Today ICE announced the creation of a new office to serve as a point of contact for those who have "concerns, questions, recommendations or important issues they would like to raise." Boy, do we!

The office will be led by Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, who has been at ICE since 2008, mainly working as an advisor on reforming detention practices. Prior to joining ICE, Strait was a legal services attorney in Prince George's County, Md. Read more...

The Washington Post recently offered a profile of immigration activist Jaime Contreras, who arrived illegally in the United States in 1988 at age 13, and currently chairs the Capital Area District of 32BJ, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. It is actually difficult to understand the purpose of such a profile, especially since there is nothing specifically new on the horizon regarding the focus of Mr. Read more...

The Washington Post's editorial writers ought to read their own newspaper. Monday's lead editorial bemoaned the fact that having illegal aliens go to the "back of the line" is deceptive since there is no "line" for them: Read more...

On the one hand, the mass migration lobbyists say that we must admit more of the "best and brightest" alien workers and should expand the H-1B program to do so. The economy needs them, they say.

On the other, their friends in the administration are now tacitly admitting that the wages offered in the same H-1B program are inadequate to support the "best and brightest" already in the program.

A little cognitive dissonance, maybe? Or just a wonderful example of a tin ear, or maybe a tin brain? Read more...

Last week, the New York Times reported on the State Department's decision to bar the Council on Educational Travel USA (CETUSA) from sponsoring young foreigners who come to the United States in the Summer Work Travel (SWT) program. Read more...

Mass legalization and mass deportation are two unworkable, unrealistic means of addressing the nation's illegal immigration problem. Mass legalization — aka amnesty — was tried in 1986 and it resulted in more illegal immigration, significant fraud, and facilitated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, just to name a few problems. Read more...

If America is going to sell legal status to immigrant investors – a subject I explored in a recent Backgrounder – then what is the appropriate price?

The U.S. charges $500,000 for a full set of green cards for the entire family. I am not at all sure that this is a good idea.

As noted in the Backgrounder, most English-speaking nations require rather larger investments in return for the visas than does the U.S. The Bahamas, for example, has a de facto minimum of $1.5 million. Read more...

Following Utah's misguided lead, a group of illegal-alien-dependent Kansas business types has hatched the latest whacko state-level amnesty plan, the Associated Press reports.

Kansas dairies, feedlots, construction, landscaping, and roofing companies supposedly can't find enough workers. They also want to keep their current illegal foreign workers around, depress pay levels, and get a pass for legally questionable conduct. Read more...

Those of us who went through the H-1B expansion battle in 1998 know well that industry does not have good faith when it comes to H-1B visas. Now that the H-1B visa has again come to the attention of the public, let me take this opportunity to describe how things work in Washington. Read more...

Readers, let us immerse ourselves in the convoluted language and thinking of the immigration policy world.

You know, where "parole" is a good thing (you can, despite your apparent disqualifications, enter the country), and where "voluntary departure," which might sound positive actually means that you have to leave, albeit without shackles.

Similarly, the double negative verdict of "cancellation of removal" is good news, because it means you can stay here (though you probably should have been thrown out). Read more...

Ron Paul's immigration speech to a Hispanic group in Las Vegas Thursday was a remarkable blend of incoherence and pandering, spiced with a little America hatred. Read more...

Both Barack Obama and Mark Warner have won elections to the U.S. Senate, both are Democrats, both are graduates of Harvard Law, and both have figured in the H-1B controversy in recent weeks, the president more prominently than the Virginia senator.

While the president's statement during a video chat session that "industry tells me that they do not have enough highly-skilled engineers" was contradicted by data from his own Census Bureau, as CIS pointed out today, and was fairly widely reported, the senator's off-stage involvement in the program was not well known. Read more...

The recent incident where a woman asked president Obama why we are importing foreign workers on H-1B visas has attracted much attention to the issue...and has brought out the worst in American media. Read more...

A recent Board of Immigration Appeals decision -- rejecting asylum claims from a Chinese couple – shows how complicated it can be to move from a decision that an alien is in illegal status, to the alien's actual deportation. Many of the complications, however, can be seen only by reading between the lines. Read more...

There is considerable Internet discussion underway about the Mexican roots of Mitt Romney's family. It's a fascinating and complex story. Unfortunately, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos has muddied the waters with the simplistic suggestion that Romney is actually Mexican-American.

In his interview last week with Romney, Ramos introduced the story by equating Romney's background with that of Bill Richardson. Read more...

President Obama says that "The H-1B should be reserved only for those companies who say they cannot find somebody in that particular field."

Well Mr. President, when are you and the Democrats going to propose legislation to ensure that only companies that cannot find Americans can get H-1B visas? Read more...

Suppose you were an elected official, and were facing a situation in which the class of people who voted for you were facing a severe financial penalty when they sought jobs.

Suppose there was a system that gave non-voting aliens on your turf a substantial break in terms of their payroll costs to employers, and that as a result, employers actively favored giving jobs to the non-voters.

You would think that any politician in his (or her) right mind would want to fight the discriminatory system that hurts your supporters. Right? Read more...

It's axiomatic that the nation's leading pollsters, in what amounts to a tacit conspiracy, have for years falsified their reports about the deep disquiet an overwhelming majority of the American people feel about our broken immigration system. This near-universal disinformation has played a key role in the effort on the part of the political and fiscal elite to prevent immigration from emerging as a major national political issue. Read more...

On January 18 presidential candidate Mitt Romney met immigration DREAM activist Lucy Allain. He hadn't planned to, but she crashed a fundraiser for him and gained access to the candidate by repeatedly misrepresenting herself as a Romney supporter. Allain says she was brought to the United States as a ten-year-old by her mother, who had overstayed a tourist visa. Read more...

Gingrich's interview yesterday with Jorge Ramos of Univision (video and transcript) had a telling moment that I think gets at the basic policy disagreement about illegal immigration. Ramos asks what Gingrich would do with the vast majority of illegal aliens who wouldn’t qualify under his phony-baloney draft board scheme: Read more...

Univision's Jorge Ramos, a man who regularly pushes for legalizing illegal aliens in the United States, recently interviewed presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and asked what he thought about fellow candidate Mitt Romney's support for the "attrition through enforcement" approach to illegal immigration – the policy already embraced by a number of states. Read more...

Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the career or present presidential campaign of former speaker Newt Gingrich know him to be a man whose rhetoric knows no boundaries, either of accuracy or common decency. He is equally likely to attack his opponents from the left or the right and thinks little of smearing his opponents if he thinks he can profit from it. Read more...

Characterizing someone as "anti-immigrant" is an easy way to demonize those whose views you disagree with and to assault the legitimacy of their views. In the world of immigration policy and theory it is the equivalent of tar and feathers. Many who use this meme clearly hope that the term will someday rival "racist!" as an epithet of opprobrium and silencing. Read more...

In too many police stations, public safety takes a back seat to illegal alien advocacy. Americans are paying for it with their lives. Read more...

Below are President Obama's immigration-related remarks from his 2012 State of the Union address: Read more...

A potential gaping hole in immigration enforcement, opened earlier by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), has popped up again.

It deals with a subset of mostly long-term illegal alien border crossers now married to, or otherwise related to, U.S. citizens – a substantial population, but only to a portion of them. It probably pertains to very few aliens who are not from Mexico. Read more...

The politically-correct immigration practices of the administration led to a rather gruesome murder in Florida, as reported by the Miami Herald.

Career criminal Kesler Dufrene, a Haitian, had been caught red-handed committing a burglary in 2006. He was serving a five-year prison term when Dufrene, who had received a deportation order, was handed over to immigration officers. That was September 2010. Read more...

"Ethnicity", in my opinion, is a terribly vague category that we, in our excessive American preoccupation with classifying people, use mostly to our disadvantage. A recent New York Times article, "For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture Than Color", underscores well just how vague it is. Read more...

I just finished reading Tom Barry's new book, Border Wars, which grew out of his 2010 article in the Boston Review that was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the public service category.

I recommend it highly, especially for those restrictionists who are willing to consider a view from the other side of the debate if it is informed by the sort of strong reporting and deep perspective on the border that have long characterized Barry's work. See, for example, his Border Lines blog. Read more...

As noted by Mark Krikorian and Janice Kephart, President Obama recently toured Disney World in central Florida to announce his determination , via executive fiat in lieu of cooperative action with Congress, to open up America, The Theme Park, to the world's huddled masses by loosening existing restrictions and streamlining issuance of visas. Read more...