lawyers make a big difference between whether a person is quickly deported, Muzaffar said, because Fourth Amendment rights still apply, as does the right of habeas corpus—a Constitutional right that protects people from imprisonment, absent a court order. Therefore, Muzaffar said, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents cannot enter a workplace or home without a warrant. People also have the right to ask ICE agents for the warrant, which must be signed by a judge or a federal magistrate.
Even if agents have final orders of removal, Muzaffar said, people have the right to seek a reopening of the order.
However, once in detention, Kalantry said, it becomes increasingly difficult to fight final removal.
“It’s very hard to communicate with people who are in detention,” Kalantry said. “You have to sort of be the lawyer. The (detention) centers make it very difficult. I’ve been doing this for years and … people who are undocumented obviously don’t want to come out and have lots of conversations.”
Lande also said that the debate has extended to segregating who stays in the U.S. based on their skill set, or simply deporting all of them.
“Here there are a number of politicians including some very senior officials in the Trump administration who believe that the Indian nationals that are coming on H-1Bs and-L1s actually do more harm to America and take U.S. jobs or facilitate the offshoring of work,” instead of benefitting U.S. companies or economies, Lande said.
“It used to be, you had the (Steve) Bannons and Steven Millers and such on one side saying that these visa programs are just bad, and then you had others largely in industry or academia noting the tremendous benefits of these programs,” Lande added. “Now, you have people like Elon Musk in the midst, who are saying that the visa programs are good and need to continue.”
But if you look just below the surface, Lande said, what such people are really saying is that only a certain kind of person who can benefit specific industries or companies are needed.
“[They are saying that] the rest of the individuals and the rest of the types of companies that historically get large numbers of visas … should be deprioritized,” Lande explained, “so that’s the real crux of the debate that’s happening here right now.”
Lande and Chishti said that a second Trump administration will be more dogged in pursuing anti-immigrant policy, and that there will be a distinct difference between Trump’s first and second terms.
The first Trump administration came in and simply did not follow policies or regulations, Lande and Chishti said. This resulted in industries fighting back, winning on administrative grounds—which is based on the governance of duties of the executive branch—not substantive ones, which govern the rights and obligations of individuals, and is based on statutory and common law.
Lande said he suspected that the second administration will likely be “much smarter about how they try to pursue it.”