News
May is Mental Health Awareness month and to kick it off U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an 81-page report that says the US is in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. But how prevalent is loneliness in a dense urban environment like New York City, where we often interact with dozens of people a day just going about our business?
In March 2020, the Trump administration invoked its authority under Title 42 of the U.S. Code, a public health law, to close the southwest border to virtually anyone crossing in from Mexico. Since then, border officials deported or denied entry to would-be migrants more than 3 million times.
“I think the earliest that we may get a final decision by the Supreme Court would be June of 2024, and even that may be premature,” says Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of immigration law.
Rachel Bezner Kerr, professor of global development, says: “In some regions of the world it will become not possible to grow food, or to raise animals. That’s if we continue on our current trajectory.”
At face value, a whale in the Arctic Ocean may have little in common with a Central American political refugee. What connects them, and countless other populations, is their broad identity as migrators.
Also: they’re among the hundreds of subjects explored by Cornell’s Migrations initiative, the University’s first-ever Global Grand Challenge—an initiative to unite the Hill’s top scholars under a common mission to tackle Earth’s problems.
Patricia Campos-Medina, executive director of the Worker Institute at ILR, discusses the labor market.
The Migrations initiative has awarded the 2023 community college fellowship to Mary Delmastro, assistant professor at Finger Lakes Community College. As a fellow, she will enhance her curriculum on racism, dispossession, and migration.
The DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program is the result of an executive action by President Barack Obama in 2012 to serve as a temporary stopgap measure for a small subset of the undocumented population in the United States. The DACA program does not provide formal immigration status, but rather is a form of prosecutorial discretion that provides work authorization and deportation deferral. A recent decision in the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Texas v. United States held that the DACA program is unlawful.
More conservative measures are likely to become law soon. Florida’s legislature is expected to take up a bill that would bring felony charges for “sheltering, transporting or hiring” undocumented immigrants. If passed, it would be one of the most punitive in the country, said Shannon Gleeson, professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
“This is devastating for undocumented workers, who often work in jobs that are more poorly paid, dangerous, and subject to discrimination and harassment,” Gleeson said.
