US Economic Competitiveness At Risk: A Midwest Call to Action on Immigration Reform

For too long the Midwest has waited for Washington to produce meaningful reform of the nation's immigration laws. Bills have come and gone through the years, but often end in political gridlock. The Midwestern economy needs high-skilled, educated workers with long-term visas to create the companies and innovations that will power it in the future. Midwestern businesses need low-skilled immigrants with visas to sustain their industries. Midwestern schools insist that their students get the legal status that will lead to higher education and jobs. Midwestern farms seek a legal way to hire the seasonal help they need. Throughout the Midwest, cities and towns cope imaginatively with the social and economic challenges of immigration. Yet there is only so much the region can do until the federal government acts.That time has come. As economic recovery proceeds and political alignments shift, our region's leaders are thinking strategically about long-term economic competitiveness and the role played by immigrants at all levels. Midwest leaders want to ensure sustainable growth, jobs, population stability, and quality of life. Immigrants are an essential ingredient for this future. America's heartland can wait no longer.A diverse and bipartisan group of civic and business leaders, aware of the urgency of immigration reform and frustrated with delays, began convening in December 2011 to produce this report. Their priority was to state what the region needs from immigration reform to ensure its economic competitiveness. If 53 Republican and Democratic leaders -- drawn from companies, law enforcement, schools, hospitals, nonprofits, foundations, advocacy groups, and communities of faith -- from the 12-state Midwest can support these recommendations, then surely our representatives in Washington can act on them

America\u27s De Facto Guest Workers: Lessons from Germany\u27s Gastarbeiter for U.S. Immigration Reform

Part I of this Note describes West Germany\u27s post-war Gastarbeiter [guest worker] program from 1961 to 1972. Part II focuses on the long-term results of the Gastarbeiter program, with special emphasis on the legal status of Turkish Gastarbeiter in Germany. This assessment concludes that guest worker programs inevitably result in the permanent settlement of foreigners in the host country. If not properly anticipated and planned for, this settlement leads to social stratification and political divisiveness. Part II also presents for comparison U.S. immigration policies and their effect on Mexican immigrant workers. The section asserts that the United States over the past two decades has implemented a de facto guest worker policy, which led to many of the same adverse consequences wrought by Germany\u27s Gastarbeiter program, including the permanent settlement and subsequent marginalization of undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Part III concludes that temporary worker programs, formal or de facto, have irreversible and adverse sociopolitical consequences for their participants and the countries that adopt these policies. Accordingly, this Note cautions against the adoption of a formal temporary worker program in the United States and argues that the permanent legalization of undocumented immigrants is the most judicious means of reversing recent trends

Consensus Development at NIH: What Went Wrong

A close observer identifies the Science Court concept as inspiring consensus development conferences at the National Institutes of Health and describes the extent to which they have followed the model. Professor Jacoby also argues that, if the model were more closely followed, conference objectives would be better realized

Resolving Medical Controversies

Dr. Jacoby explains why emerging technologies must be evaluated expeditiously. He also argues that an approach closely following Science Court tenets would more uniformly guide practitioners and insurers

The Debt Financing of Parenthood

Jacoby discusses the significant role of lenders in the parenthood market and how they might facilitate access and shape this industry in more profound ways. Second, she introduces the issue of financing assisted reproduction and adoption. Third, she reviews specialty loans for assisted reproduction and adoption, reflecting traditional research in case law and legal and nonlegal scholarly literature, as well as results from a review of news media and Web sites of prominent intermediaries and service suppliers. Lastly, she presents a sampling of political-economy implications relevant to assisted reproduction, leaving other issues for future investigation

The Legal Infrastructure of Ex Post Consumer Debtor Protections

This article reviews the legal infrastructure of tools that protect debtors’ assets or income, or that enable debtors to resolve secured credit problems during ordinary times (e.g., not specific crisis interventions). Part I divides consumer protection tools into functional categories: protection of assets and future income, and retention of property subject to a security interest in default. Part II identifies the location of similar tools in federal law, uniform state law, and non-uniform state law. Part III examines implications of this divided system, with a special focus on the bundling of debtor protections and the role of intermediaries. This discussion helps the reader imagine improvements to consumer protection whether or not new legal tools are added

Home Ownership Risk Beyond a Subprime Crisis: The Role of Delinquency Management

A surge in delinquency among risky subprime home mortgages has produced calls for front-end regulatory fixes as well as emergency foreclosure avoidance interventions. Whatever the merit of those interventions, this Essay calls for home mortgage delinquency management to be conceptualized as an enduring component of housing policy. The Essay identifies and evaluates a framework for the management of delinquency that is not limited to formal foreclosure law and includes other debtor-creditor laws such as bankruptcy, industry loss mitigation efforts, and third-party interventions such as delinquency housing counseling. The Essay also proposes that delinquency management be evaluated through the lens of objectives commonly used to justify public investment in home ownership and home mortgage markets: to build household wealth and economic self-sufficiency, to generate positive social-psychological states, and to develop stable neighborhoods and communities. Because those ends are not inexorably linked to ownership generally or owning a particular home, a system of delinquency management that honors these objectives should strive to provide fair, transparent, humane, and predictable strategies for home exit as well as for home retention