One should never write "I told you so," so I will not do so, but I will say that this blog's view that USCIS devotes too much executive and staff time to tiny migrant populations was reinforced (if unwittingly) by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in its recent testimony on the introduction of federal immigration control to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). Read more...

I do not mind the policy regarding the temporary legal status of live-in lovers of long-term nonimmigrant aliens, but I get a huge kick out of USCIS' struggles with the English language as it defines its rules. Read more...

"All men are created equal" is an important principle, but it has its limits.

That's the way it should be regarding relationships among human beings within a democracy, but it should not necessarily apply when a democracy is handling a threat scenario.

A good example of the misplaced use of the equality principal could be seen during the early post-9/11 screenings for would-be terrorists on our passenger planes – everyone was equally subject to random special attention, be they 90-year-old nuns or young men from, say, Yemen.

In many ways that sort of mindless egality is applied to somewhat less dramatic situations, such as our migration-screening procedures, including the way we sort out applicants for F-1 (student) visas. Read more...

Have you ever heard of Stratford University? Or the University of Bridgeport?

Well, you should have, because their students are the most numerous and second most numerous in a government subsidy program that is supposed to bring the world's "best and brightest" to our shores. Read more...

It is useful – say, once every six months or so – to be reminded that amnesties of illegal aliens last a long, long time.

Today's case stars one Mohammed Uddin, a Pakistani citizen, who snuck across the border back in 1984, and who last month won an interim decision in the Third Circuit that will keep him from being deported for a while, at least until his next court case is settled.

He has been in the States for more than a quarter of a century, and every so often DHS made an effort to get him removed, but, so far, he has not actually been deported. Read more...

One of the smaller benefits an employer can obtain from hiring resident workers – i.e., citizens or legal immigrants – as opposed to H-1Bs is that the employer can suffer less when he fires the Americans, rather than the H-1Bs.

We are not writing about the worker's suffering, our usual subject, only the employer's suffering. Read more...

Today’s New York Times article on the case-by-case amnesty program of this administration displayed -- without comment -- a remarkable bit of “straw man” argumentation from White House official Cecilia Munoz, someone I met decades ago at the Council of La Raza.

Ms. Munoz was quoted, in defense of the selective removal program, saying that the new system would “suspend deportation in low priority cases that, for example, involve ‘military veterans and the spouses of active-duty military personnel’.” Read more...

As regular as clockwork, the "temporary" legal status of a small group of Liberian illegal aliens has been extended for another 18 months.

While most such "temporary" statuses are in the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) category, the one for the Liberians has a different set of initials, DED, standing for Deferred Enforced Departure. It means the same thing: a short-term, but always repeated, status as a momentarily legal alien during which time the beneficiaries can work, but cannot use the status to change to green card status. Read more...

Recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) testimony is deeply depressing regarding the transfer of immigration management in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI) from the local authorities to the Mainland government. Read more...

The Migration Policy Institute, an open-borders think tank in Washington, has had the following helpful piece of information on its website for two months now:

Independence Day in the United States, which is on the fourth of July, is just around the corner, and with it comes the traditional holiday festivities, fireworks, and waiving of American flags . . . [emphasis added]

Thank you, MPI, it is good to know when Independence Day is, but the U.S. does not waive its flag – it annually waives the need for visas for millions of alien tourists. [UPDATE: MPI corrected the spelling error this afternoon.] Read more...

We have noted in an earlier blog how secretive USCIS is with its decisions about R-1 (nonimmigrant religious worker) visas.

Recently in an FOIA request that produced data on yes/no decisions on every other classification of petitions for nonimmigrant workers, there was no information on what USCIS did with the R-1 requests. I think that was deliberate, as noted in another blog. Read more...

USCIS got its wrist slapped this week by an arm of the Justice Department, when USCIS tried to hide a quasi-amnesty application from an immigration judge.

An illegal alien from El Salvador, Pablo De Jesus Henriquez Rivera, tried to revive his previously rejected application for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), thus making his presence in the U.S. legal, when he came before an immigration judge. Read more...

The waste of administrative resources devoted to tiny classes of migrants – which we have covered in a previous blog – may get worse in the near future.

Earlier this year I called attention to one such minuscule class, a small cluster of nonimmigrant "investors" in the Northern Mariana Islands who were simultaneously judged by USCIS to be rich enough to be investors, but poor enough to have their fees waived. Read more...

One of the current immigration mysteries has been: why have so few Haitian illegal aliens in the U.S. accepted the government's offer of Temporary Protected Status, a quasi-amnesty?

After the earthquake of January 2010 the Department of Homeland Security offered TPS to all Haitians who were in the U.S. legally or illegally on the date of the quake. It expected some 100,000 to 150,000 or so to register. Read more...

Perhaps the least attractive henchman of imperial publisher Rupert Murdoch (and there is fierce competition for that distinction) got into the U.S. on an H-1B visa, lost the job that got him the visa, and, apparently, has not left the U.S. as he should have done. Read more...

Both images of the EB-5 immigrant investor program emerging from recent DHS documents are misleading.

One, the widely publicized statement yesterday by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano was that the agency had "outlined a series of policy, operational, and outreach efforts to fuel the nation's economy and stimulate investment [to] . . . create jobs . . ." Read more...

The only thing that irks the administration more than one underused immigration program is having two such programs.

So today the Obama administration took several steps to still further ease the rules in the H-1B program for high-tech nonimmigrant workers, and the EB-5 program for alien investors, as the Wall Street Journal reported under this headline: "U.S. to Assist Immigrant Job Creators". Read more...

Infosys, the big Indian body shop and extensive user of the H-1B program, has, in effect, lost an age-discrimination case in federal court, but everything about the case is shrouded in secrecy. Read more...

This week’s hearing of the Senate Immigration Subcommittee, reported in an earlier blog, suggested to me that the nation needs a neutral system for “scoring” the impact of individual immigration bills on population growth.

In other words, were we to pass a given bill, how many more people would be brought to the nation, over what period of time? Read more...

There were three bright spots in an otherwise cut-and-dry immigration policy hearing chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer (D - NY) this morning.

Schumer, chair of the Senate’s Immigration Subcommittee, is an old hand at tilting hearings toward the open borders types, people who argue that more skilled alien workers are needed by corporations, and that refugees are good for the local economy. Predictably, seven of the eight witnesses this morning took one of those approaches. Read more...

Recent news reports reminded me that all higher education immigration fraud, through the massive F-1 visa program, is divided into three parts:

1. There are the individual students who drop out of legitimate universities to become illegal aliens on their own;

2. There are visa mills which are distinctly illegitimate establishments; they recruit would-be illegal aliens, and, in effect, charge them substantial fees for their F-1 visas; or they operate marginal operations more keyed to profits than to education; and

The Department of Homeland Security, in effect, has given two and a half citizenships to one illegal alien from Haiti.

One, or at most two, citizenships should be enough for any single human being, but the Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) of DHS, a semi-judicial agency, has ruled in a recent case that a Haitian citizen, who is also a Canadian citizen carrying a Canadian passport, can also enjoy Temporary Protected Status in the U.S. Read more...

There’s been a small bit of genuine good news on the alien worker front, thanks to a federal judge.

Tens of thousands of H-2B nonimmigrant workers will get an unexpected pay raise on or near October 1 this year because of an order signed by Judge Louis Pollak. He sits in the federal district court in Eastern Pennsylvania, but the order will have a nationwide impact. There were 56,381 admissions of H-2B workers in FY 2009, the last year that statistics are available. Read more...

Suppose major league baseball released batting statistics that consisted of just two variables, at- bats and strikeouts.

Fans would have no idea of the number of hits, runs, walks, or runs-batted-in – just at-bats and strikeouts, but MLB would say that they were publishing comprehensive data.

That is essentially what USCIS is doing in today's output of floods of operating data. Read more...

The Department of Homeland Security argues it should not deport some deportable aliens on the grounds that it wants to use all its resources to remove criminal aliens.

Sometimes the deportations of criminals take a long, long time, as we can see by examining the most recent precedent decision from the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), issued last week.

The alien involved, Juan Ramon Martinez, a native of Honduras, was convicted of a serious crime in a California court, and this is the timeline of his case:

Fake marriages to obtain green cards are evil, criminal acts and the government should pursue them more vigorously – but the death penalty?

I am all for jailing, then deporting, the alien or aliens involved and simultaneously jailing the citizen "spouse" if the marriage is a fraud, but a penalty of death? Read more...

Suppose you are a manager in a multi-national corporation and you want to hire a graduate engineer from another nation. The nonimmigrant worker programs in the U.S. are so numerous, and so lightly supervised, that you can choose among as many as four different programs, in three different cabinet agencies, for your migration mechanism.

Suppose you are a principal in a K-12 school somewhere in America, and you want to bring in a teacher from, say, Peru, for two years. You can choose from two or perhaps four different visa programs to arrange for that teacher's temporary admission. Read more...

Apparently nothing frustrates USCIS more than an underutilized visa program, such as the one that allows a well-to-do-investor's family to get a collection of green cards by – briefly – investing half a million dollars in the U.S. So, the agency has announced its efforts to expand that program. Read more...

Last year the Center for Immigration Studies filed formal requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) with two different federal agencies, and we got answers of vastly differing quality. Both requests related to operations of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Read more...

There has been an abundance of immigration news lately, some good, some bad, and some reflecting genuine new thinking. All related to issues covered in our previous blogs.

Good News. Perhaps the best news was the abject surrender of one of the largest H-1B users in the nation's school systems, that of Prince George's County Md., a Washington, D.C., suburb. Read more...