Is it fair play for an American organization to encourage a foreign government to take action against our government in a dispute before an international organization?

Clearly it is OK for an American organization to seek to change the policies of the American government directly, or in alliance with other American organizations. And it would be acceptable for an American organization – say the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce – to seek to change the policies of an international organization, say the UN. Read more...

Many systems in America tilt in favor of its citizens, such as voting or obtaining government jobs, but at least one does not.

That's the system that funds PhD-level educations.

New foreign PhDs, or more precisely, those with temporary visas, have considerably less educational debt on graduation than new PhDs who are U.S. citizens or green card holders. Read more...

A Guam employer, using the H-2B foreign worker program, has just been caught in a quadruple abuse scheme.

Were there such a thing, he would have won the title of World Champion Ignoble Employer, hands down.

The employer's name is Shui Cheng (aka Steven Wang). He is in construction, a booming business on Guam because of the U.S. military build-up there. He managed, all at once, to:

• break the U.S. labor and immigration laws;
• exploit and abuse his countrymen;
• cheat legal workers out of available jobs; and

Juan P. Osuna, formerly Associate Deputy Attorney General, had been appointed Acting Director of the Justice Department's Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR). Who succeeds Osuna in the policy job in the AG's office may be more interesting than the acting EOIR appointment. Will we get an immigration enthusiast (like USCIS Director Mayorkas) or another sober careerist, like Osuna? Read more...

Once in a while – if the situation is both very, very bad and very well-publicized – U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) does the right thing regarding its bizarre immigrant investor program.

It did that recently regarding a dicey investment scheme involving the City of Victorville, on the edge of the Mojave Desert in Southern California. Read more...

The enormous difficulty getting Congress to close even the most glaring loopholes in our immigration system was shown again this month in its feeble action regarding the controversial, visa-creating, English-language instruction schools.

One can study the English language in virtually every nation of the world, but the American immigration system insists on granting student (F-1) visas to nonimmigrants who have enrolled in just about any American institution that says it provides instruction in the language. Read more...

The already pallid rules for investor (EB-5) visas have been watered down, yet again.

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, a whole family can get a full set of green cards if one member of it makes a half-million dollar investment in the U.S. for two years.

That's right, permanent legal residence permits for the whole family, forever, in exchange for a short-term financial investment. Read more...

Once upon a time there was an illegal alien with a remarkable imagination, unlimited nerve, but limited intelligence. This is a story of what happened to him, and what did not, in the immigration decision-making process. (I stumbled on the case while researching something else.) Read more...

As a public service, the Center for Immigration Studies is providing you with a negative shopping list, so that you will not patronize any of the enumerated firms, ones with really grim records of abusing foreign worker programs. Read more...

Despite the DREAM Act defeat, different amnesty advocates continued the argument this week, using different approaches.

There was the raw political approach reported in a blog by my colleague Jerry Kammer, "NCLR to Republican Senators: 'Watch Out'," in which the National Council of La Raza threatened political repercussions for DREAM Act opponents, including the two GOP Senators from Texas. (And when is the last time that the Republicans lost a U.S. Senate race in Texas? – the answer is below.) Read more...

It is obvious, by now, that allowing gays to serve in the armed forces is more attractive to the U.S. Senate than encouraging illegal aliens to do so. (I suspect that the Senate would not have voted to terminate don't ask-don't tell (DADT) 20 years ago.)

That broad mindset is probably good news for the restrictionists, but what intrigues me even more are the 19 members of the Senate who bucked their parties' leadership in the votes for ending DADT or initiating the DREAM Act, or both. Among these 19 are the votes that will swing the Senate one way or the other in the two years to come. Read more...

While I am very pleased that the Dream Act failed to pass the Senate (though it sailed through the House of Representatives) I think it is a time for only modified rapture.

Yes, the most attractive amnesty proposal of them all – despite the support of the President, the leaders of the Senate, and all the open borders forces – did not get through the upper body. Had it done so, it would have been quickly signed by the President. Read more...

One of the grim aspects of America's programs for temporary alien workers is the wide menu of choices offered to the nation's employers.

If one program is seen as a little too costly to employers, or a tad inconvenient in its terms, the ever-gracious government provides a wide variety of alternatives. U.S. and alien workers are both hurt by the general laxity of these programs. Read more...

The U.S. Labor Department has penalized a newspaper for abusing the H-1B program in its own hiring practices.

The paper is the Asian Journal, headquartered in Los Angeles, which also prints editions in San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, and the Philippines. It was not only forced to make more than half a million dollars in payments to its own staff and to the government, it was tossed out of the H-1B program until July 30, 2011.

Given the wide extent of the violations, noted below, I was surprised that its suspension from the program was so brief. Read more...

Two recent events reminded me that the American government uses immigration to preserve an archaic, Third World, agricultural labor practice. And it does so to please a very narrow economic interest.

The pattern I have in mind is of the sheepherders who follow and protect their flocks in distant mountain meadows, sometimes, if lucky, living in a trailer, sometimes in a tent or a hut. The underlying notion is that there is grass for the sheep to eat in remote pastures during the summer, but in the colder months the sheep must be moved back down to lower elevations. Read more...

China, according to a recent news story, has invested something like $1.7 trillion dollars in U.S. bonds and that if China stopped buying our bonds we would face a really awesome financial disaster.

Meanwhile, a few miles off the coast of Florida, China is reported to be investing $2.5 billion in a massive tourist complex near Nassau, in The Bahamas. Read more...

There is a strong argument to be made that there is no such thing as a skills shortage, only a wages-and-training shortage, but it is highly unlikely that employers' desires for low-cost skilled workers from overseas can be thwarted with that sensible line of reasoning.

But one way to cope with the challenge is to perfect tough new, evidence-based standards for defining an immigration-creating skills shortage, and the British have done just that. Read more...

While the DREAM Act has been the focus of the immigration field this week, I continue to keep my eye open for the strange sideshow in the Caribbean, the usually quiet, the dog-does-not-bark, story of illegal immigration from Haiti.

Given the cholera threat, on top of the misery of the sluggish recovery from the earthquake, adding to the pervasive poverty of that nation, and the very sizable Haitian communities in the U.S. – why are we not seeing numerous attempts to enter the U.S. illegally? Read more...

The ever-creative advocates of amnesty for illegal aliens are pressing what they regard as a historical argument for the proposed DREAM and AgJobs Acts – that those kinds of specialized programs, not general amnesties, are, in effect, the American Way. That's their position.

As Gertrude Stein would have said, an illegal alien is an illegal alien is an illegal alien. There may be a fine distinction between boutique amnesties and general ones, but there are no differences in their impacts on the broader society, on taxpayers, nor, for that matter, on the aliens themselves. Read more...

The H-2B program for unskilled non-agricultural migrant workers is one of the nation's many alien worker programs, and one that, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report, is subject to extensive fraud and abuse. Read more...

Those supporting tuition breaks for illegal aliens attending college sometimes use both straw man arguments and chutzpah math to advance their cause.

There is, for example, a November 23 article in the Fresno Bee headed "Illegal immigrants are not getting free college education, Calif. official says." Read more...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has just issued a press release saying that they had found a major new tunnel under the U.S. /Mexico border south of San Diego.

It was half a mile long, had two entrances on the U.S. side and one in Mexico, and the tunnel was equipped with, the release said, "advanced rail, electrical and ventilation systems." Read more...

These blogs are often critical of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), but in this case we want to note some useful (if almost invisible) steps forward.

It involves the foreign worker programs, particularly the H-1B program that currently creates a glut of scientists and engineers in the U.S. labor market and thus deprives citizens and legal residents of high-tech jobs, and results in lowers salaries for all concerned.

While this may sound almost trivial to those outside government, the progress is in the re-design of a government form, the I-129. Read more...

The new British government may have outreached itself by planning to require that immigrant spouses of UK citizens must speak the English language.

Lord knows that no American government would make such a demand.

While a Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition runs the government, the Conservatives seem to be the ones setting immigration policy. The two parties, while agreeing to run the nation together, had quite different immigration policies before the recent election. The Liberal Democrats strongly support the open borders position, and the Conservatives do not. Read more...

Sometimes it is useful to take a look at case histories of the violations of, and the enforcement of, the immigration law.

It is well known that it often takes the government a long time to wrap up a criminal case involving a violation of the immigration law. Read more...

When it comes to transparency in government activities there are two extremes:

On the one hand, there is the total freedom of information sought by many advocates of democracy, the "open covenants, openly arrived at" concept of Woodrow Wilson.

On the other there is the highly efficient censorship of a dictatorship, such as that of North Korea.

And in the middle there is the not-so-competent, partial censorship of USCIS's review body, the Office of Administrative Appeals, a semi-judicial entity that handles appeals from many USCIS staff decisions. Read more...

If you read the New York Times article "China Surges Past India as Top Home of Foreign Students" on Monday you might have seen this line: "And, according to the Commerce Department such [i.e., foreign] students contribute nearly $20 billion [a year] to the U.S. economy." Read more...

Illegal immigration is, among other things, a crime that breeds further crime.

This is a grim fact that the open-borders advocates rarely discuss.

Crimes of passion and bank robberies, on the other hand are usually, to use the English phrase, "one-off" actions. Deplorable as they are, they are self-contained events and do not usually lead to other, on-going criminal activities.

I have not seen this typology before, but perhaps some criminologists have been using it for years. Read more...

I may be completely wrong, but I read into a new and rather opaque DHS research document an implication that increasing spending on Border Patrol staff may be reaching the point of diminishing returns. Read more...

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that it has hired 24 additional Immigration Judges. That's an increase in that judicial work force of about 10 percent.

That's good news; it means that there will be many more deportations, some more judgments that aliens can stay in the country, and, one hopes, fewer aliens, on average, in detention centers, thus saving the taxpayers about $100 a day per detainee. Read more...