Group 12:
Immigration and Regulation
New York City Shelters
Lauren DesRosiers, Albany Law School
People without immigration status have long existed in liminal spaces
and “outside the law.” NYC’s segregated
shelter system is something more: It excludes people without – or with
indeterminate – immigration status from the standardizing and protective force
of government oversight. The mechanisms of exception – in law, regulation, and
policy – at work in NYC’s immigrant shelters reproduce insidious patterns of
subjugation and marginalization. NYC follows a template activated by the
invocation of crisis and its attendant consolidation of government authority
and limitation of individual rights. People in these shelters are “entirely
removed from the law and judicial oversight,” their existence– and the harms
done to them – are thus rendered all but invisible and illegible to the law.
Governed through NYC’s public hospital system rather than the state
shelter agency, NYC immigrant shelters are outside of the regulatory oversight
framework. Crisis contractors have seized on the financial opportunity that
“the suspension of law itself” offers, exploiting immediate vulnerability with
an eye toward long-term extractive potential. A community-based resiliency
paradigm that incorporates excluded immigrants while deescalating border
enforcement and exclusion at all levels of government is the antidote to the
knot of today’s fractious and fractured borders and extractive commercial
enterprises.
In
Layman’s Terms: Ending the Seven Year Refugee SSI Cutoff and Modernizing the N
648 Disability Waiver
Ericka Curran, University of Dayton School of
Law
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, announced
revisions to Form N-648, or Medical Certification for Disability Exceptions in
2022. Overall, the new Form N-648 and disability waiver policy guidance are
major steps in the right direction that will improve access to naturalization
for people with disabilities after so many years of increasing length,
complexity, and barriers in the form and guidance. However, the guidance does
not go far enough in eliminating barriers faced by our most vulnerable
immigrant populations.
Recent data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) show that
thousands of the most vulnerable refugees and other “humanitarian” immigrants
in the United States — all of whom are elderly or disabled — continue to lose
Supplemental Security Income (SSI).
The cutoff is the result of the 1996 welfare law, which limits many
refugees and other immigrants admitted on humanitarian grounds to seven years
of SSI benefits unless they become naturalized citizens. The rationale for the
seven-year limit was the belief that all humanitarian immigrants could obtain
U.S. citizenship (and thus retain SSI eligibility) within seven years. Unfortunately, the process for becoming a
citizen is lengthy and can be arduous. Many refugees and other humanitarian
immigrants who are elderly or disabled, therefore, find it difficult to obtain
citizenship within seven years.
In this article, I will discuss the barriers to access to appropriate
medical and mental health care and the devastating impact of the Social
Security benefits cut-off on disabled individuals who are unable to obtain an
approvable N 648 disability waiver. I will then suggest improvements to the
process for highly vulnerable immigrants.
Discussant and Moderator: Lori A.
Nessel, Seton Hall University School of Law