Angelo Codevilla, a Boston University professor of international relations, and I have been engaged in a back-and-forth on the need for (or futility of) border enforcement:

His article which got the whole thing started ran in the Claremont Review of Books entitled "Our Borders, Ourselves". Read more...

The president still doesn't get it.

If his amnesty speech yesterday in El Paso is any indication, he really believes that the call for "enforcement first" is merely a ploy to avoid amnesty. His crack about alligators suggests he thinks that he's done all the enforcement that can reasonably be expected of him and that further opposition to amnesty is simple demagoguery. Read more...

The standard line among the high-immigration right (earnestly, if insincerely, seconded by their fellow-travelers on the left) is that Republican opposition to open immigration is driving otherwise-conservative immigrant (and/or Hispanic) voters into the arms of the Democratic Party. Some new research suggests it's actually the other way around. Far from Republican anti-immigration views pushing immigrants further toward the Democrats, it's immigrant anti-Republican views that pushes Republicans further toward restriction. Read more...

After the passage of Arizona's SB1070 and Republican gains in many state legislatures, there was a lot of talk of similar immigration measures sweeping other states. There has been some real progress, most notably in Georgia, but not as much as you would have thought from the hype. Some of that is because it was hype, and most bills in any legislature never get anywhere. Read more...

After I'd finished writing the piece that's at National Review Online today about the anti-climactic denouement of the open-borders smear campaign against immigration skeptics, it occurred to me that the whole sordid affair was the result of the other side's lack of imagination or empathy. Read more...

In news sort of related to today's new CIS welfare report comes this disturbing information in the latest Rural Migration News: Read more...

It was a year ago yesterday that Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was murdered by an illegal border-crosser. Over at National Review Online today, I outline the border-enforcement blueprint put together by his fellow ranchers, for whom the security of our frontier with Mexico is a life-or-death issue. Read more...

"13 Illegal Immigrants Arrested in California Wearing U.S. Marine Uniforms". Not only was their illegal entry into the U.S. a crime but impersonating a member of the armed forces is also a crime. But don't hold your breath for them to be prosecuted — U.S. Read more...

A new pilot program was launched Monday allowing people to run themselves through E-Verify and make sure the database has the correct information about them. For now, E-Verify Self-Check is available only to people in Arizona, Colorado, D.C., Idaho, Mississippi, and Virginia. If you live in one of those states, it's definitely worth doing (the whole thing, including confirmation of my identity, took me maybe two minutes). Read more...

The Public Policy Institute of California is about as respectably mainstream (i.e. liberal) as a think tank can get. Its board of advisors includes people from all the state's commanding heights: the teacher’s union and Disney, SEIU and Sun Microsystems, the Bank of America and the ACLU, Goldman, Sachs and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Its publications are routinely published in Spanish and on immigration its work has generally reflected the bien-pensant consensus that more is better.

Which is why its latest report is so arresting. Read more...

Numbers USA has an informative map of the status of E-Verify mandates in the states: Read more...

I'd mentioned last week that Indiana governor Mitch Daniels has tried to avoid weighing in on a tough new immigration bill making its way through his state's legislature, despite freely dispensing his views on a variety of other issues of national importance. The Indianapolis Star had more on the topic Sunday, quoting people on both sides expressing their hope that Daniels will come down on their side: Read more...

From Politico:

A tough, Arizona-style anti-immigration bill in the Indiana state Legislature has put Gov. Mitch Daniels — who is mum on whether he backs it — on a collision course with tea party activists who see it as a big priority and could have national implications for the Indiana governor in a GOP presidential primary.

Only one month into the new Congress, and Lindsey Graham has already started scheming with Chuck Schumer on how to pass an illegal-alien amnesty. I'm surprised he waited that long. McCain won't be far behind.

A few excerpts from the story in today's Politico: Read more...

As my colleagues have noted below, the DREAM Act has finally been put out of our misery. (Here's how everyone voted, and see analysis of the vote from Roy Beck and Mickey Kaus.) But it's bigger than that. Read more...

Immigration Daily is a daily webzine for immigration lawyers. Yesterday's edition offered "three reasons for the bar to support DREAM." The first:

it will pave the way for employment-based immigration bills in the next Congress, since Democratic votes will be necessary on both the House and Senate floors to pass these bills, this Democratic support may not materialize if DREAM dies

I'm not sure why this would be true, but who knows. The second reason is more revealing: Read more...

The sponsors of the DREAM Act inserted what they clearly considered boob bait for patriotic Americans — a provision that qualifying illegal aliens (came before age 16, here at least five years, have a high school diploma or GED) could convert to permanent status and get a green card if they served two years in the military (as an alternative to two years of college). Read more...

I debated the DREAM Act with Josh Bernstein of the SEIU at Bloggingheads, an online debate site. The New York Times excerpted the discussion at its site today.

Also, I published an article at National Review Online on the issue.

From the Washington Post:

Prince William County's controversial immigration policy appears to have had some effect, as the growth of the county’s Hispanic population now lags behind that of other jurisdictions, a report from the University of Virginia states.

Gallup reports that 18 percent of Hispanic immigrants in the United States want to emigrate to another country, a third of them to Mexico and the rest to other Latin American countries or Canada or Europe. They are more likely than other Hispanic immigrants to be poor and not speak English well — i.e., almost certainly disproportionately illegal aliens, though the survey didn't ask about legal status. Read more...

The amnesty crowd is hawking a new fable — that a massive margin among Hispanics saved Harry Reid:

Longtime immigration advocate Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) credited Hispanics Wednesday for keeping Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in the Senate.

"Latino citizens responded to Majority Leader Harry Reid's aggressive pursuit of immigration reform by voting for him in overwhelming numbers," he said in a statement. "They were clearly the difference in his victory."

I haven't jumped on the anti-NPR bandwagon following Juan Williams' firing — yes, it was wrong, and yes, there should be no government funding of news operations, but I like NPR and I and CIS have always been treated fairly, both by reporters and talk shows, at both the national level and regional stations. Read more...

The Pew Hispanic Center has a new poll out of Hispanic attitudes related to immigration. Maybe most interesting is this: Read more...

Tevi Troy wrote in a recent Politico piece on Republican trends among Jewish voters at the state level: "Jewish voters, like other voters, are worried about the economy, the deficit, and health care." Add immigration to that list — an American Jewish Committee survey has found that a majority of American Jews support the Arizona immigration law, 52 to 46. Read more...

Yesterday I participated in a Bloggingheads.tv debate with Simone Campbell, Executive Director of NETWORK. We debated the DREAM Act and other general immigration issues. View the video below. Read more...

A slew of news stories today about a new report from the Pew Hispanic Center estimating that as of March 2009, the illegal population had dropped to 11.1 million. Pew, though institutionally inclined toward amnesty and mass immigration, does honest work, and this is no exception. But many of the press reports are treating this as momentous, previously unknown news when, in fact, it's already been reported — twice. Read more...

Linda Chavez's new column laments John McCain's flip-flopping on immigration:

McCain's capitulation to what he once called, in my presence, "a strong nativist tendency" fooled no one. It simply besmirched his honor and dignity.

I don't believe that he’s changed either, though after nearly 30 sanctimonious, bullying years in Congress I don't think "honor" and "dignity" are relevant descriptions for him any longer. She also writes: Read more...

The latest installment in the Obama administration's gutting of immigration enforcement was reported today in the Houston Chronicle. As reporter Susan Carroll wrote:

The Department of Homeland Security is systematically reviewing thousands of pending immigration cases and moving to dismiss those filed against suspected illegal immigrants who have no serious criminal records, according to several sources familiar with the efforts.

There's a wrinkle of the birthright citizenship debate that I think is telling. One thing that everyone accepts is that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" excludes kids born here to representatives of foreign governments. Read more...

The Democrats seem to actually think that Senate passage of a bill providing for increased immigration enforcement personnel, two UAVs, and some other stuff is all it takes to convince people that the border is secure. As Politico described it:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Schumer and McCaskill told reporters in a conference call Friday that the bill paves the way for consideration of a comprehensive reform bill.