Attorney Peter Vincent

Immigration reform is among the controversial yet pressing issues faced by America today. The growing need for immigration to supply the labor needs of the economy runs into the immigration policy of the United States that fails to address a dire issue faced by many migrant workers in the country.

                                                  Image Source: immigrationproject.org

Stories abound of families split apart by the implementation of current immigration laws. Immigrants can be penalized for minor crimes (or no crimes at all) and be incarcerated or deported, with summary deportations of entire families becoming more and more common. In this manner, many families are forcibly separated for indefinite periods.

These situations do not plague undocumented immigrants alone; families waiting in line in immigration offices often find themselves faced with similar prospects due to bureaucratic backlogs preventing them from gaining entry to the country as one family.

                                                         Image Source: usnews.com

Moreover, the mired immigration bureaucracy continues to incarcerate undocumented immigrants as criminals in deplorable detention centers whose conditions rival prisons.

In 2014, President Obama decreed a landmark suspension of all deportations, which had a profound effect on the lives of many undocumented migrants. While this and other executive actions and the landmark 2013 legislation made under his administration have been lauded by the international community as steps in the right direction, these are presently insufficient to alleviate the pressing human costs already caused by unfair immigration policies of the past and ones that continue to persist.

                                                          Image Source: latinpost.com

Further reforms in the immigration bureaucracy are needed to streamline the process of entering the country legally (to prevent undocumented entries) and to find alternatives to detention and deportation for undocumented immigrants. A more inclusive approach awaits.

Even with secure software programs installed, a few experts still believe that completely computerized international relations remain highly vulnerable to cyber attacks. Read the full story below:

Image source: isn.ethz.ch Has the gradual transition to cyber-based international relations had unintended consequences? Myriam Dunn Cavelty thinks so. By focusing exclusively on state-to-state relations and defending against cyber-attacks, state actors have given short shrift to other voices and the possibility of large-scale cyber-exploitation. We have arrived in an age of mega-hacks, in which high-impact and high-attention cyberincidents are becoming the new normal. The increase in strategically consequential, targeted cyberincidents is met with intensified efforts to reduce the risk of cyberconflict through norm-building, mainly geared towards creating deterrent effects at the state level. While these new developments have an overall stabilizing effect on cyber-international relations, the narrow focus on destructive cyberattacks and on state-to-state relations is creating unintended security-reducing side-effects. For half a decade, cyberincidents, both big and small, have made the news almost daily. The fact that insecurity in and through the cyberdomain has come to dominate political discussions is not a trend – it is old news. Never­theless, something has subtly changed in the last few years: There is an in­creasing sense of unease about the es­calatory potential of cyberconflict, mainly fueled by the certainty that more and more states are using cyber­space to achieve strategic ends. As a result, the traditional world of states is more actively seeking to stabilize po­litical interaction in and through cy­berspace by a variety of means. Over­all, cyberspace has been upgraded to a strategic domain whose development is no longer left to non-state actors. This chapter focuses on the efforts of states to pacify cyberspace. It explores both, the causes of this trend as well as wanted and unwanted consequences of this gradual normalization of cyber-international relations. Despite big differences between traditional secu­rity problems and the newer issues of cyberspace, states are using tradition­al tools of diplomacy and statecraft, shaped and tested during the Cold War, to develop norms. On the one hand, this stands in contrast to two major truisms of our age: that states have no power in the virtual realm and that traditional state response strategies are useless because the cyberdomain is too different. Since the cyberdomain is not a natural environment that de­velops beyond human control, it is almost entirely malleable. In other words, traditional response strategies and rules of conduct can be made to apply – at least in part. On the other hand, a focus on state-to-state rela­tions and a focus on cyberattacks with destructive effects leaves two major is­sues untouched: first, how to extend norms, understood as shared expecta­tions about appropriate behavior held by a community of actors, to non-state actors (both, as threat actors and security providers); and second, how to deal with large-scale cyberexploita­tion, or activities that are not destruc­tive, but are used to extract data or to prepare for potential future ‘cyber­war’. This omission leads to paradoxi­cal effects: Even though more stability for state interaction is created, other state actions are, directly and indirect­ly, to blame for making both, the vir­tual but also, by implication, the real world rather less than more secure. This chapter has three sections. The first discusses two developments in cyber-in-security. The first is about the ‘normalization’ of cyberconflict and the second about targeted at­tacks. Both trends give the impression that aggression in the virtual space has destabilizing effects and that there is a high risk of escalation. A second section describes the attempts between states to stabilize interaction in cyber­space as a result of these insecurities and shows how norm-building is used to attempt cyberspecific deterrence. The third describes intended and un­intended effects of these stabilization efforts, pointing to the main sources of tension. In conclusion, the chap­ter shows that the current stabiliza­tion and normalization processes are doomed to fail, unless the underlying issues are recognized and tackled. Continue reading here.