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.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus came out against encouraging illegal aliens to return home, signaling an apparent opposition to U.S. sovereignty and the rule of law. Speaking at a RNC meeting in Boston this week, Priebus explained his support for maintaining open-border policies to a reporter, saying:

Using the word "self-deportation", I mean, that's uh, it's a horrific comment to make. I don't think it has anything to do with our party. When a candidate makes those comments, obviously, it hurts us. And so, I think that's a big deal.

While holding a town hall meeting, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) was caught on video supporting amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, people he calls "undocumented citizens". In response to a question from a woman with illegal alien family members who have been in the country for over 13 years, he illustrated a lack of understanding of immigration policy and unjustifiable faith in the Obama administration to secure the border. Seven problems with his response are analyzed below. Here's his quote: Read more...

Lawmakers in King County, Wash., are considering a sanctuary policy that the county's own prosecutor says would shield dangerous criminal aliens from federal immigration enforcement. Read more...

Many journalists, pundits, and pollsters still seem to be under the impression that the Senate's amnesty bill (S.744) requires illegal aliens to pay back taxes. It doesn't. When the bill was first being written, the idea of requiring illegal aliens to pay back taxes for the period they worked off the books was considered, but quickly abandoned. Read more...

Though the Senate Judiciary Committee's marathon immigration hearing took place some time back, it's worth another look as a reminder of why public opinion of Congress is so low. Many people think that congressional hearings are meant to be an opportunity for open discourse and deliberation where experts are called to testify and inform our leadership about the various impacts of legislation. Unfortunately, hearings are often nothing more than political theater and the experts often nothing more than special interests and props. Read more...

Advocates of amnesty and higher levels of immigration have come out with a new advertisement that attempts to sell their agenda by highlighting only the border provisions of the Senate's immigration bill (S.744) — provisions that will never see the light of day if the open-border crowd gets its way. The American Action Network's amnesty ad is designed to appeal to conservatives and refers to the amnesty as "conservative immigration reform". Read more...

The Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body for the federal judiciary, has come out with a scathing letter on the costs that the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill would create for our court system. Sent to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the letter outlines the many ways in which the immigration bill would put strains on the nation's court system, noting that "without increased resources, the federal courts cannot sustain the increased workload this legislation would create." The Conference is calling for the immigration bill to be amended, a move that will necessarily make the 1,000-page bill even larger and more costly. Read more...

President Obama and the Gang of Eight senators are repeating a number of talking points designed to elicit support for amnesty, or as they call it, "'earned legalization," for immigrants who have come to the United States illegally. The so-called "path to citizenship" is part of a bipartisan Senate immigration bill. Read more...

History shows us that for the most part, advocates of "comprehensive" immigration bills are only after the legalization portion and will do everything in their power to undermine the enforcement provisions as soon as the bill becomes law. A report published only a few years after passage of the 1986's Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) proves this. The amnesty had only started to roll out, and yet the National Council of La Raza produced a report calling for an end to workplace enforcement – the central enforcement provision of IRCA.

The author of the La Raza report was Cecilia Munoz, currently the Obama administration's chief immigration advisor. (Munoz was recently profiled in the New York Times.) Read more...

The pro-amnesty lobbyists who helped craft the Schumer-Rubio immigration bill included within the bill two "slush funds" amounting to $150 million that may be supplemented with additional taxpayer dollars for years to come. Slush fund grantees are "public or private, non-profit organizations" described in the bill as including "a community, faith-based, or other immigrant-serving organization whose staff has demonstrated qualifications, experience, and expertise in providing quality services to immigrants, refugees, persons granted asylum, or persons applying for such statuses." In other words, the grantees would include many of the groups involved in writing and promoting the amnesty. Read more...

For months now, the "Gang of Eight" senators, President Obama, and the lobbyists who helped craft the Schumer-Rubio bill have been justifying amnesty by assuring skeptics that illegal immigrants applying for legal status would be required to pay back taxes on money earned during the years they lived illegally in the United States.

Except the actual bill does not require the payment of back taxes. Read more...

Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is claiming amnesty is necessary so that the United States can determine the identity of illegal aliens in the country. However, basic enforcement of existing immigration law is all that is necessary to acquire the identities of all illegal aliens. Instead of promoting amnesty, Sen. Rubio could demand that the Obama administration enforce 8 U.S.C. § 1302, "Registration of Aliens", which makes it "the duty of every alien" to register their presence in the United States if they remain here 30 days or longer. Read more...

While amnesty advocates are exploiting the horrific Boston Marathon attack as justification for quickly passing an amnesty, the Center for Immigration Studies finds that the failed FBI background checks of terrorism suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev indicate that the government does not have the capacity to adequately vet the backgrounds of 11 million illegal aliens, and that an amnesty might actually facilitate terrorism. Read more...

In a horrific story that the national newspapers are thus far ignoring, the Associated Press is trying out its new linguistic gymnastics on illegal alien and murder suspect Jose Zarate. Read more...

The Supreme Court has held that deportation is not punishment, but rather an administrative procedure whereby an illegal alien is returned to his homeland. The alien has not been deprived of life, liberty, or property, so many constitutional protections do not apply.

Most important to the discussion is the fact that most detainees facing deportation are dealing with administrative charges in a civil process, rather than criminal. Consequently they do not have a constitutional right to an attorney; such protections only apply to criminal law. Read more...

In a victory for those who want to further blur the line between legal and illegal, the Associated Press has announced its decision to stop using the term "illegal immigrant" in its articles. Instead, the new "acceptable variations" include "living in or entering a country illegally" or "without legal permission". Journalists make it a rule to be concise and not wordy. But such standards are thrown out the window when it comes to the illegal immigration issue, it seems. Read more...

According to public records detailing the daily meetings of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, she has been quite busy reaching out to amnesty activists over the past few years. While the schedules available online only cover January 2009 to June 2011, and while there is a section missing between August and December 2010, the list is quite revealing. It appears that advocates of high levels of immigration and amnesty have easy access to the White House. Read more...

Day laborers – individuals who line the streets across the country on a daily basis looking for work in low-paying, low-skill professions – are becoming increasingly visible throughout the United States and are perhaps the most vivid example of our government's failure to adequately enforce immigration laws. The Los Angeles metropolitan area alone has more than 27,000 day laborers on about 125 street corners on any given day. Read more...

It is significant that President Obama released an unknown number of illegal aliens from detention on the 20th anniversary of the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Despite claims that those released pose no threat, case studies of two of the WTC bombers indicate that the federal government does not have the capacity to safely determine whether illegal aliens are threats to public safety. For some aliens the public safety analysis is likely based on their U.S. records — which may look clean on account of their having been in the country for a very short period of time. Read more...

Today, February 26, 2013, marks the 20th anniversary of the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The deaths of six and injuries sustained by more than 1,000 people were facilitated by a number of illegal aliens, one of whom fraudulently acquired U.S. citizenship through the 1986 amnesty included in the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Each of the alien terrorists exploited the U.S. immigration system as detailed in the Center for Immigration Studies report "The Open Door: How Militant Islamic Terrorists Entered and Remained in the United States, 1993-2001". Read more...

Two new op-eds critiquing the amnesty proposal have been authored by the Center for Immigration Studies. CIS Board Member Jan Ting's op-ed "Just say no to amnesty redux" appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, while CIS Fellow David Seminara's op-ed "Legalizing illegal immigrants a bad idea" appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

Both op-eds point out significant problems with large-scale amnesty programs.

At a press conference Thursday, Senator Schumer (D–N.Y.) let it be known that the only purpose of the "comprehensive immigration reform" effort is mass legalization and increases in future legal immigration. Border security is not something the Democratic leadership is taking seriously. Those who believe that there is some agreement among political interests that border security and other measures would be in place before 11 million illegal aliens are legalized are discovering that the high-immigration side of the debate has no intention of actually seeing our laws enforced. Read more...

As reported by CNN, a new Politico-George Washington University Battleground survey "indicates a majority of American voters say they support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants". A closer analysis of the poll, however, indicates that the results should not be interpreted as a mandate for amnesty. Read more...

A coalition of high-immigration activist groups has filed a lawsuit against Arizona over the state's decision to not issue driver's licenses to illegal aliens granted deferred action (DACA) by President Obama. In their complaint, the groups misrepresent DACA, inaccurately describing the program's eligibility criteria. Specifically, the attorneys wrote: Read more...

Once again, illegal alien and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas has highlighted the fact that U.S. immigration laws are woefully under-enforced. The poster boy for the illegal alien cause was recently arrested in Minnesota after allegedly driving dangerously and presenting his fraudulent and cancelled Washington driver's license to a police officer. His court hearing is today, October 18. Read more...

A new paper by John Yoo (UC Berkeley School of Law) and Robert J. Delahunty (University of St. Thomas School of Law, Minnesota) raises many questions about President Obama's decision to grant legal status to nearly two million illegal aliens under deferred action and concludes that the president's act "threatens to vest the executive branch with broad domestic policy authority that the Constitution does not grant it." If taken to its logical conclusion, President Obama's lawless action has the power to undermine the entirety of immigration law, while expanding the presidential power in all domestic policy areas. Read more...

Yet another newspaper has reported evidence backing the claim that birth tourism creates U.S. citizens who take advantage of everything the United States has to offer while maintaining allegiance to the country in which they were actually raised. Read more...

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency tasked with overseeing President Obama's controversial Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program recently updated its "Frequently Asked Questions" webpage to assure applicants that the White House is not concerned with Social Security fraud or illegal hiring practices. Or, as the administration told the New York Times, the White House is "not interested in using this as a way to identify one-off cases where some individual may have violated some federal law in an employment relationship." Read more...

With the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), five Florida residents born to illegal aliens sued the Florida Commissioner of Education as well as the chancellor of the state's university system over a statute that denied in-state tuition rates to dependents (as defined under federal tax code) who could not prove that their parents had established legal residency in Florida and maintained it for at least a year. Read more...