The New York Times' lead story this morning made an interesting case for what it sees as a decline in illegal migration from Mexico to the U.S.

But it played down a central element of the picture: the fact that the U.S., with its widespread poverty and huge wages gaps between the rich and the poor, is rapidly getting to be more like Mexico than in the past, so the Mexican poor no longer have as many reasons to want to come here. Being sensible, they stay home. Read more...

School systems all over the country – well, some school systems – are deciding that it was not a good idea to hire nonimmigrant teachers from overseas in the H-1B program, and are not only not seeking new ones, but are beginning to think about laying off the old ones, as we noted in a recent blog. Read more...

Ivory Soap is famously "99.44% pure", but as far as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is concerned, its H-1B applicants seem to be even more pristine – they are 99.52 percent pure, or at least approvable.

USCIS is widely known as the agency that loves to say "Yes!" to aliens seeking benefits, but the extent of that enthusiasm was not clear until the Center for Immigration Studies obtained – after waiting more than a year – some statistics through the agency's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process. Read more...

The question is: will the Department of Homeland Security admit its mistakes in the asylum case of the woman who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of rape, as the New York District Attorney's Office admitted its mistakes – a painful and honorable decision? Read more...

There have been a series of interesting developments in the usually ignored nonimmigrant worker programs which continue to flood America’s already over-staffed labor markets:

• Our embassy in India is giving some major H-1B operators fits;
• An Asian financial organization has downgraded the economic prospects of some big users of the H-1B visa program;
• An H-1B school teacher in California, denied renewal of her visa, has taken her employers to court;
• The J-1 program has received some (well-deserved) negative press.

There is an appeals agency within USCIS that takes the privacy of its operations to what many regard as ridiculous lengths.

Although the Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) is a semi-judicial agency, it, unlike similar organizations spread throughout the government, issues decisions in which the decider’s name is not mentioned, nor is that of the alien, nor that of the alien’s employer nor sponsor. Nor are the attorneys in the case named, as I mentioned in an earlier blog. Read more...

A friend called my attention recently to an article in India’s Economic Times regarding India’s generally well-paid nonimmigrant workers and Social Security and Medicare taxes. (The publication is that booming nation’s rough equivalent to our Wall Street Journal.) Read more...

The good news is that the biggest H-1B employer in America got the negative attention of the New York Times this morning, including a teaser on the front page.

The bad news is that Times reporter Julia Preston managed to cover what many would regard as an economic crime without mentioning the victims: U.S. workers squeezed out of high tech jobs by the big Indian-owned firm, Infosys Technologies. Read more...

Clarification (7/1/11): Below I speculated that Ms. Napolitano wanted to be U.S. Secretary of State; in describing her other options I said that the incumbent Senator in her state, Jon Kyl (R - AZ), whose term is up in 2012, was “not in trouble” electorally there. That’s correct but what I failed to say is that he is not running for re-election. I have no idea whether Ms. Napolitano will seek that seat, but it looks like an uphill struggle for any Democrat.

Is Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano running for Secretary of State? Read more...

The murky area of what the Obama administration might do administratively to open the gates to more migration is a little less murky now, thanks to immigration lawyer Angelo Paparelli.

He suggested in a June 10 article in Immigration Daily that five highly specific gaps be opened in the current system for admitting still more high-tech workers and their relatives. Read more...

To illustrate how loosely the State Department's J-1 foreign-worker program is being administered, the speaker at a Georgetown University Law School session this morning told of this internet advertisement, translated from the Russian:

Come work in the best strip clubs in the United States, on a J-1 visa.

This is a story of how a good man who blew the whistle on his own employer for immigration law violations was fired, and how a federal hearing officer said that was OK. Here are the facts and the law.

Fact #1. Daniel Cavazos, Jr. had worked for Wanxiang America Corp., a Chinese-owned auto parts manufacturer, apparently in the Middle West; he told the warehouse supervisor that he was planning to tell federal authorities that the firm was hiring illegal aliens. He was fired. Read more...

There is an often overlooked opportunity for individual citizens to give advice to the government about specific parts of the nation's immigration policy, and I want to encourage (and help) the reader to participate.

Frequently various agencies of the executive branch ask for public comments on proposed regulations, fee levels, form changes, and information collection systems; you can be sure that big business and other big pro-mass-immigration groups are well aware of these requests, and respond regularly. Read more...

You have heard all about sanctuary cities, and some states' refusal to cooperate with the Secure Communities program, and state-sanctioned tuition breaks and driver's licenses for illegal aliens, but there is a new wrinkle in state-sabotage of immigration enforcement.

It comes to us from Washington State, one of three states that still issue driver's licenses to illegals.

I find it devious; others may find it creative. Read more...

You would not know it from reading a prominent news story in today's Washington Post, but you need to break the immigration law repeatedly if you are going to keep an alien worker as your household slave.

And it helps your slimy cause if the immigration authorities fail to notice violation after violation. Read more...

USCIS and related agencies are to be commended for their planned joint action against phony practitioners of immigration law and others who prey on migrants seeking help within the morass of the American immigration system. Read more...

It is refreshing to see H-1B users being monitored by various sets of authorities; this is one or our periodic round-ups of H-1B news. (See here for an earlier one.)

While H-1B users routinely get away with little or no monitoring, as they operate under a very loose federal law, today we have four reports of at least some surveillance: one from overseas, two from the federal courts, and a disappointing one regarding the U.S. Labor Department, plus a mention of the use of H-1B visas by a group of Turkish charter schools in the U.S. Read more...

There are probably about 200 separate and distinct national and insular immigration-control systems around the world – and sometimes they make interesting decisions; some laudable, some not. Here are three of them.

The Philippines. This over-populated set of islands has long sent immigrant and non-immigrant workers to other nations – to the U.S., to the Middle East, and to other East Asian nations. The remittances these workers send back are important to the nation's economy, and the government is also aware that some of its people are treated very badly overseas. Read more...

It is the latest twist on an old story, the constant hunt through the intricacies of the immigration law for the best way to exploit nonimmigrant workers. As we have previously reported, the INA is chock full of obscure visa categories, most written with the desires of special interests in mind.

Today's story, which actually has a happy ending, is about one firm's efforts to turn Q visas into its own little gold mine. It is based on court and agency records. Read more...

When there are more people wanting to migrate to your country than slots for them, there are two ways of resolving that matter.

There is the sensible way, adopted by most of the rest of the world, and then there is the American way. Read more...

If the job does not pay much, or if the investment is shaky, the way for big business to close the deal is to add a ticket to America to the formula – and the migrant quickly falls in line with a body for the job, or a sum of money for the investment.

For example, many of the exploited guestworkers recruited to work in the Marianas Island sweatshops a dozen years ago were naive young women from rural China; they were sometimes told that "Los Angeles is just a bus ride away from the factory site". Read more...

Judge Mark H. Metcalf's new CIS Backgrounder, "Built to Fail: Deception and Disorder in America's Immigration Courts", reminds me that the four cabinet departments dealing with international migration have totally different ways of handling migration statistics, two in deplorable ways, and two in a more or less acceptable manner.

Department of Justice: Misleading Read more...

While the abuse of immigration systems is as old as national borders, there are creative new types of fraud (at least new to me) that pop up from time to time.

One of the typical frauds in foreign worker programs is that the worker is charged for fees that should be paid by the employer. Recently the school board in Prince George's County, Md., adjacent to Washington, D.C., was caught, as we recorded in a blog, doing exactly that to its overseas school teachers brought to this country under the H-1B program. Read more...

The Good News is that an H-1B employer has been penalized by an obscure Justice Department entity for discriminating against U.S. citizens.

The Bad News is that this small agency, in the last 13 years, has publicized actions of this kind only five times, while issuing press releases on taking action against employers who discriminated against foreign-born workers 25 times. Read more...

Amnesty for all Haitians who arrived legally or illegally in the U.S. by January 12 of this year has been offered by the Department of Homeland Security.

Previously this form of amnesty, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), had been available to Haitians who were here on January 12, 2010, at the time of the earthquake in that country. Now the arrival date has been extended by one year. According to DHS about 48,000 had secured this status during the earlier amnesty, a number smaller than the government had expected. Read more...

Congressional hearings on the immigration court system usually focus on resources and the length of the backlogs.

This morning's U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing dealt with these subjects but also with some other matters:

• the utility to the system as a whole – not just to the aliens involved – of having the aliens represented by counsel; and
• the specific problems with deporting aliens to China and India.

(See my colleague Jon Feere's report on the hearing here.) Read more...

It was nice – and out-of-character – of the New York Times to run an exposé of yet another foreign worker program (P-1B) on its front page this morning.

The headline was written to attract the eyes of music-lovers, not immigration policy specialists:

Orchestras on Tour: Names Strike False Note

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agrees thoroughly, particularly in this administration, with the Emma Lazarus approach to immigration; you know, "Give me your poor, your huddled masses . . ."

So it may come as a surprise to both the public and the agency that it is about to make major operational changes, and that its proposed procedures would, indirectly, cause that phrase to read: "Give me your rich, your English-speaking, your computer-savvy individuals . . ." Read more...

The Department of Homeland Security has – yet again – decided to raid the Social Security Trust Fund and shoulder aside American college graduates from good jobs, as it announced today a twist on the use of the F-1 student visa to aid big business.

That, of course, was not the way the DHS publicists shaped their press release, which was, headed, innocuously:

ICE announces expanded list of science, technology, engineering and math degree programs
Qualifies eligible graduates to extend their post-graduate training

It's the perfect man-bites-dog story in the immigration field; a 30-ish Honduran woman seeks to deport her own mother, goes to the Honduran consulate in Atlanta to speed it up, and is faced with a demand for a bribe to do so.

The full story has elements of pathos, of irony, of illegal-alien klutziness, as well as some interesting implications for immigration policy, notably that we as a nation should systematically encourage the non-mandatory departure of illegals – something we don't do. Read more...