News Round Up In-Brief

US News

• New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to introduce a multimillion-dollar initiative called Direct Access that has been aimed to create a type of universal healthcare to improve health-care for some of the city’s low-income, uninsured immigrant population by connecting them to crucial health care services.
• A miscalculation of visas has resulted in a sudden halt in visa and green card services, sending many immigrants including highly qualified Indian and Chinese immigrants with advanced degrees, back to where they had been in slow-moving visa lines.
• The Texas Civil Rights Project, along with 25 undocumented immigrant families, appeared before a federal judge with the intention of suing the state health department, claiming the state is making it too difficult for immigrants to obtain birth certificates for their US born children.
• Similarly, lawyers for immigrant families who were denied birth certificates for U.S.-born children in Texas are seeking an emergency injunction to obtain certificates, arguing that the children’s rights to health care, travel, and schooling are being harmed by tightened identification standards.
• Luis Gutierrez is pushing to extend the Affordable Care Act to undocumented immigrants with the hope of decreasing the number of uninsured people in the country.
• With steps California has taken to provide low or no cost health coverage to undocumented immigrants in the last year, the state is ahead in its effort to extend health care to 2.6 million undocumented immigrants, which could spur other states to follow suit.
• California Governor Brown has signed legislation that will allow 170,000 undocumented children to receive full scope medical coverage by removing obstacles of re-applying or re-enrolling. By May 2016, California will become the fifth state to allow undocumented children from low-income families to enroll for wide-ranging health care.
• According to a Kaiser study, about 2.78 million Floridians lacked coverage in early 2015, which included 567,000 who would qualify for Medicaid and 384,000 undocumented immigrants.

International News

• Volunteer doctors in the mobile Medecins du Monde unit on the island of Lesbos, are attending to thousands of refugees and migrants arriving from Turkey with aching muscles, lower body injuries and pulmonary infections; with over 350 patients a day.
• UNHCR is concerned that the lack of reception capacity in Greece where island ports are being crowded with up to 14,000 people every day is causing people to move to the Balkans on their own which could seriously threaten the relocation program agreed upon by the European Council.
• Out of the immigrants expected to migrate to Germany this year, 200,000 refugees have already arrived leading to high level of complications in the registration procedures. With winter on the horizon, many asylum seekers are experiencing high levels of frustration as they claim to have been waiting for more than 25 days to register.
• Germany’s previous estimate of 800,000 asylum seekers has now gone up to 1.5 million with hundreds of thousands of people pouring into Europe to escape conflict and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.
• With the net immigration to Britain reaching an all time high with 330,000 people in the year to March, British Conservative interior minister and Prime Minister promise to reduce the number of immigrants as they believe that when immigration is too high, public services such as schools and hospitals experience high levels of strain along with reduction of wages and the increase in unemployment.
• After a long struggle, a 23-year-old pregnant Somali woman who was raped on the Pacific Island of Nauru, has now been granted a visa and has been brought to Australia to receive medical treatment and to carry out her wishes of having an abortion.
• According to the head of the NHS in England, the immigration rules in the UK in which foreign nurses who are earning less than £35,000 are forced to leave should be re-structured since over 3,300 NHS nurses could be forced to leave by the end of 2017.

Prepared by Priyanka Rao