Immigration Blog

Quick Look at Some of the Corker-Hoeven Amendment's Many Flaws

By James R. Edwards Jr., June 24, 2013

A document circulating on the Hill highlights some of the Corker-Hoeven substitute amendment's worst provisions. The amendment leaves in place the basic structure of the Schumer-Rubio amnesty: mass amnesty first, real enforcement never.

The gory details include: Read more...

Hoeven-Corker Amendment – Long on Amnesty, Short on Everything Else

By Ronald W. Mortensen, June 24, 2013

The Hoeven-Corker amendment has been incorporated into the full text of the amnesty bill (S. 744) expanding it from its original 800-plus pages to just under 1,200 pages.

The first thing that jumps out about the Senate's desperate attempt to pass comprehensive immigration reform is just how similar this process is to the 1986 amnesty, which granted illegal aliens citizenship with a promise of future border security and restrictions on the employment of illegal aliens. And we all know how well that worked out! Read more...

Sen. Begich Angles to Bring Home Some S.744 Bacon: Low-Wage Foreign Workers to Process Alaska Salmon

By Jerry Kammer, June 23, 2013

Sen. Mark Begich, D-AK, is determined to bring home some bacon from the Senate immigration bill. Actually, it would be closer to the truth to say that he's bringing home some salmon filets. To be precise, his mission to bring home the foreign college students for which his state's powerful seafood-processing industry has developed a dependence that comes mighty close to addiction.

Begich, leveraging his vote with the Gang of Eight, has managed to insert in the Senate bill a provision that would nullify the State Department's decision to put seafood processing off-limits to the Summer Work Travel program. Read more...

Hoeven-Corker Amendment and the Pelosi Rule

By James R. Edwards Jr., June 23, 2013

It's ba-ack! The ugliest, most monstrous procedure of legislative sausage making is now being employed by senators on both sides of the aisle. They're resurrecting this approach to hurry a vote on a major, humongous amendment to a major, controversial bill.

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (R-Calif.) infamously said of the Obamacare legislation that lawmakers needed to rush to "pass the bill so you can find out what's in it". I'm dubbing this the Pelosi Rule — an inadvisable, reckless approach that should never, ever be allowed for justifying the rushed passage of legislation under an arbitrary deadline. Read more...

A Virtual Debate with Sen. Pat Toomey, Champion of the World's Unskilled (but Not Our Own)

By Jerry Kammer, June 23, 2013

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) took up the cause of the unskilled workers of the world on Thursday when he declared that the Senate immigration bill's provisions for low-wage, non-agricultural guest worker visas are "wildly inadequate" to the needs of the American economy.

Toomey, of course, is a former president of the Club for Growth, which recently hailed him as "a fighter for free markets and limited government". In Thursday's speech on the Senate floor, Toomey made it clear that he doesn't believe in limited foreign competition for low-skilled and unskilled jobs in the United States. Read more...

Labor Department H-1B Enforcement: A Paper Tiger

By David North, June 21, 2013

One of the problems with the H-1B program, which brings low-paid, high-tech workers to the United States in the hundreds of thousands (and that would be dramatically expanded by the Schumer-Rubio bill now being debated in the Senate), is that there is a broad streak of fraud within it.

It should be noted that even when the program runs as it is supposed to, it takes multitudinous jobs away from American workers and it reduces wages for all in its ambit. Read more...

"The Border Security Ruse"

By Mark Krikorian, June 20, 2013

For a brief moment, I thought the Wall Street Journal had published an editorial on immigration I agreed with. It's titled "The Border Security Ruse" and I thought it would be about the efforts to add increasingly stringent border enforcement provisions as a way of buying Republican votes for the amnesty, pointing out that they were only included for political purposes and would never actually be implemented. Read more...

CBO Report as S.744 Rorschach Test

By Jerry Kammer, June 20, 2013

The Congressional Budget Office's report on the Senate immigration reform bill quickly served as a Rorschach test for the opposing sides in the Senate debate. Here are excerpts from two very different reactions to the report Wednesday on the Senate floor. The first is from Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and the second from Jeff Session (R-Ala.).

Menendez Read more...

That Big Raid on the 7-Eleven Stores – Some Comments

By David North, June 20, 2013

ICE and other law enforcement organizations mounted a big, two-state raid earlier this week on a collection of 7-Eleven stores that had been employing – and cheating – dozens of illegal aliens; there was extensive reporting by the New York Times and the Associated Press.

This was a bonanza, financially, for the employers. The various 7-Eleven interests had made $182 million in profits from these stores, according to the AP.

Was it a whopping success for the good guys? Were the raids staged to support the administration's immigration policies? Did it reveal a long series of corporate, governmental, and community failings? Read more...

CBO: Schumer-Rubio Bill Will Be a Failure

By Mark Krikorian, June 19, 2013

Heritage, CIS, and others will be examining the assumptions behind the Congressional Budget Office projections of the Schumer-Rubio immigration bill's budget impact, but why not start by just assuming, for the sake of argument, that all the CBO assumptions are plausible and their calculations correct? If so, the bill will fail on its own terms. Read more...