Immigration Blog

McCain, Others Keep Misrepresenting S.744 & Press Accounts Keep Failing to Correct the Record

By Jerry Kammer, August 29, 2013

Tuesday's blog post was about Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) factual errors at a forum on immigration reform. McCain made incorrect assertions about requirements in the Senate immigration reform bill regarding payment of taxes and participation in an English language course. The senator probably keeps repeating the mistakes because news accounts have repeatedly reported the inaccurate assertions and failed to correct the record. Read more...

Here's a Switch — Australia Hires Other Nations to Take Its Boat People

By David North, August 28, 2013

Woodrow Wilson spoke of the American states as "Laboratories for Democracy".

The general idea was that other entities could watch as one or more American states tried out innovative governmental techniques and programs.

Such experimentation is going on all the time in the immigration field, but it is done by other nations. Some of it is admirable, some of it is scary, and some of it is somewhere in between. Read more...

What Do Sen. Hatch and High-Tech Billionaires Have Against Americans?

By Ronald W. Mortensen, August 28, 2013

Too many worry that allowing more immigrants "would just displace American workers, but that's just a doggone joke," [Sen. Orrin] Hatch told a forum sponsored by FWD.us, a political advocacy group formed by such high-tech leaders as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. (Source: Salt Lake Tribune)

Of course, Hatch and the high-tech billionaires conveniently ignore the fact that: Read more...

McCain, Pitching for the Gang of 8 Bill, Is Juuust a Bit Outside with His Facts

By Jerry Kammer, August 27, 2013

Appearing at a public forum Tuesday in Arizona, Sen. John McCain made a pitch for the immigration reform bill passed by the Senate in June to provide a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. But he cited public support for conditions regarding payment of back taxes and English language acquisition that are not in the bill. Read more...

President Obama's Administrative Amnesties Have a Long History

By Stanley Renshon, August 27, 2013

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has warned those interested in immigration reform that if Congress does nothing, the president will be tempted to accomplish by executive action what he was not able to accomplish by signing the Senate's immigration legislation. As the senator put it, "I believe that this president will be tempted, will be tempted, if nothing happens in Congress, to issue an executive order as he did for the Dream Act kids a year ago, where he basically legalizes 11 million people by the sign of a pen." Read more...

A (Relatively) New Form of Marriage-Related Immigration Fraud

By David North, August 27, 2013

There are two basic forms of marriage-related immigration fraud: What I call Class C (for cash or crime), in which the alien pays the citizen for the (nominal) marriage, meaning that both are criminals, and what I call Class D (for deception), in which the alien hoodwinks the citizen into marriage.

In both instances the alien wants to secure a green card out of the process. Class C is apparently a much larger group than Class D, according to experts on such things. Class C frauds can, after all, be organized by one or more middlemen on a mass scale; Class D is, and has to be, a one-on-one operation. Read more...

Home Sweet Home

By John Rhodes, August 27, 2013

The Economist recently ran an interesting article about the Conservative Party in Britain and its longer-term strategy in preparation for the next general election to be held May 7, 2015. Three policies have emerged in the Conservative Party as central and believed to be popular with the people, and consequently destined to "put the opposition on the wrong side of popular opinion". Economics, of course, loom large. The policy of interest here, however, is not economic, strictly speaking: that of reducing immigration. In the UK, 11.3 percent of the total population is foreign-born, and there are some estimates of almost 900,000 illegal immigrants. Read more...

Unethical Amnesty

By CIS, August 27, 2013

The following is by Katherine Telford, who was an intern at CIS this summer:

The immigration bill passed by the Senate in June has been a topic of hot debate for months, and continues to be a source of political controversy. It is often, however, portrayed as a moral issue rather than an issue centered on facts. Various religious groups, including Evangelicals and Catholics, have manipulated the problem of immigration in the United States to be a doctrinal issue. Although I do not view the issue as theological, I investigated the bill from a moral perspective. However, I reached a drastically different conclusion regarding the humanity of large-scale amnesty than those critical of individuals opposing S.744. Read more...

Shameless EB-5 Millionaires Overwhelm DHS Agency for the Needy

By David North, August 26, 2013

Hundreds of millionaires and would-be millionaires, both citizens and aliens, have demanded help for their "problems" from a tiny Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency designed to help befuddled migrants with the complications of the immigration process.

The entity is the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman; it had, the last time I looked, 32 employees, and is lodged in the Office of the Deputy Secretary of DHS, not in USCIS itself. Read more...

Presidential Discretion in Immigration Policy: Deja Vu?

By Stanley Renshon, August 26, 2013

The dilemma for real immigration reformers in Congress is that that the president and the executive branch do have some degree of constitutionally mandated discretion in enforcing immigration laws.

Exactly how much is a matter of debate.

Jeffrey Anderson writing in the Weekly Standard of the president's decision not to deport young illegal aliens characterized that initiative as "pure lawlessness". Read more...