Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Monday warned about the vulnerability of the U.S.-Mexico border to penetration by Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. But her statement was marred by major ambiguity and several factual inaccuracies.

"There is evidence of actual and potential terrorists entering via the Southwest border, principally members of Hamas and Hezbollah," Feinstein said at a session of the Senate Judiciary Committee to consider immigration reform legislation. Read more...

The battle over biometrics intensified Monday at the Senate Judiciary Committee as Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions angrily said a 2009 DHS study showed it is feasible to use biometrics to confirm the departure of temporary visa holders from U.S. airports.

Sessions said the report, which he first learned about last Friday, "completely rejects" claims by some committee members that a biometric system is not available because of technical problems and affordability issues. He said a system could be in place in a short time and at a reasonable cost. Read more...

Friday's Charlie Rose program included discussion of how the Obama administration's triple whammy – controversies involving Benghazi, the IRS, and the Justice Department – could reverberate in the attempt to pass immigration reform legislation. Here are comments of Bloomberg's Al Hunt, the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty, and CNN's Jessica Yellin: Read more...

Yesterday's session of the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to mind the ambivalence of St. Augustine when he famously implored the Lord to make him chaste, but not yet.

The committee's prayer seems to be, "Oh Lord, give us a biometric identification system that would make immigration policy credible, but no hurry." Read more...

The disappearance of Sen. Charles Schumer's (D-N.Y.) proposal for a national employment card gets my nomination for mystery of the year in the national immigration debate. Just a few years ago, Schumer trumpeted the idea as essential to effective immigration reform. Read more...

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) got considerable agreement this morning with his claim that Congress should press for completion of the entry/exit system that it ordered in 1996 to track those who overstay their visas. But he failed to win enough votes for his proposal to amend the immigration bill by requiring that the system be up and running at U.S. ports of entry before illegal immigrants could be given provisional legal status. Read more...

This morning, on the MSNBC program "Morning Joe", investigative reporter Lisa Myers made pointed observations about the Obama administration's mania for controlling the news and squelching critics. She was speaking in light of the cascading revelations about the Justice Department's seizure of Associated Press reporters' phone records and about the IRS targeting conservative organizations for special scrutiny. Read more...

After writing criticisms of the New York Times's coverage of immigration in which I expressed dismay at the paper's seeming disinterest in the negative effects that foreign workers can have on U.S. workers, I want to express my admiration for Monday's story out of Georgia by Times reporter Ethan Bronner, "Workers Claim Race Bias as Farms Rely on Immigrants". Read more...

Read Part 1

More on the liberal/conservative divide that is explored in Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. Today we present the second of two sets of excerpts from the book, which The Guardian called "a compelling study of the morality of those on the left and right [that] reaches some surprising conclusions." Read more...

The U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing today to examine the Gang of Eight's immigration reform bill, which is titled "The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act". It featured several interesting exchanges between individual senators and DHS witnesses, including Border Patrol chief Michael Fisher and Anne Richards, an auditor in the DHS Inspector General's office. Read more...

Maybe you've seen the television spot called "Marco Rubio on Conservative Immigration Reform".

It begins with the Florida Republican saying, "Anyone who thinks that what we have now in immigration is not a problem is fooling themselves. What we have in place today is de facto amnesty." Then comes the on-screen message: "A Conservative Plan", as a narrator reads statements from articles or commentary about the Gang of Eight bill that have been published or aired by various media outlets. Read more...

Thursday night's NBC Nightly News featured a strong story by Mark Potter that came straight from the just-the-facts-ma'am school of reporting. In less than three minutes Potter presented the familiar border-security assurances of the Border Patrol and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, then showed graphic footage from Arizona and Texas — some of it recorded by hidden cameras — that contradicted those assurances. San Juan, Texas, Police Chief Juan Gonzalez told Potter the influx of illegal immigrants into his community on the Rio Grande is happening "every single day." You can see Potter's story here And you can see the 2010 CIS video from the same Arizona border region here. Read more...

This blog reported the other day that a recent Senate hearing on immigration provided a demonstration of the liberal/conservative divide that is explored in Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. Today we present the first of two sets of excerpts from the book, which The Guardian called "a compelling study of the morality of those on the left and right [that] reaches some surprising conclusions." Haidt, by the way, describes himself as a life-long liberal whose research has led him to respect the values of social conservatives. Read more...

This morning's "Morning Joe" program featured a discussion of "Rubio's Folly", the National Review cover story written by CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian. Host Mika Brzezinski launched the conversation — which included National Review editor Jay Nordlinger, Huffington Post correspondent Sam Stein, and Donny Deutsch, by reading this excerpt from the article: Read more...

On this morning's "Morning Joe" program, co-host Willy Geist began a conversation with Politico's Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei by noting the growing skepticism of some Republicans about the Gang of Eight immigration reform legislation. Here is how the conversation unfolded.

GEIST: This is no sure thing before the end of the year, is it? Read more...

If Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Righteous Mind is the best explanation of the liberal/conservative divide I have ever seen, ever makes a documentary film based on the book, video of the April 22 Senate hearing on immigration would provide an excellent opening scene. Read more...

If you believe that reporters need to play it straight with their reporting and pundits have an obligation to rise above cheap disdain toward those with whom they disagree, you can only shake your head at MSNBC's coverage of the immigration policy debate. Read more...

The Hill, the Capitol Hill newspaper, has noted in an editorial that the new immigration reform bill was produced by a "bipartisan group of eight senators [who claim it] will both secure the border and create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants." The paper said that accomplishment "follows months of difficult negotiations in which the Gang of Eight sought to address weaknesses that have killed prior immigration bills."

True enough, as far as it goes. But there has been little reporting on efforts to shape the bill for purely commercial purposes. The public needs to understand what is being done along the axis of influence that ties K Street and Capitol Hill. There, dozens of lobbyists are representing the interests of a myriad of employers who want to shape the bill to suit their purposes. They also perform the complementary duty of raising money for the politicians whose opinions they seek to shape — and for whom many of the lobbyists previously worked. Read more...

In an interview broadcast Sunday morning on the Univision news program "Al Punto", Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) corrected an erroneous description of the new Senate immigration reform legislation by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Sen. Rubio, who has emerged as one of the most outspoken and widely quoted advocates of the bill, has published a detailed analysis of the bill on a webpage that describes it as providing "the toughest border security and enforcement measures in U.S. history". Read more...

A recent Senate hearing featured a confrontation between two Arizonans known for strong wills and large egos.

They were Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who as governor of Arizona in 2005 declared a state of emergency on the state's southern border and now insists that the border is secure; and Sen. John McCain, who as a member of the House of Representatives in 1986 voted for the notorious Immigration Reform and Control Act and now vows that its failure will not be repeated. Read more...

A report from NBC's Kelly O'Donnell suggests that yesterday's defeat of gun control legislation in the Senate might be good for the Gang of Eight's immigration reform bill.

Reporting on yesterday's vote for the "Morning Joe" program on MSNBC, O'Donnell said: "The politics was about more than gun rights. Later today a bipartisan group of senators will roll out immigration reform. Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who fought hard to get enough votes on background checks, found that with two politically hard votes, some senators chose immigration over guns." Read more...

Three of the leading congressional advocates of the comprehensive reform legislation that will be debated in the Senate and House over the next several months made solemn pledges this week about what the bill would offer. If what Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) promised matches up with what the bill actually provides, it would represent an historic compromise to resolve our long-simmering immigration policy crisis. It will meet a key test. It will be hard-headed, but not hard-hearted. Read more...

The Saturday edition of Mexico City's Reforma newspaper published a bitter description of what its author sees as a long chain of exploitation suffered by Central American migrants on their journey to the United States. Read more...

What I most enjoy about my work here at CIS is the opportunity to do to the sort of research I did in the good old days when I was an investigative reporter and had weeks or months to dig into a story.

This week I got two fascinating views of the ongoing debate over guestworkers. One came from the right, via C-Span's website. The other came from the left, via Audible.com. Read more...

I've got nothing good to say about Don Young, the Republican congressman from Alaska who last week stumbled into the headlines with his reference to "wetbacks" who picked tomatoes at the Young farm in California many years ago.

Young's comment shows that he is as thoughtless now as he was reckless when he plundered the federal treasury for pork-laden projects known as earmarks. He was responsible for the most infamous earmark of them all: Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere. Read more...

On Sunday's "Meet the Press", NBC's Chuck Todd engaged in the sort of moralistic preening and poorly informed right-mindedness that sometimes makes me want to throw a history book at the television.

With Olympian disdain and pained disbelief, shaking his head sadly and smiling ruefully, Todd declared: "We have the same debate every two generations, with another immigrant group. It was the Chinese in the nineteenth century." Read more...

As I read news reports of congressional efforts to forge agreement on immigration reform, I have the queasy feeling that in their determination to get something done our elected representatives will repeat the mistakes of 1986.

That was the year when Congress passed the poorly named Immigration Reform and Control Act. Now, I fear, they will once again pass a law that will deliver sweeping legalization while failing to deliver credible worksite enforcement. Read more...

This morning C-SPAN’s "Washington Journal" included a pair of calls, one right after the other, expressing frustration with immigration-law enforcement at opposite ends of the country. The first came from a man who identified himself as Gil, a Border Patrol agent from Hebronville, Texas. The second came from Sam in Boston, who said he is a small contractor. Here is some of what they said. Read more...

On March 5 this blog reported that a commission of prominent Americans and Mexicans has suggested that Mexico should establish its own border patrol after the United States adopts "comprehensive immigration reform". Once the reform is in place, they said, "Mexico should actively prevent unauthorized northward migration by ensuring that people who leave the country to enter the United States do so at designated crossing points and with the required documents." Read more...

In January this blog expressed surprise that a Harper's magazine article hostile to Nebraskans who mobilized against illegal immigration had little to say about the ruthless, wage-slashing strategy of Hormel that had driven Americans from the local meat-processing plant in the town of Fremont. The plant, like many others in recent decades, hired a workforce that drew heavily from illegal immigrants. Read more...