American immigration policy is essentially stuck. One reflection of this is that an immigration policy war is being fought out at every level of our political system, in every major governmental institution, and in many civic ones as well. So far it has been less a fight to the finish than to a rough draw, though by no means yet to exhaustion. Immigration policy conflict can best be emotionally described as a roiling sub-current of anger, angst, entitlement, and resentment. Read more...

Many Americans think of the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of the constitutionality, and therefore political legitimacy, of legislative and executive policy and behavior. That, however, is the 8th grade civics class version of a much more complex reality.

When considering the court's decisions, Americans are used to thinking in broad summary strokes and striking finality. Court strikes down! Court affirms! Read more...

Those on both sides of the immigration divide have had some legislative success with their initiatives at the state level. Those hoping to further legalization for the country's 10-12 million illegal aliens have been successful in getting several states to allow some of them to gain the benefit of in-state tuition at state colleges. With that successful legislation comes a form of de facto regularization of their immigration status. Read more...

America's 50 states have famously been called "laboratories of democracy", an idea first formulated in 1932 by Justice Louis Brandeis. He wrote "that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country." Read more...

When political leaders and activists both have deeply felt views about a policy issue, when the general public has conflicted views about the same issue, and when no consensus exists or can be developed, policy wars of attrition are likely to be the result. That succinctly describes the state of American immigration policy today. Read more...

How do you resolve a fundamental national impasse that embodies policy, conflicting visions of fairness, and deep but mixed feelings about the available options? That is the question that confronts this country regarding immigration.

There are really only a limited number of options available. Read more...

The numerous issues that arise from the fact that the United States now has between 11 and 12 million people living here with no legal basis for doing so has created strong currents of conflicting emotions in the American public. On one hand, Americans sympathize with those who want a better life for themselves and their children. On the other hand, they have little sympathy for those who break the rules for their own advantage. Furthermore, they are upset with their government's inability or disinclination to control the nation's borders. Read more...

An immigration datum buried deep inside a New York Times-CBS political poll is a timely reminder of America's immigration stalemate. The poll was conducted from May 31 to June 6 and primarily focused on the Supreme Court and its upcoming health care decision.

But reading through the poll, one comes to Question 18: Read more...

There is no area more suffused with conventional "conventional wisdom" than the role of immigration in the 2012 presidential election.

Did you know that Hispanic voters are a "large and growing electoral bloc"? That's right, "The number of Hispanics eligible to vote increased from 16 million in 2004 to 19.5 million in 2008."

NOTE: Repeat as often as necessary to ensure that you don't have to deal with the actual decline of Hispanic voting. Read more...

As everyone who has followed politics at all in the last decade knows, the media's biggest buzzword for any political story is "narrative". Borrowed from cognitive psychology, that term literally means an assemblage of items (not necessarily facts) that are designed to convey a preferred impression. In the news media and political campaigns it is simply a storyline assembled for a purpose. Read more...

There is no doubt that Michele Bachmann made a big mistake and now realizes it. She now claims "it is a non-story" and that, "I have always pledged allegiance to our one nation under God, the United States of America. We live in the greatest nation humankind has ever known and I am proud to be an American."

I believe her. Others aren't so sure. Read more...

I have to admit that I was startled to read the Politico headline: "Bachmann claims Swiss citizenship". Could this be the very same Michele Bachmann that the Weekly Standard dubbed "Queen of the Tea Party"?

It couldn't be. But it was.

What was she thinking? She had just finished making a determined, if unsuccessful, run for the United States presidency. And she had done so as a champion of conservative causes and principals.

Do those now include dual citizenship? Read more...

Critics of the Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his views on legal and illegal immigration are busy perfecting novel methods with which to impugn his character and positions. Consider Dana Milbank's "bad by association" argument. Read more...

I did not know very much about Russell Pearce before I read Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank's tendentious characterization of him in his column. I knew that he was the former President of the Arizona Senate, had been instrumental in passing Arizona's controversial immigration law that is now before the Supreme Court, and that he had been defeated in a recall election, much to the pleasure of his enemies. Read more...

Critics of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his views on legal and illegal immigration, like the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, are busy perfecting novel methods with which to impugn his character and positions. Consider Milbank's reverse double character smear, aided by a mischaracterized policy parallelism, and topped by a determined, and successful, effort at caricature. Read more...

The Washington Post opinion writer Dana Milbank clearly prides himself on what he feels are his snarky, funny, smart forays, but they are mostly mounted against conservative straw men. Are his opinions snarky? Yes. Are they smart? Maybe. Are they funny? Only if you find misrepresentation amusing.

His latest: "Romney won't be able to shake immigration debate" relies on a grab bag of questionable associations, topped off with what can only be described as an intentional caricature. Read more...

Sometimes a news report provides informative juxtapositions that underscore the foolishness of our immigration policies. Case in point is the New York Times piece on reforming the EB-5 visa system, "Making Visas-for-Dollars Work".

The basic idea of the program is simple. The United States sells visas to those who invest between $500,000 and $1 million here and create at least 10 domestic jobs from that investment within two years. If they do so, they get a green card. (My colleague David North has written extensively on the program.) Read more...

Two recent stories in the New York Times underline, if only inadvertently, the importance of a robust economy to the continuing assimilation of legal immigrants.

The first is titled, "Many U.S. Immigrants' Children Seek American Dream Abroad". It is a reminder that emotional attachment to the American national community is the real final accomplishment of assimilation, when it happens. And that is a precious, not-to-be-taken-for-granted outcome that is the foundation of American support for legal immigration. Read more...

In an otherwise mundane story by Dan Balz of the Washington Post concerning Mitt Romney's shift of focus to the president after Rick Santorum dropped from the Republican primary race, we find this observation, "He [Romney] also faces potentially major problems among Hispanics because of his positions on immigration and the harsh language he used to describe them during the GOP debates." Read more...

"Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world" is the insipid platitude that begins an article flatly asserting that "Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter." What does one have to do with the other? Nothing that is immediately obvious. Read more...

Well, actually the title of the article in the New York Times is a bit less equivocal. Its title begins with a conclusion, to wit: "Why Bilinguals Are Smarter". And it then goes on to assert that, "Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter." Read more...

The infant-tender years narrative of the Dream Act invites public sympathy and support, and that is its purpose. It succeeds in doing so because it rests on a legitimate moral claim — that some people are being placed in an untenable immigration situation because of the behavior of their parents over which they had no control because they were infants or young children when they arrived in the United States. Read more...

In a time of economic difficulties it is understandable that cost estimates provided by the New York State legislature for their proposed "Dream Act" legislation and those provided by the state's Education Department to support that legislation would err on the low side. It is also understandable that advocates, whether in the state legislature, the state Department of Education, New York State Regents, or like-minded "independent" think tanks would stress the importance of making investments in this group. Read more...

In this time of enormous government debt and spending, economic hardship for many Americans, and public distress about these circumstances, no political leader wants to go on record as exacerbating these problems. And that includes sponsors of the proposed "Dream Act" bills before the New York State legislature. Read more...

New York State ranks its felonies from Class A to Class E, with Class A the most serious and Class E the least. Class A felonies are divided into Class A-I and Class A-II and the others are labeled either violent or nonviolent. There also are misdemeanors (Class A or Class B) and violations, the least serious criminal offenses. Read more...

Various federal and state versions of "Dream Act" legislation seem tailor-made as a wedge issue and are used that way by advocates. Who could be against helping those who were brought here illegally as infants and young children by their parents and now suffer the consequences of their parents' effort to give them a better life? Why, people, mostly though not wholly Republicans, who are "anti-immigrant", that's who.

The reality is quite different. Read more...

The poster stories of infants and very young children brought to the United States illegally by their parents are meant to present those who support enforcement of American immigration laws with a dilemma. "Look at these poor children", we are told. "They were brought here by their parents seeking a better life and had no control over that choice."

For some as-yet unknown number of persons that is true. But it is not true for all of those who would be covered by most versions of the Dream Act, including the proposed New York State laws we are discussing. Read more...

New York State Democrats' latest effort to enact a limited version of the Dream Act deals only with making "financial aid available to illegal immigrants at colleges and universities." Such students are already able to pay tuition and fees at in-state rates at New York States' public universities. Read more...

The New York Times recently provided an update on efforts by New York State Democrats to enact their version of what is euphemistically mislabeled the "dream act". According to the Times, "Its goal is to help ambitious youths who were brought here as children and are American in all but the paperwork." More limited in scope than those that propose a "pathway to legalization", these draft bills present themselves as very narrowly conceived and concerned 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...