The ever-creative, nicely-funded advocates of more migration have announced a new set of strategies for federal action.

In a nutshell: if congressionally-enacted "comprehensive immigration reform" is off the table for two years, their emphasis will be on narrow administration actions that can be implemented without congressional approval. Each of the actions will be focused on the rights of some groups of aliens – not numbers – and all of them in totality will encourage more migration directly or indirectly, though that is not mentioned. Read more...

It is one of the world's tiniest navies, yet it is doing an effective job of preventing illegal entries to the U.S.

And, no, it does not carry the U.S. flag, and it may not even get any U.S. government funds.

The entity is the Royal Bahamas Defense Force (BDF), which is the army, navy, and air force of the Bahamas, all wrapped into a single organization.

If everyone's press releases are to be believed, it is much, much more likely to stop illegal immigrants from Haiti than all of America's migration cops put together. Read more...

I am not an English language zealot.

I do not mind the occasional translation of a government document that deals with a limited-English population being translated into another tongue. Emergency signs, for example, in two languages are probably useful to both English speakers and speakers of the other language.

But if a U.S. government agency is going to print something in two languages, should not the English version appear first? Above, rather than below; and on the left side of the page, rather than the right? (We read from left to right.) Read more...

This is a question that has puzzled me for decades.

It is generally agreed that the people hurt most, economically, by both illegal immigration and massive legal immigration are those at the bottom of the labor market; and many in that part of the labor market are blacks. Read more...

The U.S. State Department has quietly made it legal for some Americans to migrate their alien same-sex partners to the U.S. – but it has done so only for diplomats.

Run-of-the-mill citizens can get visas for alien spouses only in male-female marriages, but the ever-creative State Department has figured a way around that law, but only for its own diplomats. Earlier it made roughly comparable arrangements for diplomats from other nations. Read more...

The USCIS involved the White House in its announcement at five this afternoon of a proposed rule that would save H-1B-using corporations millions of dollars a year.

The proposed rule, which would not go into effect for 12 months, will not affect the basic rules of the program nor the various ceilings set by Congress, but it would potentially cut costs for employers, presumably making it even more attractive to corporations than it is now. Read more...

The House of Representatives Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement held a lively but largely good-tempered discussion yesterday morning about the extent of the impact of illegal alien workers on the labor market experiences of blacks, particularly black men.

For the hearing announcement and links to witness statements see here. Read more...

When jobs for American residents are scarce, should an employer pay smaller fines for ignoring the rules on hiring illegal aliens because there's a recession?

That's the odd position taken by an administrative law judge (ALJ) who works for the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), an arm of the U.S. Justice Department. Read more...

Since I am curious about the apparent current and strange lack of illegal entry attempts from Haiti in recent months, I have been following the flow of press releases out of Coast Guard's Seventh District headquarters in Miami.

The image I get is an entity as busy as a one-armed paperhanger, who is also charged with cooking the meals, watching the dog, changing the baby . . . and catching illegal immigrants. Read more...

I suggested in a previous blog that the Department of Homeland Security should spend more staff time making high-priority immigration decisions, and less time on lower-priority ones.

The general notion being that the removal of aliens and decisions about migrants admitted outside of numerical limits should get more attention than admission decisions within numerically-limited classes, as the last-named set of judgments have no bearing on the size of the U.S. population, while the former two are crucial to that metric. Similarly, I noted that there is often an enormous amount of bureaucratic energy spent on very small, innocuous populations. Read more...

This is a story about how a rich and famous alien made a major impact on America's deportation policies, and how a prominent Marine general sought to unwrinkle part of the very wrinkled verbiage used in the immigration business.

The alien was John Lennon, the Beatle and British political activist; the Nixon administration tried to deport him for stirring up opposition to the war in Vietnam. Read more...

After a year or two of watching how DHS, and more specifically USCIS, makes immigration decisions, I realize that both the agency, and Congress, are working in the wrong conceptual environment.

Virtually everything that DHS does regarding migrants, legal and illegal, is (perhaps unconsciously) based on how we handle criminal cases. Immigration decisions are made on an individual basis, often with many of the trappings of the courts, and with ample opportunity for extended due process. Read more...

Wikileaks, the unauthorized release of a huge collection of U.S. government documents, has made a useful contribution to the immigration field.

More specifically, it has shed light on the multiplicity of fraudulent visa schemes inflicted on the American immigration system, and most specifically, on those that have been detected by consular officials in Mexico City. My colleague, Jerry Kammer, called the leaked State Department report to my attention. Read more...

Maybe, just maybe, the Social Security Administration might do something useful about illegal aliens and Social Security benefits, later this year.

The title of its announcement is not very exciting: "Additional Insured Status Requirements for Certain Alien Workers (2882P)"

But what it says has at least some promise. Read more...

Can an alien, somewhere in the USA, be simultaneously so rich that he gets immigration benefits as an investor and simultaneously so poor that USCIS will waive a $325 immigration application fee?

The question seems absurd, but the underlying situation suggests three useful lessons for U.S. immigration policy, generally. More on that later.

The answer to the initial question is, amazingly, yes, but only in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which lie just north of Guam in the Western Pacific. Read more...

Obscure Arm of DHS Probably Does Right Thing
as Visa-Seeking Iranian Apparently Tries
to Buy into Watergate Hotel with Lawless Cash!

If I were on the copy desk of a tabloid newspaper, that would be the (admittedly long) headline I would write regarding one of the latest decision of the Department of Homeland Security's privacy-crazed Office of Administrative Appeals. (There's a lot of mystery in this story.) Read more...

The president can create 100,000 summer jobs for young Americans – our 16-24 year-olds had a thunderous 19.1 percent unemployment rate last summer – with a stroke of the pen. Read more...

In contrast to so many conferences on immigration held in Washington, the Brookings Institution yesterday sponsored an even-handed event on the question of highly-educated immigrants and innovation in industry.

The announcement and links to some of the papers can be found here. Read more...

The Obama administration's Labor Department has, finally, done the right thing regarding the wages to be paid to one group of temporary foreign workers and to the U.S.-resident workers who toil alongside them.

But the effective date is not until January 1, 2012! Read more...

As a CIS Backgrounder has documented, immigrants and their children have accounted for about three-quarters of our population growth in recent decades.

Well, suppose we could identify a class of arriving immigrants who neither had children, nor would have children in the future. Such migrants would make a passing contribution to the size of the current population, but after they died there would be no follow-on impact on our future population. I will use the British term and call them "one-off immigrants". Read more...

Congress for close to 90 years now has voted to numerically limit some kinds of immigration. The point is that the U.S. does not want to be overcrowded the way Egypt is.

The open borders people and greedy employers have long resisted numerical limits, and have often figured clever ways to avoid them, or to define away the limits that they cannot change. Witness the games played with H-1B ceilings in recent years.

Unfortunately, an arm of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Office of the Ombudsman, has missed the point, too. Read more...

There are, according to Paul Simon, "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover," but, by my count, only three ways for illegal aliens to leave the interior of the United States.

In order to cause more illegal aliens to leave the U.S., which I regard as a good thing, I think there should be a fourth departure plan, a gentle one. Read more...

A recently released report on the controversial H-1B program is a disappointment on several levels – mostly because it plays down or ignores the program's negative impact on resident workers.

The report was written by the ultra-cautious Government Accountability Office (GAO) and is entitled "H-1B Visa Program: Reforms Are Needed to Minimize the Risks and Costs of Current Program".

Though this is not spelled out in the text, the "risks" and the "costs" of the program appear – in GAO's eyes – to rest on the employers. Read more...

A previous blog argued that the Government Accountability Office had hidden the size of the total H-1B population in its recent report, either out of political expediency or maybe laziness, and thus blurred the debate over the appropriateness of that controversial program. Read more...

Suppose you have a suburban front yard of about 3,000 sq. feet (60 feet x 50 feet), and you have 30 dandelions in it, or one for every 100 sq. feet. Not to worry, enjoy the bright yellow flowers in the springtime. On the other hand, you could have 30,000 of them, or ten per square foot; they would shortly obliterate any grass you had left. You probably should make a policy decision about the dandelions, based on the numbers, because numbers matter. Read more...

You had to read between the lines to get the full meaning, but USCIS issued a sad little immigration announcement last week.

It was about the H-2A (agricultural) and H-2B (non-ag) foreign worker programs run by our government to benefit employers who would rather not cope with the demands of the American labor market. Or, as USCIS says of the H-2A program, it "allows U.S. employers to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary agricultural jobs." Read more...

A reader asked: "Just what is the mechanism that allows an anchor baby to keep his or her illegal alien parents in the U.S.?"

There are four different mechanisms at work here, as my CIS colleague, Jon Feere, and I see it: Read more...

Now that "comprehensive immigration reform" is either dead or in slumber for the next two years, the pro-migration people have come up with a somewhat different approach, and it was discussed at a meeting in Washington Thursday.

It is useful to note that the pro-migration advocates, though allied with each other, come in three different groupings. There are the employers, who want lower wages; there are the ethnic organizations who say, in effect, "Let My People In"; and then there are the intellectuals, represented Thursday at a session of the foundation-supported Migration Policy Institute. Read more...

A Washington Post editorial of a few days ago urged the Obama Administration to let 55,000 Haitian immigrants come to the U.S. despite the fact that they would be jumping the visa-backlog queues and numerical ceilings established by Congress.

There are three sets of considerations here: 1) would this be good for the individuals involved? 2) what consequences would be imposed on the U.S.? and 3) would it be good for Haiti? Read more...

There have been two recent Washington personnel decisions that may impact the making of immigration policy, one in the legislative branch, the other in the executive.

Lamar Smith (R-TX), incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee, contrary to many expectations, has named longtime Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-CA) as chair of the immigration subcommittee; Steve King (R- IA) an equally conservative member and until recently the ranking Republican on that subcommittee, had been thought to be in line for the position. Read more...