U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform

The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform was created by Congress to assess U.S. immigration policy and make recommendations regarding its implementation and effects. Mandated in the Immigration Act of 1990 to submit an interim report in 1994 and a final report in 1997, the Commission has undertaken public hearings, fact-finding missions, and expert consultations to identify the major immigration-related issues facing the United States today.LBJ School of Public Affair

Transnational Labor Citizenship

Over one million new immigrants arrive in the United States each year. This spring, Americans saw several times that number pour into the streets, protesting proposed changes in U.S. immigration and guest work policies. As the signs they carried indicated, most migrants come to work, and it is in the workplace that the impact of large numbers of newcomers is most keenly felt. For those who see both the free movement of people and the preservation of decent working conditions as essential to social justice, this presents a seemingly unresolvable dilemma. In a situation of massive inequality among countries, to prevent people from moving in search of work is to curtail their chance to build a decent life for themselves and their families. But from the perspective of workers in the country that receives them, the more immigrants, the more competition, and the worse work becomes. As an advocate for immigrant workers for over twenty years, I have often spoken from the heart of that dilemma. This Article proposes a way out. In it, I develop the idea of transnational labor citizenship, a new approach to structuring cross-border labor migration that draws on, but goes beyond, current theories of transnational political citizenship. Transnational labor citizenship reconceptualizes the relationship among the governments of immigrant sending and receiving countries, civil society labor institutions, such as unions and worker centers, and private actors. Inspired by recent efforts to organize workers as they move across borders, transnational labor citizenship would link permission to enter the United States in search of work to membership in cross-border worker organizations, rather than to the current requirement of a job offer from an employer. This Article offers the new concept of labor citizenship as a lens for understanding the challenges unions face in taking the leap to an open attitude toward the future flow of migrants. By labor citizenship I mean the ways in which workers\u27 organizations create membership regimes, set and enforce rules for those who belong, and approach their goal of improving wages and working conditions. I begin in Part II by elaborating the concept of labor citizenship, drawing on the nation-state citizenship framework and emphasizing the key pragmatic and normative roles of borders in union organizing. In Part III, I trace the interactions between labor citizenship and its nation-state counterpart, arguing that in the context of large-scale immigration, the boundaried nature of labor citizenship is frequently its undoing, creating a recurring conflict between solidarity and defense. In Part IV, I lay out the dilemma of guest work as the last frontier in this progression. I draw on the history of both the bracero and more recent temporary work visa programs in the United States to argue that even a good guest work program would not address the challenges of establishing labor citizenship in a transnational world because guest work proposals inevitably preserve barriers between guests and residents that undermine efforts to raise or even maintain wages and working conditions. In Part V, I lay out my proposal for transnational labor citizenship, and in Part VI, I explore practical and theoretical hurdles and suggest how they might be overcome

Barn Owls (Tyto alba) and Biodiversity Near Hemp Farms and Grasslands in Oregon, USA

Extensive agriculture poses a major threat to biodiversity worldwide, although some species, such as the barn owl (Tyto alba), can thrive in many agroecosystems. Barn owls, the world\u27s most widely distributed owl, provide rodent management, and their presence may be both an indicator of and support for ecosystem biodiversity. Little previous research documents the relationship between barn owls and adjacent crop attributes, however. In 2018, hemp (Cannabis sativa) was taken off the federal Controlled Substance Act list and permitted as an agricultural crop. Hemp is now rapidly increasing in extent in Oregon, USA. This research assessed the reproductive success and diet of barn owls, as well as the biodiversity of prey and nest visitors, near hemp fields as compared to near managed grasslands. I collected barn owl pellets and used camera data to assess nest success and prey diversity and to describe what other species visited nest boxes in five organic/no-spray hemp farms and six managed grasslands during the 2021 and 2022 nesting seasons. Barn owl nest box occupancy and success were similar, and vertebrate biodiversity was greater, in sites near hemp farms versus managed grasslands. Longer-term studies are needed to confirm my findings, but the observations indicate that hemp poses no greater threat and possibly more support to barn owl success and agroecosystem biodiversity than do managed grasslands

International Organizations as a Profession: Professional Mobility and Power Distribution

professional attraction, human resources, power, international elites

New Trends in Development of Services in the Modern Economy

The services sector strategic development unites a multitude of economic and managerial aspects and is one of the most important problems of economic management. Many researches devoted to this industry study are available. Most of them are performed in the traditional aspect of the voluminous calendar approach to strategic management, characteristic of the national scientific school. Such an approach seems archaic, forming false strategic benchmarks. The services sector is of special scientific interest in this context due to the fact that the social production structure to the services development model attraction in many countries suggests transition to postindustrial economy type where the services sector is a system-supporting sector of the economy. Actively influencing the economy, the services sector in the developed countries dominates in the GDP formation, primary capital accumulation, labor, households final consumption and, finally, citizens comfort of living. However, a clear understanding of the services sector as a hyper-sector permeating all spheres of human activity has not yet been fully developed, although interest in this issue continues to grow among many authors. Target of strategic management of the industry development setting requires substantive content and the services sector target value assessment

Framing terrorism and migration in the USA: the role of the media in securitization processes

American security discourse has intensified profoundly since 9/11. For nearly two decades, anxiety about the threat posed by the foreign other against the American self has influenced policy debates, the legitimization (and execution) of exceptional measures and the public mood. These changes in security discourse have co-occurred with seismic shifts in the increasingly complex media and information marketplace. The proliferation of media actors has stimulated more targeted news produced for niche audiences, meaning that public processing of security issues has also changed dramatically. Cable news in particular has matured into a polarized genre of information that commands the widest audience in the US. Through a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates securitization theory from International Relations and the broad framing scholarship from political communication, this thesis investigates the relationship of these developments. Specifically, it investigates the impact of media in the social (de)construction of security threats. Two illustrative case studies are considered across two presidential administrations from 2001-2016. First, the securitization of terrorism is explored with an emphasis on the discursive (de)legitimization of torture as an exceptional response. Even among exceptional measures, torture is exceptional: its practice has been banned both during and outside of wartime. That it is even up for debate – never mind that it briefly became “standard operating procedures” and nearly half of all Americans support it – is evidence of the successful securitization of terrorism. The second case study focuses on the securitization of unauthorized immigration, analyzing the contestation of competing remedy proposals and moral evaluations of the foreign other. Despite the oft-invoked immigration-terrorism nexus, American attitudes toward unauthorized immigrants have softened. In both cases, press framing appears to have influenced public attitudes, above and beyond political elite signals, suggesting that the media can act as an independent and strategic actor. This has implications for securitization theory, which traditionally relegates media to a facilitating role, rather than an independent securitizing actor. This also has broader democratic implications as unelected press actors increasingly assume political roles and drive the (de)legitimization of exceptional measures. Further contributions of this project include the discovery of cross-sectoral patterns, such as the consequences of silencing and the effectiveness of euphemisms. Finally, this thesis demonstrates the value of synthesizing concepts in framing scholarship with securitization theory. Methodological tools commonly used in framing studies – content and public opinion analysis – empower securitization theory with quantitative sophistication and hypothesis-tested assumptions that have been previously overlooked

An Archaeological and Spatial Exploration of Yard Use at the Oval Site, Stratford Hall Plantation: A Mid-18th-century Mixed-Use Site on the Northern Neck of Virginia

The Oval Site (44WM80) is located on the grounds of Stratford Hall Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia and was excavated by the Department of and Center for Historic Preservation at Mary Washington College/the University of Mary Washington between 2001- 2014. The Oval Site was one component of a larger eighteenth-century plantation and is comprised of four structures. These buildings are currently interpreted as an overseer’s house, a barn, a kitchen, and an unidentified building. The kitchen had also served as a quarter for the enslaved Africans and/or African Americans that worked on this site. Using methods developed in landscape archaeology studies, I will be examining the relationship between these buildings and by extension the relationship the inhabitants had with one another through an analysis of refuse disposal patterns, as shown through artifact distribution analyses. This research can aid in highlighting and expanding the narrative of historically excluded and/or underrepresented groups in studies focused on 18th century Virginia