US Immigration Outlook: From Uncertainty To Panic

Tends of thousands of desperate refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are pressured by ‘coyotes’ to fast-forward their plans so as to reach the US before Trump’s inauguration:

Since Trump’s victory, the number of people flocking north has surged, Central American officials say, contributing to a growing logjam along the southern U.S. border.

“We’re worried because we’re seeing a rise in the flow of migrants leaving the country, who have been urged to leave by coyotes telling them that they have to reach the United States before Trump takes office,” Maria Andrea Matamoros, Honduras’ deputy foreign minister, told Reuters, referring to people smugglers.

Carlos Raul Morales, Guatemala’s foreign minister, told Reuters people were also leaving Guatemala en masse before Trump becomes president.

“The coyotes are leaving people in debt, and taking their property as payment for the journey,” he said in an interview.

Last week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection opened a temporary holding facility for up to 500 people near the Texan border with Mexico, in what it said was a response to a marked uptick in illegal border crossings.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said earlier this month immigration detention facilities were holding about 10,000 more individuals than usual, after a spike in October of migrants including unaccompanied children, families and asylum seekers.

And Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is an opponent of the H1-B work visa program, leaving tech companies worried about a brain drain:

Sessions, however, has long sought to curtail the program and introduced legislation last year aiming to make the visas less available to large outsourcing companies such as Infosys. Such firms, by far the largest users of H-1B visas, provide foreign contractors to U.S. companies looking to slash information technology costs.

“Thousands of U.S. workers are being replaced by foreign labor,” Sessions said at a February hearing.

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Sessions last year urged then-Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate Southern California Edison’s use of H-1B visas in a letter than was also signed by Democratic Sens. Bernie Sanders, Richard Durbin and Sherrod Brown.