Affirmative

Introduction
- European settlers immigrated to the Americas to escape persecution,
discrimination, misfortune, poverty, and being unemployed. Majority of European
Settlers immigrated from nasty, dirty, countries and historically tended to bring
those nasty dirty issues with them. European settlers also immigrated in search
for gold, glory, and God.
- A significant reason for such high regulations and restrictions now are because
European Settlers are paranoid that they will be done how they did Natives and
Africans when they immigrated and settled in America.
- Defenders of immigration reform argue America is a nation of immigrants, and a
progressive immigration policy.
- Immigrants make up 5% of the workforce. Immigrants feed into the tax system.
They pay taxes. They contribute just as much if not more than many Americans
- Immigration in America isn’t what the politicians tell you.
- RESOLVED: THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD SUBSTANTIALLY
REDUCE ITS RESTRICTIONS ON LEGAL IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES
- 70% of voters listed immigration as very important to their decision in 2016.
- IN 1850, most immigrants were from Ireland and Germany. By 1870, most were
from Mexico. The Chinese came in 1880s. The 20th century had Canadians settling
in northern states. 1900 had lots of Greek and Italians. By 1910 you had lots of
Russians coming. Many fled to escape WWI. 1921 had the first quota system –
how many people could come to the country and who is allowed to come in. 1924
had first permanent restrictions for immigrations – time quotas on visas today. In
1930 the New Deal stimulated the economy and there was a lot of development.
1965 eliminated race as factors for immigration – opens floodgate into increased
ethnic diversity in the US. 1970 had low immigration. In 1980, US expanded visas
and Mexico began immigrating. 1980s made churches politican sanctuaries. IRCA
in 1986 grants amnesty to illegal immigrants who entered the US. Requires
employers to attest to immigration – can’t lie about immigration status. In 1996,
“welfare reform” restricts benefits to legal immigrants in US five years or fewer
and to all undocumented immigrants. 9-11 restricted immigration especially on
foreign university students. Anti immigrant groups became more powerful and
radical. 2009 had 11.1 million immigrants. Mexico made up 60% of immigrants.
Dominicans followed in 1990. By 2000, Mexicans had 9 million immigrants in the
US.
- The Chinese Exclusion Act block immigrants – model minority – repealed in 1950.
1892 didn’t need the Chinese anymore since they had already mined out all the
gold so they started stoning Chinese people.
- We need to have an understanding of what is diversity – Different European
countries are not considered diverse but non European countries are considered
diverse.
- Obama administration had most deportation ever – Alien and Sedition Act
 Topic
- This topic doesn’t deal with spending money. It instead deals with social justice
and fairness.
 Contemporary issues in immigration
- Categories of Visas – their criteria and numerical limits, they might focus on
different populations or areas of the world, they might examine types of skills
under represented in the United States.
- Comprehensive immigration reform
- Amnesty for immigrants already living in the United States
- Reversing restrictive state laws, changes to visa/quota requirements
- The DREAM act
- Increasing work permits for immigrants with special skills in medicine or
engineering, among others
 Affs
- Eliminating borders, queering borders
- Citizenship Ks dealing with antiblackness and settler colonialism
- Securitization – Ontopower, Biopower
Topicality
 “Legal Immigration”
- There is no consensus about what “legal immigration” means. T evidence is very
high quality.
- “THE ADMISSION OF PERSONS INTO THE UNITED STATES FOR LAWFUL
PERMANENT RESIDENCE”
- There are definitions that challenge this – however you should use this as the
working model.
- What is lawful permanent residence or LPR? Green cards, etc. People are almost
citizens but not citizens. Having LPR doesn’t mean you are a citizen. A citizen is
distinct from a legal immigrant. LPR can’t vote, serve on a jury, sponsor others for
immigrant status, can’t get access to welfare until they’ve been here for 5 years.
They are not deportable unless they violated an immigration law. If you kill
someone, you cannot be deported.
- What is “admission” to the United States? 1. You need a visa 2. You need an
inspection done. Borders and customs asks you questions and signs a paper
saying you don’t have diseases or drugs.
- Court case where family was here on H1B (nonpermanent visa) – requested LPR
and needed to go through inspection. Other court cases said that changing from
temporary to permanent residence was not “immigration”. This means H1B is not
topical. Giving H1B LPR status MAY be topical. Global cap for immigration is
675,000 people for the US. We cannot admit more than 675,000 people on visas
per year. There are over a million of visas that we give out each year which are
not included in that cap. For example making non immigrant visa immigrants into
LPRs.
 How to be admitted
1. Employment visas – EB1, EB2, EB2A, EB5, etc. If you come to work in the United
States on a visa that is an employment visa. If you get fired you will lose your
employment. EB1 visas are priority visas for rocket sciences and athletes. EB2
is for PHDs. There are a ton of them, each one for different purposes.
2. Family sponsored visas – Legal immigrants can sponsor their family to come to
the US. Being admitted would be that you would be an LPR and that you
couldn’t sponsor others. You can’t sponsor people outside of immediate family
“Chain migration” where you invite your family and they invite their extended
family and they do the same etc
3. Refugee visas - Race, religion, nationality, group membership, and political
opinion – you need a well founded fear of any one of those five things. People
who are displaced from their homes are not refugees. This doesn’t count
towards the immigrant cap. They do meet admission to the United States.
Refugees are topical. We do have a cap on refugee visas. Topical affirmative
could raise cap on refugee visas.
4. Non Immigration visas – This includes H1B. You need to show that you will not
seek to seek citizenship. If you are a tourist, you get a non immigrant visa. You
can’t get a F1 visa or an EB visa if you are applying for an H1B visa because that
shows you have intent to stay. This is not topical. It might be topical. T visas
and U visas are for people who have been abused in some way and can apply
for LPR after three years in the US without removal. T visas are subjected to
deportation if you get arrested. You want to transition to LPR to prevent
deportation. Students and H1B are effectively long term residence because H1B
can be continuously renewed. Though H1B is non immigrant visa, some courts
think that you should still be treated as an immigrant because of the duration
that you are here. This makes for some interesting topicality arguments.
Priority work visas can go to UN members, people negotiating treaties, etc.
They are all for employment or work.
Confused yet?
 “Restrictions”
- There is a legal and a colloquial standard for what “restriction” means. By the
legal definition, you have 2 types of restrictions.
- For the legal definition. There are “caps” such as the EB cap and the nationality
cap. 7% of the cap space can go to a particular country. This matters in China and
India. India has a 70 year waiting list for employment visas because of the caps.
China has the same problem. Unless you change the cap, there will be this
impossibility. Qualitative restrictions are characteristics. If you are a communist
or a Nazi, if you are a pedophile or polygamous, if you have engaged in
prostitution or trafficking, you can be charged and denied from being admitted.
There is a list of 70 characteristics that you can be charged with. You can make
affs to take out certain characteristics. The second characteristic of qualitative
restrictions are eligibility restrictions. It just means “do you meet the visa
requirements you’re applying for?” If you are applying for an F1 visa and don’t
have family in the US, you are not eligible.
- Cap tradeoffs – if you don’t change the global cap, you have to decrease a cap on
some other visa to get a certain visa. There is always a tradeoff. Tradeoff disad is
going to be big. Increasing cap means that it has to come from a different visa
program.
- The colloquial definition is the impediment of immigration. The cost of a plane
ticket from Mexico to the US being too high could be a colloquial restriction. If
you don’t use the legal definition for restriction, that makes the topic massive.
Giving everyone lawyers is topical. The topicality debate comes in when courts
haven’t decided whether to use the colloquial or legal restriction for immigration.
Negative
 Disadvantages
- Push DA – What’s happening in the sending country
- Pull DA – What’s happening in the US
 Push DA
- Brain Drain is a push DA. Brain drain links are better for developing countries.
Developed countries don’t have a dramatic impact during brain drain. Inability to
renew visas – Uniqueness for the link – People are returning home. You can also
say that there is a global divide – it makes the upper world and the lower world –
Brain circulation is the aff’s response to brain drain. Even though people are
present in the US, they will send money and intelligence back, still giving
developing countries innovation
- Education DA – Educated people are going to the US – universities are having a
hard time finding students – this deincentivizes education in developing countries.
Good against student visas
- Tax DA – countries lose a ton of citizens and get less taxes, causes the falling of
developing political leadership.
- Remittances Bad DA – Remittances are financial transfer from immigrant back
home. People think that these influxes of cash doesn’t produce meaningful
economical advantages. You just have money in the economy not people working
and building the economy. It’s a good 2NC surprise. You can run it with a Brain
Drain DA
- Lots of these push DAs overlap, you can run them together
 Pull DA
- Malthusian DA – having an influx of people coming to the US will cause a overuse
of resources, too many people are taking social services. This causes a Malthusian
crisis – its better if there are less people in the US so we don’t have an overload
- Agency Overload DA – The plan might distract from another group – the agency
needs to have time and resources to process other kinds of migrants who are
more important – for example student visas distract from refugees.
- Wage Deflation DA – Lowers wages because immigrants accept poor working
conditions and pay – employers lower wages because they know that there are
those who will accept the low wages
- Unemployment DA – The immigrants take jobs, kind of Trumpian rhetoric, use
mathematics and statistics and factual instead of passionate.
- Terrorism/Crime DA – Terrorists exploit this to get into the country and destroy
- Nativism/Backlash DA – pro Trump people retaliate – become racist, structural
violence.
- Offshoring DA – Offshoring good – STEM industries allows corporations to have
fewer regulations which allows innovation
- Trade DA – If we are liberal on immigration, we need to raise tariffs in exchange
for our concessions
- Politics DA – Allowing more legal immigration causes less illegal immigration
disad, midterms – Trump and his group look more humane which loses democratic
votes in the midterms.
- Courts DA – Court’s don’t have power – plenary powers – courts have stayed out
of immigration and should just give that to congress.
- Courts Clogging DA – Courts are backed up – similar to agency overload – so many
people are suing the government makes immigration courts illegitimate
- Visas DA – visas don’t ensure staying in the United States – allows exploitation of
the law to deport people.
- Tradeoff DA – We don’t meet the caps on certain visas and we have an overload
on other visas.
- ICE DA – ICE will circumvent the plan – continue to deport/oppress immigrants
- Be careful with these disadvantages – some of them could sound racist. Try to
sound objective and statistical
 Counterplans
- Temporary counterplan – circulation of people – instead of having unlimited
duration H1B visas, get new workers every once in a while. Can be run with Brain
Drain
- Auction CP – Auctions visas to employers and individuals – net benefit is that
people who need the immigrants the most can get them.
- Offsets CP – Instead of lifting the cap, take nurses visas and give them to investors
like EB5.
- Recapture CP – Take unused visas from the year before and put them to the visas
that are overflowing – rollover visas prevents “wasting” spots
- Negotiate role making CP – consult businesses first
- Human Rights CP – Create Human Rights Impact Statement – needs to align with
human rights standards
- International CP – Instead of US unilaterally liberalizing immigration – the WTO
will do this plan around the world
- Brain Tax CP – People have to pay money to their home country to ameliorate
brain drain
- Compensation CP – Mexico needs to securitize before we allow Mexican
immigrants, China needs to liberalize currency before we allow Chinese
immigration
- Parole CP – USCIS grant humanitarian status changes. If there is a giant
earthquake, the USCIS and DHS could give “parole” to those people displaced
- Agent CP – Should executive, legislative, or judicial do the plan
- Topicality with counterplan makes it more competitive
- Be careful when writing your counterplans – “giving status” is different from
“admitting more”
 Case
- Fiat = let it be done. However, there’s the question about how ICE will circumvent
the plan, etc. The enforcement of the law is different from the law being passed.
- Need a framing position – explain how to weigh the DA or CP against the case -
 Kritiks
- There is a strong case for topical definitions to fit into the resolution
- Definitions are subjective, resolutions are open to interpretation.
- What is the “United States Federal Government”? What is a nation-state? Should
we get rid of the US to get rid of restrictions on immigration.
- They have ground on the aff and neg. No Borders on neg or aff is the same –
Natasha King Borders K
- For neg – figure out what is the core gesture for the topic – people aren’t going to
say “immigration is bad”, you want to think about what are the theses of critical
literature. Why should the state have control over immigration?
- How is immigration used to exclude and restrict certain groups of people?
- How does the affirmative produce or strengthen sovereignty or the nation state?
How do non-plan affs gesture towards the governance of territory? What defines
a border?
- What is the resolution orienting topical action towards? What kinds of affs does
this resolution open space for? Not just visas but kritikal affs.
- How does the resolution and the affirmative’s plan presuppose the cohesion of
the United States Federal Government? Asking questions about theories of power
and resistance.
- What’s the discussion between legal and illegal immigration? How does the
affirmative’s foregrounding of providing legal avenues create a paradigm that
allows more crackdown on illegal immigration?
- Settlerism, biopower, ontopower, precarity, security, identity, racial capitalism,
settler colonialism, antiblackness, nationalism, multiculturalism, Empire,
hegemony, imperialism, homonationalism (family structures), family separation,
UndocuQueer, Engagement (how you engage with the state), Inclusion (Agamben)
, Citizenship/Sovereignty, Productivity and migrant labor, Meritocracy, Open
Borders, No Borders, Abolition, No more Deaths, No One is Illegal,
Not1MoreDeportation
- State: Professionalism and norms perpetuated by the state requires us to resist
them
- Geopolitical and ideological borders are the different borders that you can
critique.
- Make sure you have examples of the stuff you critique – the bracero program is a
great example of the viewing of the migrant as a laborer. EB1 visas being for
“priority” immigrants demonstrates how people’s productive capacity determines
their importance.
- No Borders by Natasha King, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21 st
century, The Deportation Regime (collection of essays about immigration and
sovereignty), Unruly Immigrants: Rights activism and the transnational south
Asian politics in the United States by Monisha Das Gupta, the Borders of
Dominicanidad, The Afro Latinx Reader, Alien Capital by Iyko Day,
 Critical Research Tips
- Read Footnotes!!
- Who is citing the author?
- Interventions/Know the Academic Conversations happening!
- Construct your arguments in mind of the best criticisms of such argument
 Relevant Academic Fields
- Critical Border studies
- Critical Globalization Studies
- Ethnic Studies
- Queer theory
- Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Critical Migration Studies
- Critical Race Theory
- Surveillance Studies
- Critical Legal Studies