By Maria Sacchetti

The governor of Texas is poised to sign a sweeping bill that would outlaw sanctuary jurisdictions in the state and impose costly fines and even jail time on officials who refuse to cooperate with U.S. immigration agents.

It makes clear that local law enforcement officers may ask ­people they detain about their immigration status, a line of ­questioning that critics say should be reserved for federal immigration agents.

“I’m getting my signing pen warmed up,” Gov. Greg Abbott (R) tweeted this week. His state is home to the second-largest number of undocumented immigrants in the nation, some 1.6 million people.

The legislation would be the country’s most significant crackdown so far on sanctuary cities, which in general refuse to hold immigrants who have been arrested for local crimes past their release date so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement can take them into federal custody and try to deport them.

In March, Mississippi’s governor signed a law that bars sanctuary jurisdictions, while Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) vetoed a similar measure. On Thursday, Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) warned that state and local law enforcement officers are “potentially exposed to liability” if they continue to jail a person whom a judge has ordered released.

Last week, a federal judge in California temporarily halted President Trump’s effort to crack down on sanctuary cities nationwide.

State Sen. Charles Perry (R) has said he sponsored the Texas bill to prevent local officials from letting serious criminals out of jail before immigration agents can take them into federal custody.

The measure would fine local governments up to $25,500 a day for policies that block immigration enforcement. Elected or appointed officials who refuse to cooperate with immigration agents could lose their jobs. Sheriffs and other police officers would face misdemeanor charges, punishable by up to a year in jail and fines, if they ignore requests to detain immigrants. The bill would take effect Sept. 1.

Church leaders, police chiefs and teachers opposed the bill and vowed Thursday to fight it in court, saying it would make cities and towns unsafe because undocumented immigrants would be more unwilling to report crimes, for fear of being questioned about their own residency status.

Houston has reported a significant drop in Latinos reporting rape and other violent crime this year, after fear spread among immigrant communities following Trump’s inauguration.

Advocates predicted that Texas could be targeted with boycotts and lawsuits, just as North Carolina was after passing its controversial bathroom bill.

“The intention is there to terrorize and put more fear in the community here in Texas,” said Eduardo Canales, director of the South Texas Human Rights Center. “It’s a horrible bill.”

Frank Sharry, executive director of the America’s Voice Education Fund, said the bill “attacks the civil rights of every Texan who might look or sound like they are from somewhere else, even if their families have lived in the Lone Star State for generations.”

Texas Rep. Rafael Anchia (D-Dallas) said he hoped the ACLU or the Mexican American Legislative Caucus would file a lawsuit against the bill once it is signed. He called it “hateful and discriminatory” and said such acts are contributing to a rise in white nationalist propaganda on college campuses.

“It’s very sad to see in the state of Texas today,” he said.

Texas shares the longest U.S. border with Mexico and had long enjoyed friendlier relations with its southern neighbor than some other nearby states. It resisted passing laws opposing bilingual education or illegal immigration even as such statutes materialized in Arizona, Massachusetts and California.

But since Trump’s election, advocates say, the climate has shifted.

Maria Teresa Kumar, president and chief executive of Voto Latino, predicted that the harsh sanctuary bill will ultimately backfire, as it did in California, where anti-immigrant ballot measures passed in the 1990s led to a “political awakening” for Latinos.

Now California is a leading protector of undocumented immigrants, granting them driver’s licenses and in-state tuition at public colleges. The state Senate recently passed a bill that would transform the state into a sanctuary jurisdiction.

After the Texas bill passed the Senate in February, Abbott said he would “not tolerate sanctuary-city policies that put the citizens of Texas at risk.”

“Elected officials do not get to pick and choose which laws they will obey,” the governor said.

Matthew Dowling, chief of staff for Perry, the bill’s sponsor, said in an email Thursday that law enforcement agents will question the immigration status only of people they have detained for ­another reason. The bill bans racial profiling and exempts schools from cooperating with federal agents, and it would protect immigrants who are crime victims or witnesses, he said.

Dowling also pointed out that the fines vary, from $1,000 to $1,500 a day for a first offense and $25,000 to $25,500 for each subsequent violation.

“If the Texas Legislature were serious about removing undocumented persons, there are better ways to address this issue than forcing law enforcement to become immigration agents,” the officials said in an opinion piece that was published in The Dallas Morning News. “The Legislature could easily start by addressing the businesses that hire undocumented workers, which is why the majority of the honest, hard-working persons immigrate to this country with or without documentation.

“Addressing the primary reason undocumented persons enter this state would free law enforcement to address those people who are committing crimes.”

Outrage over the threat to undocumented immigrants may be fuelling undue panic, and could be part of Trump’s big plan

By Rory Carroll in Los Angeles

An awkward question has begun to nag opponents of Donald Trump’s immigration policies: is the resistance inadvertently helping the administration?

Few say it publicly but there is concern that the rallies and marches, alerts and tweets, workshops and press releases are helping the administration sow fear among undocumented immigrants.

The spectre of deportation so haunts communities across the United States that some people are afraid to report crimes and others have reportedly decided to return to Mexico and Central America before they get swept up.

Many immigrant rights groups play into the strategy by hyping the risk of deportation, a message then echoed by media, she said. “Some media is really helping further Trump’s agenda.”

Roberto Suro, a journalism and Latino affairs scholar at the University of Southern California, said the White House may struggle to match Barack Obama’s record-breaking deportation levels but that tough rhetoric and scattered high-profile Ice operations were generating energetic immigrant activism and news coverage.

“Fear is a natural consequence. People appear to be changing their behavior. There’s talk of folks at least thinking about going home. That obviously would suit Trump’s purposes.”

On one hand, they feel they must sound the alarm. During the election Trump vowed to banish all 11 million undocumented people. In office he drastically broadened enforcement guidelines and vowed to swiftly deport 2 million to 3 million people.

It is enforcement through attrition – instilling so much fear that people leave on their own

Anecdotal evidence – such as the detention of Dreamers, a father driving his daughter to school and a mother in Phoenix – suggest more aggressive Ice tactics. And in a statement an Ice spokeswoman, Sarah Rodriguez, said operations were targeted and lead-driven but that the net had widened. “We do not engage in indiscriminate sweeps or raids. However, as [homeland security] secretary Kelly has made clear, with very limited exceptions, Ice will no longer exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement. Any alien encountered during the course of targeted enforcement actions is subject to removal.”

But in sounding the alarm activists spread fear, thus serving the president’s agenda – a quandary that “almost requires a degree in postmodern French philosophy”, said Chris Newman, legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network..” The administration sought to make citizens afraid of immigrants and immigrants afraid of government. “They’re playing the media like a symphony.”

Even so, said Newman, there was only one option: resist. “Our overall view is when in doubt, fight back, even if it means amplifying Trump’s message.”

For Mateo, the activist, some fellow activists and media outlets, especially Spanish-language broadcasters, do a disservice by telling people to brace for the worst, as if deportation were something to prepare for rather than resist. “It’s very disempowering.”

From the opposite end of the spectrum Rodriguez, the Ice spokeswoman, lamented hype and false rumours. “They create panic and put communities and law enforcement personnel in unnecessary danger. Those who are falsely reporting such activities are doing a disservice to those they claim to support.”

In the current political climate there was no easy balance between informing and frightening people, said Doris Meissner, who headed the Immigration and Naturalization Service under Bill Clinton and now works at the Migration Policy Institute. “It’s a real dilemma.”

The true impact of activism may not be felt for a generation. That alone is reason to fight, rather than surrender to despair

It could be a year before Ice ramps up deportations but the broadened deportation categories meant more people were already at risk, she said. “It’s not unreasonable to be fearful. But the likelihood of being in the wrong place at the wrong time does appear to be quite low.”

Janine Jackson, program director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (Fair), said the journalists needed to report fear without fuelling it. “You don’t need to cover every deportation. The media should be wary of carrying water for the White House. Reporters should write about the fact that Trump is trying to drive this fear and anxiety.”

Others think activists, and the media, have a straightforward task: blow the whistle, hard, because Hurricane Trump is gathering force.

“I actually think the media’s coverage has been good in letting undocumented people know the gravity of the situation. Because those deportations are coming, and are actually already happening,” said Gustavo Arellano, editor of OC Weekly and author of the syndicated column ¡Ask a Mexican!

Lucas Zucker, of Cause, an immigrant rights group on California’s coast, said people urgently needed to know what to do if Ice came knocking. “The Trump administration is absolutely gearing up to do mass deportations so it is important in this calm before the storm for our community to know their rights.”

By MIRIAM JORDAN, The Nedw York Times

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif. — The delivery trucks began arriving with their precious parcels before daybreak Monday, lining up before the massive ziggurat that rises here above Orange County’s suburban sprawl.

Each truck carried two workers because of the volume of thick envelopes they had to unload. One UPS driver said his truck held 3,000 of them, 10 times the number he normally delivers to the building, a government processing center.

Andrew Langyo, a FedEx courier whose truck was first in line, swung open the back of his truck for inspection by the guards. There were 15,000 packages inside.

“We’re loaded, and we have more trucks coming,” said Mr. Langyo, who would return two hours later in the same truck with another haul.

Last Monday, the starting gun went off on application season for skilled-worker visas, known as H-1B visas, which allow American employers, primarily technology companies, to bring in foreign workers for three years at a time. For the last few years, the government has been so overwhelmed by applications that it has stopped accepting them within a week of opening day — hence the line of trucks trying to deliver their cargo of H-1B applications before the doors close on the program for another year.

And this year, the rush has escalated to an all-out scramble because the H-1B program’s future is unclear. Hailed by proponents as vital to American innovation, the visa program’s detractors say it has evolved into a scheme to displace United States workers with cheaper foreign labor. President Trump has vowed to overhaul it and lawmakers from both parties have drafted bills to alter it.

At his campaign rallies, Mr. Trump introduced laid-off Americans who had been asked to train their foreign successors at companies including Disney. “We won’t let this happen anymore,” he thundered in one stump speech about the practice, which he has deemed “outrageous” and “demeaning.”

Just this past weekend, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced a technical change that could make it harder for entry-level programmers to receive the visas, and on Monday, the Justice Department warned that it would investigate companies that it believed had overlooked qualified American workers.

“The Justice Department will not tolerate employers misusing the H-1B visa process to discriminate against U.S. workers,” Tom Wheeler, the head of the department’s civil rights division, said in a statement.

Each year, 65,000 H-1Bs are made available to workers with bachelor’s degrees, and 20,000 more are earmarked for those with master’s degrees. They are attractive not only to the companies that file the applications, but also to the workers themselves, who can become eligible for a green card while working on an H-1B.

Last year, the government took in 236,000 applications in the first week before deciding it would accept no more. A computer randomly chose the winners.

The average H-1B petition, a collection of forms and documents attesting to the bona fides of a job offer and the person chosen to fill it, is about two inches thick. But some files are six inches fat and weigh several pounds, according to Bill Yates, former director of the Vermont Service Center, which also processes H-1B applications.

Mr. Yates recalled some mishaps, like the time a driver bound for the center in Vermont drove 50 miles unaware that his truck’s back door had swung open, spilling its cargo onto the road.

Among the petitions expected to land in California’s center on Monday is that of Minh Nguyen, a software-design engineer from Vietnam who was sponsored for an H-1B by BitTitan, a cloud software company based in Kirkland, Wash. It is his second attempt at a visa.

“In America, you’re in the center of new technology and cutting-edge changes in the I.T. industry,” said Mr. Nguyen, 25. “I would contribute directly to the company and to software development in the U.S.”

In 2014, the last year for which information has been published, just 13 outsourcing firms accounted for one-third of all granted visas. The top recipients were Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro, all based in India.

The companies, which subcontract their employees to banks, retailers and other businesses in the United States to do programming, accounting and other work, often inundate the federal immigration service with tens of thousands of H-1B applications.

BitTitan, a growing firm that hopes to hire 60 engineers in the next 12 months, is submitting just six applications. “We are trying to fill specific positions around cloud and artificial intelligence,” said the company’s chief executive, Geeman Yip. “If we can’t fill them, our innovation suffers.”

Mr. Yip opened a small Singapore office four years ago in part to address the worker shortage.

“I want to invest here,” said Mr. Yip. “I can’t be stifled by a shortage of people.”

Several bipartisan bills pending in the Senate and the House seek to make companies give more priority to American workers before they fill jobs with H-1B visas. They also seek to raise the minimum pay for the jobs, which depend on skill level and location — a computer systems analyst in Pittsburgh, for example, must make at least $49,000 under current regulations. The theory is that higher pay would make those jobs more competitive with American-filled positions and eliminate some of the rationale for importing workers.

A draft of a presidential executive order on “protecting American jobs and workers by strengthening the integrity of foreign worker visa programs” was distributed widely in late January but never signed. But without warning over the weekend, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services published a memo on its website that could affect many applications. The measure appears to be directed specifically at outsourcing firms but could hurt other companies.

Specifically, companies seeking to import computer programmers at the lowest pay levels will have to prove that the work they perform qualifies as “specialty” labor, which is what the H-1B visas were created for. “There will be greater scrutiny of the role the company wants to fill,” said Lynden Melmed, a lawyer in Washington and a former chief counsel for the immigration service.

Even before the change, fears about the future of the H-1B program were making this year more pressure-packed than most. “Just to make sure the petitions get in, almost every client demanded that theirs arrive on the first day,” said Greg McCall, a lawyer at Perkins Coie in Seattle who prepared 150 applications.

FedEx and UPS trucks came and went all day long, as did some smaller delivery companies that received a piece of the action. At 9:20 a.m., one courier, Fernando Salas, pulled up in a red Suzuki station wagon stuffed with 10 boxes. “I have 109 envelopes,” he said. “That is all that fits in here.”

Apo Kelyan of On-Time Messenger Service pulled up at 6:21 a.m. in a van. “This is the busiest day for us,” said Mr. Kelyan, as he carried a load into to the building’s mailroom. He could not stop to speak any longer. “I have to run,” he said.

Much like the United States, the countries of Western Europe have experienced massive immigration in the last three decades. Spain, in particular, has been transformed from an immigrant-exporting country to one receiving hundreds of thousands of new immigrants. Today, almost 13 percent of the country’s population is foreign-born. Spanish Legacies, written by internationally known experts on immigration, explores how the children of immigrants—the second generation—are coping with the challenges of adaptation to Spanish society, comparing their experiences with those of their peers in the United States.

Using a rich data set based on both survey and ethnographic material, Spanish Legacies describes the experiences of growing up by the large population of second-generation youths in Spain and the principal outcomes of the process—from national self-identification and experiences of discrimination to educational attainment and labor-market entry. The study is based on a sample of almost 7,000 second-generation students who were interviewed in Madrid and Barcelona in 2008 and then followed and re-interviewed four years later. A survey of immigrant parents, a replacement sample for lost respondents in the second survey, and a survey of native-parentage students complement this rich data set. Outcomes of the adaptation process in Spain are systematically presented in five chapters, introduced by real-life histories of selected respondents drawn by the study’s ethnographic module. Systematic comparisons with results from the United States show a number of surprising similarities in the adaptation of children of immigrants in both countries, as well as differences marked by contrasting experiences of discrimination, self-identities, and ambition