This week, Current Affairs' resident immigration lawyers, Oren Nimni and Brianna Rennix, roll up their sleeves and delve into all the details of Bernie Sanders' plan for immigration policy, which was released November 7th.

A few immigration terms that may be useful to know while listening to this episode:


metering - limiting the number of people per day who can request asylum at points of entry, resulting in long waitlists and large numbers of people trapped in dangerous border cities.


TPS - temporary protected status. This status allows people present in the U.S. who cannot safely return home due to a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other emergency to receive permission to live and work in the United States. Although the window of time to receive TPS is narrow (for example, if there’s a devastating earthquake in your country in 2010, the window to apply for TPS might close in 2011), once people have TPS, they can apply to continue renewing that status for as long as the government continues to extend it. (This means that TPS holders from some countries, like El Salvador or Honduras, have been legally living in the U.S. for decades.)


'safe third country' principle – a vague term for an agreement between two or more countries that purports to state that all the countries in the agreement are “safe” for asylum-seekers, and therefore that asylum-seekers should seek protection in whatever country they arrive in first. For example, the U.S. has had a safe third country agreement with Canada since 2004. The U.S. is now allegedly attempting to broker safe third country agreements with countries like Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, even though refugees are fleeing these countries in large numbers.


Matter of A-B - an asylum case decided by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in June 2018, which overturned a favorable precedent that had allowed many domestic violence survivors to qualify for asylum, and stated that “generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum."


IIRIRA - The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which greatly expanded the scope of detention, punishment and deportation for undocumented immigrants.


You can read Bernie's plan here: https://berniesanders.com/en/issues/welcoming-and-safe-america-all/

You can find our previous episodes on immigration here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/30632925

https://www.patreon.com/posts/24173901

Brianna Rennix writes regularly on immigration here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/author/brianna-rennix

And is interviewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5GCjTqhOqI