Explanation - Policy 2018-2019 Topic Immigration
By: Jaya Nayar
The 2018-2019 topic for policy is: “The United States federal government should substantially reduce its restrictions on legal immigration to the United States.”
The Aff
The explanations of each header is in order:
1. Trump has really messed up VAWA orders and essentially given permission to any ICE agent or local police officer to arrest any undocumented immigrant. Pre-Trump, immigrants were able to attain U-visas if they cooperated with law enforcement in any related investigation. Now, that's not so clear. There was one specific incident in El Paso where a woman had gone to court because she was a survivor of IPV and wanted to leave the abusive relationship. An ICE agent then arrested her while she was in the court house (which is an almost unheard of thing to do).
2. This segues into the issue of a chilling effect. Now that immigrants have heard about incidents like the one in El Paso and others, as well as the fact that Trump has stirred up mass anti-immigrant sentiment, immigrants feel much more scared to go to the authorities regarding IPV because of fear of deportation.
3. To explain this part, it's important to clarify some of the basics about immigration. When spouses migrate to the US (most of whom are wives of men living in the US) they can do so on their own or they can get a dependent visa. These cards refer to the latter situation. With dependent visas, the spouse of the dependent must petition on their behalf in order to grant them a different immigration status. These cards discuss how this becomes problematic in households where IPV is an issue, because the primary spouse (the one without the dependent visa) will threaten their dependent spouse with immigration. In response to this, Congress passed under VAWA, or the Violence Against Women Act, a provision that spouses of US citizens or LPRs (legal permanent residents) can self-petition in cases where it has been demonstrated that IPV has occurred. This still means that people who are not spouses of US citizens or LPRs, like people with H-4 visas, cannot self-petition and are totally dependent on their spouses for legal immigration status.
4. This one is more simple than the one above it in that previously, immigrants who were escaping IPV were offered asylum in the US. Under Trump, many immigrant survivors are being refused asylum.
5. Most of the plan texts should be relatively straightforward. T is really complicated on this topic because "restrictions on legal immigration" isn't really a term of art in immigration literature. I wouldn't say these plan texts are definitely not T, but I would also would say that most, if not all of them, run into T issues.
6. The card about why the aff's discussion is key basically says that immigrant women have frequently been overlooked in immigration studies, so having discussions about immigrant women specifically is really important. This could provide offense versus a K as to why the discussion of the 1AC outweighs the discussion of the K, or it could also be a T argument why any T interp that would exclude affs about immigrant women would be a bad thing.
7. The stats I included mostly for understanding how many people IPV affects in the immigrant population.
8. Lastly, I found this random card that says immigration policies regarding women aren't well-known, nor does the public really care about them, which would answer midterms and any other politics disads that rely on voters switching their vote because of the plan.
What are the affs?
Some of the best advice I can give you for this aff is keep the area you want to focus on limited. The way I see it, there are 3 affs that can be run based off this card file (there are obviously other ways to go as well, but these are the strategic ones I have identified). The first one involves why Trump has essentially gotten rid of VAWA and U-visa protections for immigrant survivors of IPV, which means that less immigrants are reporting IPV. The second one involves creating an asylum for immigrants escaping IPV in their home countries. The third one involves changing rules for immigrants with dependent visa status, such that H-4 visas and other spouses who aren't married to US citizens or LPRs are still able to access relief in the case of IPV.
Neg args
DAs: The nice thing is that these affs are small enough to avoid most DA links. Additionally, the first aff about VAWA and the second one about maintaining the US as an asylum for immigrant survivors could be run with a plan that just gets rid of Trump’s new policies. This would mean that most DA links wouldn’t apply because the US was doing just fine without Trump’s policies, so getting rid of them wouldn’t have an effect.
CPs: I’ll preface this section with the idea that about 80-90% of CPs compete by net benefit, so having a small aff would get rid of a lot of CPs. For the first and second affs, what you’d want to leverage is that even if they have a CP that hypothetically solves the aff, changing the policies of the president is specifically key. What I mean by this is that immigrants don’t really know about all the routes available to them in cases of IPV, but they do listen to the news. When they hear Trump making such bold statements about immigration, that scares them. What you want to say is that passing a law that overrides Trump’s orders would get highly publicized and would make immigrants feel less scared because they wouldn’t feel like Trump has all the power in the world anymore. For the third aff, it’s a little bit harder to solve with a CP because there’s concrete evidence that VAWA has helped immigrants who are married to LPRs and US citizens, so extending it to H-4s and others with dependent visas would work too. Empirics and studies are definitely on your side with this aff, and CPs are going to have much weaker solvency.
Ks: I’m only going to reference state bad Ks for the sake of not making this post too long, and so what I will say is that what you want to go for is that in the case of IPV, state protection is necessary. It’s pretty hard to argue against a position that says granting some form of protection to survivors of IPV is a good thing.
T: I discussed this a little bit above, but this is probably one of the things you’re going to hit the most, because what is defined as a restriction on immigration is really vague. It probably means that you have to increase the number of visas given, but there are also some cards out there that say otherwise. Research is key!
I hope this helps :))) Happy debating!