The Obama Administration’s November 2014 Immigration Initiatives: Questions and Answers

[Excerpt] On November 20, 2014, President Obama delivered a televised address wherein he broadly described the steps that his administration is taking to “fix” what he has repeatedly described as a “broken immigration system.” Following the President’s address, executive agencies made available intra-agency memoranda and fact sheets detailing specific actions that have already been taken, or will be taken in the future. These actions generally involve either border security, the current unlawfully present population, or future legal immigration. The announced executive actions—particularly the granting of deferred action and employment authorization to some unlawfully present aliens, discussed below (see “Unlawfully Present Population”)—have revived debate about the executive’s discretionary authority over immigration like that which followed the Administration’s June 2012 announcement of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative. DACA has permitted some unlawfully present aliens who were brought to the United States as children and raised here to obtain temporary relief from removal and, in many cases, employment authorization. Some have argued that DACA constitutes an abdication of the executive’s duty to enforce the laws and runs afoul of specific requirements found in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), among other things. Others, however, have maintained that the DACA initiative is a lawful exercise of the discretionary authority conferred on the executive by the Constitution and federal statute. Similar arguments will likely be made as to the November 2014 actions, which affect a significantly larger number of aliens than DACA. This report provides the answers to key legal questions related to the various immigration-related actions announced by the Obama Administration on November 20, 2014. Because the various documents outlining these actions have been available for a limited period of time, and additional information is expected to be released in the future, these answers are necessarily preliminary. It is anticipated that the report will be updated to reflect further developments

Unlawfully Present Aliens, Higher Education, In-State Tuition, and Financial Aid: Legal Analysis

[Excerpt] State measures that would deny or provide access to public institutions of higher education, instate tuition, and financial aid to unlawfully present aliens have been challenged on various grounds. While these grounds can vary depending upon the specific statute or practice in question, the grounds most commonly asserted appear to be violations of the Equal Protection and Supremacy Clauses of the U.S. Constitution. Thus, these provisions are the focus of discussion in this report, and the following paragraphs provide an overview of the basic principles implicated in discussions of equal protection and preemption

The Dunford-Pettis property on tensor products

We show that, in some cases, the projective and the injective tensor products of two Banach spaces do not have the Dunford-Pettis property (DPP). As a consequence, we obtain that $(c_0\hat{\otimes}_\pi c_0)^{**}$ fails the DPP. Since $(c_0\hat{\otimes}_\pi c_0)^{*}$ does enjoy it, this provides a new space with the DPP whose dual fails to have it. We also prove that, if $E$ and $F$ are ${\mathscr L}_1$-spaces, then $E\hat{\otimes}_\epsilon F$ has the DPP if and only if both $E$ and $F$ have the Schur property. Other results and examples are given.Comment: 9 page

Factorization of weakly continuous holomorphic mappings

We prove a basic property of continuous multilinear mappings between topological vector spaces, from which we derive an easy proof of the fact that a multilinear mapping (and a polynomial) between topological vector spaces is weakly continuous on weakly bounded sets if and only if it is weakly {\it uniformly\/} continuous on weakly bounded sets. This result was obtained in 1983 by Aron, Herv\'es and Valdivia for polynomials between Banach spaces, and it also holds if the weak topology is replaced by a coarser one. However, we show that it need not be true for a stronger topology, thus answering a question raised by Aron. As an application of the first result, we prove that a holomorphic mapping $f$ between complex Banach spaces is weakly uniformly continuous on bounded subsets if and only if it admits a factorization of the form $f=g\circ S$, where $S$ is a compact operator and $g$ a holomorphic mapping

Insourcing Functions Performed by Federal Contractors: An Overview of the Legal Issues

[Excerpt] While agencies are prohibited by federal law and policy from contracting out functions that are “inherently governmental,” other functions could potentially be contracted out. There has long been debate over both general government policies promoting the use of the private sector to perform “commercial functions” and whether specific functions should be performed by government personnel or contractors. However, since 2008, the insourcing initiatives of recent Congresses and the Obama Administration have caused particular controversy. Several lawsuits have been filed challenging agencies’ determinations to insource particular functions, and broader questions have been raised as to whether agencies’ implementation of insourcing runs afoul of civil service, ethics, or small business laws. This report provides a brief overview of key legal issues related to recent insourcing initiatives. It will be updated as developments occur

Modification of the Equivalent Photon Approximation for Resolved Photon Processes

We propose a modification of the equivalent photon approximation (EPA) for processes which involve the parton content of the photon, to take into account the suppression of the photonic parton fluxes due to the virtuality of the photon. We present simple, physically motivated ans\"atze to model this suppression and show that even though the parton content of the electron no longer factorizes into an electron flux function and a photon structure function, it is still possible to express it as a single integral. We also show that for the TRISTAN experiments its effect can be numerically of the same size as that of the NLO corrections. Further, we discuss a possible measurement at HERA, which can provide an experimental handle on the effect we model through our ans\"atze.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX with equations.sty, 3 figures (not included); to appear in the Proceedings of "Photon95", Sheffield, April 1995. A complete compressed PS file, including figures, is available via anonymous ftp from ftp://phenom.physics.wisc.edu/pub/preprints/1995/madph-95-891.ps.

Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Enforcement: Legal Issues

This report begins by discussing the sources of federal power to regulate immigration and, particularly, the allocation of power between Congress and the President in this area. It next addresses the constitutional and other foundations for the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion, as well as the potential ways in which prosecutorial discretion may be exercised in the immigration context. It concludes by addressing potential constitutional, statutory, and administrative constraints upon the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The report does not address other aspects of discretion in immigration law, such as the discretion exercised by immigration officers in granting benefits (e.g., asylum), or by immigration judges in non-enforcement contexts (e.g., cancellation of removal)