US Immigration News

On 1 May hundreds of thousands of people in the US marched in support of immigrant rights CNN reports.

The organizers of a series of nationwide marches "A day without immigrants" asked those opposing tighter restrictions on immigration namely immigrants themselves to boycott businesses and not go to School or College for the day.

Thousand of immigrants and their supporters did not turn up for work or go to college. There were rallies all round the US:

American agriculture is warning Americans that the $12 trillion US economy could be forced to go on a big diet if further steps are taken against illegal immigrants. Immigrants are an important source of labour in a variety of industries including agriculture where Mexican immigrants make up a significant proportion of the labour force.

"To find and deport workers who are in the country right now would throw a wrench into the economy of the United States that would leave the public in disbelief," said Dave Ray, a spokesman for the American Meat Institute.

The Immigrant Justice Project (IJP) has filed a lawsuit designed to force one of the US largest food providers to take responsibility for mistreatment of its workers.

The class action was filed by Center attorneys on behalf of migrant farm workers who were underpaid while working in South Georgia for subsidiaries of the US food giant Del Monte.

US resort towns like Aspen, Colorado and Key West, Fla., have become reliant on hundreds of foreign workers who come to the US legally on short-term work visas. They take jobs scanning lift tickets and staffing checkout lines. They are often college students who come into town for a little work, and maybe a little fun, for a season. But these workers are often from the Southern Hemisphere - Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa - whose summer breaks coincide with Colorado's ski season.

To ease the nursing shortage in the US, New York's St John's Riverside Hospital, which operates a nursing school and supplies nurses to 100 hospitals, has arranged for Korean nurses to come to the US for a one and a half year internship that leads to full time employment.

As many as 10,000 nurses could be leaving South Korea to work in the US over the next 5 years. The US Department of Health and Human Services has predicted that in the year 2020, there will be a shortage of 800,000 nurses in the US.

When the US senate failed to agree upon changes to US immigration laws concerning illegal immigrants and border control, these were not the only issues left pending. The questions of how to clear the backlog of green cards, and increasing the cap were left unanswered.