It is now clear that there will be no action on the nomination of Alejandro Mayorkas to be deputy secretary of DHS until after the August Senate recess. He is currently director of USCIS.

More specifically, the Senate resumes work on September 6 and current DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano is scheduled to leave her office on September 7, so it appears that Under Secretary Rand Beers, now acting deputy secretary, will become acting secretary on that date, assuming that Napolitano leaves as scheduled. For more on the succession complications at DHS, see this earlier blog of mine. Read more...

While, thanks to the arrival of the little Prince of Cambridge, the succession plans for the British monarchy are well established for the next 60 years, the succession for the secretary-ship of Homeland Security is not clear 60 days from now. Read more...

A large EB-5 project in Aberdeen, S.D., Northern Beef Packers Limited Partnership (NBP), has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, probably leaving some 160 alien investors (mostly Chinese) with little or no financial return for their 160 half-million-dollar investments, according to local reports. Read more...

Alejandro Mayorkas, the USCIS Director who has been nominated to be Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had an easy confirmation hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee Thursday — but only because the Republican senators boycotted it. Read more...

It is time to take a closer look at the impact of the clauses in the currently pending immigration bills that would, in effect, staple a green card to the advanced STEM diploma of all aliens completing those degrees in the United States. Read more...

The Associated Press headline and lede are ominous:

Homeland Security Official Probed

President Obama's choice to be the No. 2 official at the Homeland Security Department [Alejandro Mayorkas] is under investigation for his role in helping a company secure an international investor visa for a Chinese executive, The Associated Press has learned.

Here's an idea. Instead of adding 20,000 Border Patrol agents at our southern border, let's make that 18,000, and use the money saved for 2,000 of them to fund, say, 4,000 Mexican Border Patrolmen (or better, Mexican Marines) at their southern border. Read more...

What if Congress decided to give a potential free immigration pass to a group of about 250,000 aliens with limited educations?

And then Congress guessed that most of the resulting migrants would settle in four specific American jurisdictions?

And then agreed to pay for some of the financial impacts of the new migrants, but only in those four jurisdictions?

How would the four jurisdictions handle and measure the impact of the newcomers, and what else would happen? Read more...

USCIS has defined alien video gamers as athletes for immigration purposes in response to the pressure from lobbyists.

As humorist Dave Barry would say, "I am not making this up."

The July 16 Time headline is: "Pro Gamers Get U.S. Work Visas, Thanks to Industry Lobbyists". Read more...

A recent bit of investigative journalism by Politico showed that few illegal aliens are taking advantage of the in-state tuition breaks offered by many state universities.

This news should, but probably will not, shoot some holes in the endless propaganda about how a whole generation of future leaders are losing their prospects because of a nasty insistence on the enforcement of the immigration law — about all those illegal aliens who are high school valedictorians who want to go to medical school so they can serve the people, etc. Read more...

The University of Northern Virginia (UNVA) — a very marginal institution that relied heavily on foreign students, notably those from India, and that was raided two years ago by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — was closed Wednesday, July 17, by the State of Virginia, not by ICE.

As is all too often the case, an institution outside the immigration business has stepped in and done the work that should have been done by the Department of Homeland Security, as the Securities and Exchange Commission did recently in a $145 million immigrant investor (EB-5) fraud case I described in an earlier blog. Read more...

The Obama administration and the new Mexican regime are taking some useful — if tiny — steps in the right direction regarding sending Mexican illegals back to the middle of that nation.

For decades the pattern has been to ship illegal aliens captured by our government back to our southern border, send them to the other side; then, all too often, the illegals try to cross again, frequently successfully. Read more...

The Farm Bill, which also authorizes the food stamp program, is being re-considered by the House of Representatives after that legislation failed to pass recently. Given the power of the farm lobby, the bill is certain to become law later this year.

While the bill is in limbo, the House should add a modest amendment that would see to it that families including illegal aliens (gently termed "undocumented non-citizens" in Department of Agriculture regulations) are not more eligible for food stamps than all-citizen families, which is now the case in most states. Read more...

The only joy — and it is a minor one — in the ongoing immigration policy conflict in Congress is to watch two sets of worker-exploiters battle each other over H-1B slots.

The most recent round between the Indian out-placement firms (or body shops) and the IT giants (Microsoft, Intel, IBM, et al.), also called product companies, was won by the former. Had it been a football game, the score would have been:

Placement firms: 35
Product firms: 0

That encounter was played out in the House Judiciary Committee. More on that later. Read more...

It's bad enough that USCIS is not as active as it should be in rooting out immigration-related marriage fraud. It is worse when the American military, albeit unwittingly, helps fund it, as a recent article in Military Times indicates.

All too often citizens — both civilians and members of the military — agree to loveless marriages with aliens so that the citizens get some money and the aliens get green cards. If the marriage is a sham, that's a violation of the federal law and if caught all concerned can go to jail and the alien is likely to be deported.

What I realized recently is that frequently it is not the alien who is paying for the lawless marriage, it is Uncle Sam, or more specifically our armed services. Read more...

The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted last week to admit more high-tech foreign workers in some categories than the annual supply of them.

In its eagerness to meet the wishes of the high tech industry — and steal jobs from qualified American workers — the Republican majority on the committee, with the single, commendable exception of Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), voted to allow as many as 55,000 green cards to be issued annually to aliens with advanced science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degrees from American universities. Read more...

Shown below is an older, unemployed American engineer (white hair, no jacket, apparently kneeling, perhaps pleading, on the outside of the circle) and a younger Asian, presumably a high-tech executive (dark hair, jacket, sitting at the table, presumably listening) at a Silicon Valley gathering. The photo, from today's New York Times, was taken by Noah Berger, and was used to illustrate an article headlined (in the paper version) "The Idled of Silicon Valley: A Bill Allowing More Foreign Workers Stirs a Tech Debate". It is on the first page of today's business section, page B1. Read more...

I have been both fascinated with, and appalled by, the over-emphasis on border security in the current debates about the legalization of some 11 million illegal aliens.

It is as if the minds of Congress have slipped into reverse historical gear, and are dealing with the high drama of the wars between the U.S. Cavalry and the Indians on the western frontier during the 1800s. Read more...

Setting aside the policy question of recognizing same-sex marriages – it does not bother me but it certainly bothers others – what will the impact of the Supreme Court's Defense of Marriage Act decision be on the extent of legal immigration to the U.S.? Read more...

Amidst all the talk on Capitol Hill about the alleged "need" for more alien workers, here is a bit of contrary news: Read more...

The United Kingdom is about to experiment with an interesting reverse twist on our visa waiver program – a technique that should be considered by our Congress.

Visa waivers are offered by the United States to would-be visitors from a carefully constructed list of nations that do not produce many visa over-stays, such as Japan and Great Britain. It eases travel for these aliens, pleases the lobbyists from the American travel industry, and does not produce much of a headache for the United States. Read more...

One of the problems with the H-1B program, which brings low-paid, high-tech workers to the United States in the hundreds of thousands (and that would be dramatically expanded by the Schumer-Rubio bill now being debated in the Senate), is that there is a broad streak of fraud within it.

It should be noted that even when the program runs as it is supposed to, it takes multitudinous jobs away from American workers and it reduces wages for all in its ambit. Read more...

ICE and other law enforcement organizations mounted a big, two-state raid earlier this week on a collection of 7-Eleven stores that had been employing – and cheating – dozens of illegal aliens; there was extensive reporting by the New York Times and the Associated Press.

This was a bonanza, financially, for the employers. The various 7-Eleven interests had made $182 million in profits from these stores, according to the AP.

Was it a whopping success for the good guys? Were the raids staged to support the administration's immigration policies? Did it reveal a long series of corporate, governmental, and community failings? Read more...

I suppose it was inevitable.

DHS announced today that Syrians who arrived in the United States before today and those who will arrive in the United States in the next few hours (before midnight) are to be granted Temporary Protected Status and allowed to work — no matter how they got here or what their visa status. Read more...

The New York Times did it again Friday morning, on the front page, as it did on the op-ed page Thursday.

It trotted out glowing portraits of specific illegal aliens as part of its campaign to pass the Gang of Eight's comprehensive immigration law. Friday's heroes were people granted temporary legal status under the administration's fiat Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Read more...

This is one of those "the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing" stories.

It shows that Yahoo as a corporation is lobbying for more H-1Bs on the grounds of an alleged "skills shortage" in the high-tech fields, while another part of Yahoo says, in effect, Americans should not bother to study information systems in college because it will not help them get a job.

Here are the facts in the case: Read more...

Hard on the heels of the news of the huge EB-5 fraud scandal in Chicago, two other EB-5 projects, one in Vermont and the other headquartered in Virginia, were reported to be in trouble recently.

The Vermont case involved plans for building retirement centers, while the one in Virginia related to the production of small automobiles at a planned plant in Mississippi. Unlike the Chicago case — in which two developers were indicted on criminal charges — the two new cases do not involve any indictments. Read more...

The Senate voted Tuesday to consider S.744 by 82-15, with three abstentions.

All 54 Democrats voted to move the bill to the floor, as did 28 of the Republicans. Fifteen GOP members, including Sens. Grassley (Iowa) and Sessions (Ala.) voted to keep it off the agenda.

Three Republicans did not vote on the issue: McCain (Ariz., a likely supporter of the massive comprehensive immigration reform bill), Murkowski (Alaska), and Coburn (Okla.). Read more...

One way to discourage the use of nonimmigrant workers (aka guest workers) is to make sure that these workers can sue employers that abuse them. That runs up the costs of the workers to the employers, and thus makes them think twice about hiring them in the future.

One of the problems with getting economic justice for nonimmigrant workers is that they are not — quite appropriately — in the United States all the time; they may well be back in their homeland when they become aware that there are ways that they can seek justice from their U.S.-based employers, but there they are in Mexico or Central America, and the employer is in the United States. Read more...

The big picture on the House of Representatives vote on DACA last week — 224 to 201 in favor of its repeal — is that party lines largely held as the restrictionists won with a substantial but not overpowering majority.

A more detailed look shows nine members voted against their party, six Republicans who voted against repeal and three Democrats who voted for; plus nine non-voters. That's a total of 18 House members to watch more closely as the summer progresses.

So, who are they and why did they vote (or not vote) as they did? Read more...