U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has, belatedly, taken a useful step regarding the immigrant investor (EB-5) program.

Together with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency this week issued a warning against middle-man fraud in the program. Read more...

The elite establishmentarians who make immigration policy — senators, foundation heads, ranking federal officials, corporate CEOs, and their ilk — are totally out of touch with the mass of Americans who are impacted by those policy decisions. And the former's mas-migration decisions reflect this.

The policymakers' kids and grandkids, of course, do not compete with international migrants for jobs at the bottom of the labor market. Likewise, the policymakers typically do not experience first-hand the impacts of over-population by, say, riding the New York subways. Read more...

Whenever there's a partial shutdown of the federal government -- or even discussion of cutting government budgets, including at the state and local levels -- politicians often follow the "Fireman First Principle", described by Mickey Kaus this way:

a clever bureaucrat, faced with a budget reduction, will threaten to cut not the least essential services but the most essential (in order to provoke public outrage that results in the budget reduction getting cancelled)

Somewhere in America there is a huge employer who had, on average, about 40,000 workers a year on its payroll, most of whom probably are and were illegal aliens.

The government knows the employer's name (and does not share it) but has apparently taken no steps to correct the situation. Read more...

I have written several times about visa abuse at IBM. I wish I could share everything on IBM that comes across my desk, but often the sender requests it only be used for background. When the eventual discrimination lawsuit does hit IBM, I am sure the discovery process will unearth a sewer. Read more...

In 1937, Mao wrote in On Guerrilla Warfare about “the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops,” noting that “the former may be likened to water, the latter to the fish who inhabit it.”

The image is as relevant to today’s asymmetric warfare against terrorists and drug cartels as it was to Mao’s war against the Japanese. Large, constantly refreshed and poorly assimilated immigrant communities serve as cover and incubators for our enemies, even though — obviously – most of the people in them are not included among the ranks of those enemies. I was reminded of this by two recent news stories. Read more...

Aliens who have been caught in the serious fraud of falsely claiming to be U.S. citizens are no longer prevented from obtaining immigrant visas or other immigration benefits if they made the false claim before they were 18 years old — despite what the law says — thanks to a new directive from the Department of Homeland Security. Read more...

House Judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte posted yesterday at National Review Online, objecting to NRO reporter Andrew Stiles's report suggesting that the chairman was boosting the anemic prospects of the Senate's Gang of Eight amnesty bill. He wrote that he has not wavered in his belief that the comprehensive Schumer-Rubio bill passed by the Senate is "fundamentally flawed and unworkable" and that he is pursuing a "step-by-step approach to immigration reform" by considering targeted legislation addressing discrete issues. Read more...

Three decades ago, during the long national debate that finally produced the ill-fated Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, there was broad agreement that uncontrolled illegal immigration was undermining public support for all immigration. Prominent voices warned of danger to an implicit social contract that maintained that public support in return for effective control through the rule of law.

In a 1983 editorial headlined "Time to Turn the Illegal Tide", The New York Times said that while the country needed immigration, "What it does not need is such an uncontrollable flood of illegal migrants that it tries public patience and foments a backlash against all newcomers." Read more...

The answer to the headline's question in a recent immigration case is: "Right here, boss." I will get to the specifics in a minute.

This is another instance of an obscure appeals agency, in keeping with the administration's policy tilt, reversing a sensible staff decision on an immigration matter. Read more...

A new report from Pew Research's Hispanic Trends Project confirms what many of us have long suspected: Illegal immigration appears to be on the rise again, after a brief decline during the recession. The report estimates that the population of unauthorized immigrants was approximately 11.7 million in 2012, up from 11.5 million in 2011, but down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007. Read more...

Amnesty proponents will bravely spin the new Pew Hispanic Center report showing increasing illegal immigration as evidence that enforcement doesn’t work, as if the Obama administration has actually made an effort to enforce immigration laws. Unfortunately, internal ICE statistics show otherwise. The upward trend in the size of the illegal population is more likely at least partially the result of a significant decline in enforcement, especially in the interior, where we notice it the most. Internal ICE statistics show that the number of aliens expelled from the interior of the country declined by 20 percent from 2010 to 2012. Removals and returns are on track to decline another 20 percent in 2013. Read more...

The president was in a bind.

He wanted a "comprehensive" immigration bill to add to his list of accomplishments for many reasons. If he succeeded, he would do so where his predecessor had not. If he were successful, he would also establish himself, and the Democratic Party, as having delivered a legislative victory on a policy about which many Spanish-speaking immigrants care. Electoral gratitude would follow. Read more...

"No — no fences, no drones, no more agents; you do not need them; if you want to limit the impact of unauthorized immigrants make it difficult for them to send money home; we have the technology to do that right now."

The source of this advice was an unexpected one; a Hispanic income tax consultant in a small, rural town on the Delmarva Peninsula; he was not terribly upset by the presence of lots of illegals in the workplace — "we need their labor," he said, but he was concerned about the financial ramifications of the illegals' presence in the country.

"Many of them come to America to send money back home; if you limited their ability to do that, a lot of them would not come. Make it mandatory that they can send money home only with an electronic card of some kind, set a limit on those payments, and punish the wire transfer companies if any individual sends too much," he continued. Read more...

The headline in the Christian Science Monitor reads: "US poverty rate steady at 15 percent, but 'lower class' is booming". According to the Monitor: Read more...

New data from the Census Bureau released this week confirm that while the economy is improving, incomes remain stagnant for all but the wealthiest Americans. Read more...

As part of its coverage of Hispanic Heritage Month, Tiempo Latino, a Spanish-language weekly newspaper, has published a front-page essay that made me realize how different our current wave of immigration is from past waves. It was written by Milagros Melendez-Vela, a member of the editorial staff at the paper, which is owned by the Washington Post.

The essay appears under the headline "A family voyage to identity". Read more...

At first glance the title of this entry may be puzzling, and supporters of the president would strong disagree with it. After all, hasn't the Obama administration deported "record" numbers of illegal aliens during his first term of office?

Yes, it has. The administration reports that about 1.5 million illegal aliens were deported during the president's first term. That averages out to about 375,000 per year. Read more...

"Necessity is the mother of invention." Aesop's insight continues to be true in the various facets of life — both personal and societal. For immigration and immigration policy, too, necessity is the mother of invention. Actually, it is perhaps more accurate to say, in the case of immigration, that "necessity is the mother of realism". Necessity can be a reality check — much as we see in the Biblical story of the prodigal son, whose hunger (necessity) prompts his "coming to his senses" (Luke 15:17).

Our neighbors to the north, known for their peaceful juxtaposition and quiet reserve, and also known as a nation that proactively promotes multiculturalism, because of necessity are re-evaluating their approach to and standards for immigration. An interesting recent Wall Street Journal article highlights this. Read more...

If Immigration policy-making in the United States were a huge mosaic — with large colorful splotches being the White House and Congress, with USCIS and the Border Patrol occupying major, but less prominent positions, OCAHO would be a little grey blur near the edge of the big picture.

If a falling leaf stuck to it, you would not see it at all. Read more...

Last week this blog noted the work of long-time environmental reporter Tom Horton, an expert on the Chesapeake Bay who wrote for many years at the Baltimore Sun and now writes for the Bay Journal. We cited Horton's projection that the Senate immigration reform bill, if passed, would increase the population of the multi-state Chesapeake Bay watershed to 24 million by 2050, up from the current level of 17 million. Read more...

One of the most salient features of U.S. immigration policy for more than 35 years has been the inability of Congress and the executive branch to establish an effective, fraud-resistant system to verify that employees are authorized to work here.

That long-running failure — due to resistance from ethnic interest groups, business organizations, and civil libertarians as well as a lack of federal commitment — doomed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Read more...

The United States is financially better off when people who would probably be eligible for various social benefits — such as Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, SSI, etc. — leave the country. You might call it the emigration of the elderly, something we rarely discuss.

The good news is that the outward movements of such persons have been increasing, albeit slowly, over the last six years. Most of these are foreign-born.

How do we know this? Read more...

The Rev. John C. Nienstedt, the Roman Catholic archbishop of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, asserts that "We have a moral obligation to provide those who have come here [illegally] with an opportunity for full citizenship."

The archbishop's effort to impose a moral obligation on all Americans for the benefit of foreign nationals is nothing new and it is done with a high level of confidence that we will accept yet another moral obligation because of the guilt imposed on us by influential religious, political, media, and civic leaders. Read more...

Officials representing over 100 corporate interests issued a letter to Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) demanding the legalization of 11 million illegal aliens and increased legal immigration through the creation of new visa programs. As these companies put it in their letter:

[W]e strongly support efforts to bolster the availability of a workforce at all skills levels, through a separate visa program as well as by creating a path to legal status for those already here.

The DHS press release headline says it all:

Not only is there an acting secretary, there's a deputy press secretary presumably acting for the real press secretary.

But that's not all. Rand Beers, whose continuing title is that of one of the under secretaries of DHS, where he is the ranking anti-terrorism person, is the acting deputy secretary, and, it is because of that role that he — now that Janet Napolitano has left town — is also the acting secretary. Read more...

There are some significant statistical trends that should indicate a slowing of immigration, but it has not worked that way, certainly not yet.

I am thinking about the birth rate in Mexico — the country that supplies us with the most migrants, legal and illegal; the incidence of marriage in the United States, which supplies a huge percentage of our legal immigration; and finally crime, because under the right circumstances crime, like marriages, can create visas.

Speaking broadly, birth rates in Mexico, the marriage rate in the United States, and crime rates here have all been declining for a number of years. All of those trends should lower migration pressures, but they have not. Let's look at these three variables in turn. Read more...

The Chesapeake Bay has been the center of Tom Horton's long and remarkable career as a journalist and author. Last week he wrote a compelling essay for the Baltimore Sun on the relationship between the health of the bay and the immigration reform bill that passed the Senate in June. Read more...

My posting this morning on the fading prospects for amnesty mentioned the Roman Catholic hierarchy's lobbying push, which included instructions that Sunday's sermons were to have focused on immigration. No one I've heard from, at parishes around the country, heard a sermon on immigration or even saw a letter from their bishop on it in their church bulletins. Read more...

They must be cursing Assad at the Chamber of Commerce and La Raza. If only he'd held off gassing his enemies (assuming it was, in fact, him) until after the House passed an immigration bill, it wouldn't have been so bad.
As it is, "Immigration Reform Falls to the Back of the Line," notes today's New York Times: Read more...