Alaska News

Experts: Obama's executive action will impact current, aspiring Alaska immigrants

Only a tiny portion of the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally reside in Alaska. But experts said President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration last week should still have wide-ranging effects on certain groups of people who live and work in the state -- or who want to live and work here.

One of those groups includes people who immigrated to the U.S. and are living in Alaska illegally, without authorization -- whether they came to the country to work, for example, or as the spouse of an American citizen.

Then there are high-skilled international students and graduates who have studied in Alaska and want to stay and work, as well as high-skilled foreign researchers and entrepreneurs who want to work in the state.

Obama's new immigration plan should make it easier for people in both of those groups to live and work in Alaska without being threatened by deportation. But projections of the number of people affected in the state are far from precise.

Some 4 million American immigrants in the country illegally are expected to qualify for protection from deportation under Obama's action, according to the Pew Research Center. That's primarily based on new instructions to the Department of Homeland Security to protect from deportation parents whose children are either U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.

How many of those people live in Alaska is unclear; the number is so small that many state-level estimates leave Alaska out.

Pew's estimates -- which rely primarily on government data -- simply say fewer than 10,000 immigrants are living in the state illegally. Margaret Stock, an Anchorage immigration attorney who last year won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, estimates that population at 1,500 -- the vast majority of whom, she said, are related to someone who is in the country legally.

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An earlier executive action from Obama in 2012 provided deportation protections for immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children. Under that program, only 60 of the 600,000 applicants through this year lived in Alaska, according to federal data.

If the same proportion of the 4 million immigrants eligible for Obama's new action reside in Alaska, that would amount to roughly 400 people.

While those numbers may be small in a national context, Robin Bronen, the executive director of the Alaska Immigration Justice Project, said that in the early days of Obama's administration, her group experienced a spike in the number of people it represented in deportation proceedings. The president's new action is "hugely important" to some Alaska families, who will "no longer need to live in fear that they could potentially be separated permanently from their U.S. citizen children," she said.

A spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Andrew Muñoz, couldn't immediately answer a question about how many immigrants are deported from Alaska annually. He said in an email that his agency's Seattle field office, which covers Alaska, Washington and Oregon, removed 4,500 people in the federal government's 2013 fiscal year and 6,700 in 2012.

A 2005 Anchorage Daily News article said federal officials take into custody between 300 and 500 immigrants in Alaska illegally each year, about three-quarters of them from Mexico.

As for the other set of people affected by Obama's action -- foreigners and international students who want to work in Alaska -- the size of that group is also unclear.

However, Obama's plan should make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs -- who have otherwise had to contend with "super complicated immigration rules" that have frustrated some Alaska companies -- to get into the country, said Stock, the Anchorage immigration attorney.

A memo last week from the Department of Homeland Security's Secretary Jeh Johnson instructs immigration officials to promote an underused legal provision that allows people with advanced degrees or exceptional abilities to seek permanent residency in the U.S.

"I don't know that the numbers are going to be huge there," Stock said. But, she added, referring to the founder of Facebook: "There might be somebody that's going to come in and be the next Mark Zuckerberg."

Johnson's memo also includes a section that applies to international students, who can currently request a temporary status that allows them to stay in the U.S. for a year of work -- and students in certain science, technology, engineering and math fields are eligible for 17 months beyond that.

But if those students want to stay and work for longer, it can be difficult and costly for them to get a visa to do so.

Johnson's memo instructs immigration officials to lengthen the time period that foreign science, technology, engineering and math students and graduates can use their temporary status to work in the U.S.

At the University of Alaska Fairbanks, there are currently 37 students who are in the country under that temporary status, according to Carol Holz, associate director at the school's international programs office.

In the past, some UAF students have left the country when their temporary status expired and they couldn't get visas that allowed them to keep working.

"We're saying, 'Send us your best and your brightest so that we can educate them. They can work for a year or two, and then you have to leave,'" Holz said. "To me, that's not particularly welcoming."

Obama's executive action could be "a positive" if the instructions outlined in Johnson's memo are followed to extend or expand science, technology, engineering and math students' temporary eligibility to stay in the U.S., Holz added. But she said there were other elements of Johnson's memo that needed clarification and that could pose problems or create extra work for the university system.

"There is a lot of ambiguity here," Holz said.

Nathaniel Herz

Anchorage-based independent journalist Nathaniel Herz has been a reporter in Alaska for nearly a decade, with stints at the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Public Media. Read his newsletter, Northern Journal, at natherz.substack.com

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