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...

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...

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...

Temple University law professor (and CIS Fellow) Jan Ting analyzes the Supreme Court's decision to hear Arizona v. United States and predicts that S.B. 1070 will be upheld as constitutional in a new op-ed:

Arizona law will be upheld

A new report by First Street, a CQ Press organization, analyzes two pieces of legislation – the DREAM Act and the Legal Workforce Act – and finds that open-border-oriented groups spend much, much more money lobbying than groups seeking a more rational immigration policy. Read more...

Earlier this year, Sen. John McCain stated a fact – namely, that open borders lead to illegal aliens starting forest fires – and the usual suspects responded with the usual indignation. A new GAO report confirms that McCain was indeed correct. Read more...

The Obama administration's justification for filing lawsuits against Arizona, Alabama, and South Carolina is that state-level immigration-related initiatives are creating a "patchwork of laws" that are too burdensome for aliens to follow. As Attorney General Eric Holder recently put it, "a patchwork of state laws is not the solution and will only create problems." So much for the laboratories of democracy. Read more...

About two months before the 9/11 attacks, the Supreme Court took a more active role in immigration regulation than it ever had before in Zadvydas v. Davis, a case that effectively forced the release of thousands of criminal aliens into the United States. The case illustrated the disastrous consequences of the judicial branch abandoning the plenary power doctrine, which holds that the political branches — the legislative and the executive — have sole power to regulate all aspects of immigration as a basic attribute of sovereignty. Read more...

On July 29, 2000, drunk-driving illegal alien Sergio Montelongo-Sanchez killed three young Americans and seriously injured a fourth: Christopher Shackleford, Julieanne Pascoe, Kelli Bourgeois, and Matthew Hunt. Now, the families are mounting a campaign to prevent Montelongo-Sanchez from being paroled decades before his 45-year sentence is up, concerned that he will be deported to his native Mexico only to return to the United States, possibly threatening the lives of more innocent people. Read more...

Immigration attorney Margaret Stock recently responded to my latest Backgrounder in an attempt to marginalize the issues surrounding citizenship as it relates to children born to foreign diplomats. My full report, "Birthright Citizenship for Children of Foreign Diplomats?", is available online. The point of the report is that, although the numbers involved are small, the lack of any mechanism to prevent the U.S.-born children of foreign diplomats – the one group that everyone agrees is ineligible for citizenship – from acquiring all the attributes of citizenship is indicative of our lack of seriousness about the whole subject of who is, and is not, a U.S. citizen. Read more...

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an injunction Friday, temporarily blocking parts of Alabama's "Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act." The order is available online. It was not a decision on the merits of the law. A full hearing to determine the constitutionality of the enjoined provisions is expected to be held sometime in the next few months. Read more...

20 Municipalities Forced to Drop E-Verify Laws Read more...

After enjoying a few glasses of wine while visiting my family in Sonoma County last week, I came across an article in a local paper that supports mechanization as an alternative to mass immigration. Read more...

During the last two GOP presidential debates, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has defended his support for in-state tuition breaks for illegal aliens by calling it a state issue. Certainly, many issues are best handled by states. But when a state embraces illegal immigration, the impact is not limited to the state itself. By opposing a border fence, opposing E-Verify, embracing sanctuary cities and tuition breaks, Perry and the Texas legislature have arguably turned the Lone Star State into America's illegal alien welcoming mat. Read more...

In a decision that seems to unnecessarily risk the lives of many people, ICE has released Onyango Obama, President Obama's "Uncle Omar" about two weeks after he was detained following a drunk driving accident. He reportedly had been ordered deported to his native Kenya back in 1989, and lost an appeal in 1992. Read more...

Apparently, it is incorrect to assume that the open-border crowd supports the deportation of even so-called "high priority" illegal aliens.

Amid the debate over which aliens should constitute a high priority for deportation under the Obama amnesty, and which should be permitted to stay and given more opportunities to cause crime before becoming a priority, amnesty advocates have begun to question the deportation even of aliens convicted of violent crimes. Read more...

Since the Obama administration remains quiet about the details of its non-legislative amnesty, the public's best sources of information are draft memos leaked over the past year as the administration contemplated the best method for "sidestepping" the legislative process. A previous blog post covered a draft memo from DHS which called the measure a "non-legislative amnesty" that is "controversial, not to mention expensive."

A memo from February 26, 2010, is worth reading for those interested in seeing how the administration got to the point it's at today. The memo was first leaked by The American Spectator, and it's available online in PDF format. Read more...

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement, recently sent a letter to President Obama urging him to stop his controversial decision to advance a non-legislative amnesty, stating that the policy is "undermining the enforcement of our immigration laws" and is a "direct assault on the fourteen million Americans and legal immigrants who are looking for a job to support themselves and their families." The letter is available online in PDF format. Read more...

President Obama's long-lost Uncle Omar was picked up by law enforcement on August 24 while driving drunk in Massachusetts. His blood alcohol level was reportedly nearly twice the state's legal limit. He was charged with driving under the influence, driving to endanger, and failure to use a turn signal. Read more...

The Obama administration's new administrative amnesty apparently directs ICE to wait until an illegal alien commits a serious crime or two before considering deportation. Similarly, according to the administration's latest 287(g) enforcement scheme, Americans must fall victim to "murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and/or kidnapping" before the alien perpetrator becomes a high priority for deportation. Read more...

Temple U. law professor (and CIS Fellow) Jan Ting – one of the few in his field to recognize the problems created by Obama's administrative amnesty – has authored a new op-ed in which he writes:

The administration is thus implementing by executive order a policy it could not get Congress to adopt or even consider: amnesty for the millions of foreigners who entered the U.S. illegally or who overstayed their temporary visitor visas in order to work illegally in the U.S.

DHS Secretary Napolitano's letter to congressional Democrats does not confirm whether the administratively-amnestied illegal aliens will receive worker authorization. Nor does it attempt to justify the administration's apparent usurpation of congressional authority.

It does claim that the administrative change will "enhance public safety" by directing ICE to wait until an illegal alien commits a violent crime before considering deportation. Both public safety and logical reasoning have taken a backseat to election politics, it seems. Read more...

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security remain tight-lipped about any details on the Obama administration’s attempt at an administrative amnesty, more than three days after the news story first broke. Read more...

Despite the nonsensical statements coming out of DHS today, all illegal aliens do “pose a threat” to society in one way or another. Just because an illegal alien isn’t violent, it does not follow that their presence is not a threat to the rule of law, taxpayers, and society generally. Most illegal aliens violate a number of federal and state laws, and these violations create real victims. Read more...

The open-border crowd is very well-funded and constantly growing, as noted in my blog post about a recent anti-Secure Communities effort pushed by over 200 pro-amnesty groups. A new lawsuit filed by the U.S. Read more...

When businesses get away with violating immigration laws in the workplace, there's no telling how many more laws will fall by the wayside. Three years ago I wrote a blog post highlighting this phenomenon, pointing to the fact that the ICE enforcement raids in Postville, Iowa, uncovered not only employment of illegal immigrants but also more than 9,000 violations of child labor laws involving 32 youths.

Yesterday ABC News reported that the U.S. Department of Labor found children between the ages of six and 11 working in strawberry fields in the State of Washington, likely right alongside illegal immigrants. The three companies listed – George Hoffman Farms, Berry Good Farms, and Columbia Fruit, LLC – are not using E-Verify, according to the helpful NumbersUSA database. Read more...

The increasingly feckless American Bar Association continued pushing an open-border agenda at its annual meeting this week, which was, oddly, held in Toronto. The organization passed a resolution opposing any change to the way in which the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause is enforced. Read more...

The story of illegal alien fraudster and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas continues to unfold and he is finally beginning to feel the repercussions of his unlawful activity. Read more...

The open-border crowd is very well-funded and quite large, as illustrated by a recent anti-Secure Communities effort. Though the media and amnesty advocates often portray those of us promoting sane immigration policies as part of some enormous, far-reaching conspiracy, the reality is we make up a very small portion of the interests involved in the immigration debate. The reason we are influential is because our ideas and arguments are sound and backed with good research. Read more...

The union for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents has issued a sharp press release calling on Americans to take action against what it describes as "gross mismanagement" and an effort to "create backdoor amnesty through agency policy."

On June 11, 2010, ICE Union leaders around the nation issued a unanimous no-confidence vote in ICE Director John Morton. Since then, the union's concerns have grown. Read more...