Usually it is the receiving countries that play the dominant roles in immigration policy discussions.

But that is not the case right now in Iraq.

Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has issued an unusual appeal, saying to France, in effect, "Let my people stay." He is asking the West not to accept Christian Iraqi refugees, despite the recent Muslim violence against them.

The Prime Minister's pitch came in the wake of a bloody attack by Muslim extremists on a Christian church in Baghdad. The initial attack and the police action that followed killed 53 people. Read more...

The State of Washington, one of a handful of states that issues driver's licenses to illegal aliens, took a baby step today to limit – but not eliminate – such issuances.

According to an Associated Press report, Washington, along with New Mexico and Utah, issues licenses to illegal aliens, but starting today Washington State will insist on a proof of in-state residency if the applicant does not provide a "verified" Social Security number (SSN). Read more...

From time to time I have suggested that some other nations have great immigration policy ideas, as in the case of Australia's linkage of population and migration policies touched on in an earlier blog.

But this is not always the case.

Belize (the former British Honduras) presents an excellent example this week of how not to shape an immigration policy. Read more...

ICE, like other government agencies, typically issues press releases when it wants the world to know about its accomplishments. (I know, I used to write such material for the U.S. Department of the Interior.)

The apparent narrative, in this instance, is that ICE found two illegal aliens accused of murder in their home countries, and deported them. So far, so good.

But if you dig a little deeper into available public records, the story is less flattering to the law enforcement community. Let's open with what ICE had to say. Read more...

How the election of 2010 will – or will not – alter the nation's immigration policies is not yet known, but we do know that it will shake up the array of decision-makers in the House, and will leave those in the Senate untouched. Read more...

The U.S. Labor Department is taking steps to raise wages employers are required to pay in the H-2B nonimmigrant worker program. And raising the wages may well mean that employers will be less likely to use it, thus reducing migration. Read more...

The classic labor market focus of restrictionists is on illegal alien workers vs. legal resident workers – but I want to add another question to the conversation: where do the workers spend their money?

Fundamentally, we do not want the labor force to be needlessly expanded by floods of illegal alien workers, disadvantaged by their status, and willing to work for less than the prevailing wage.

Similarly we are opposed to needless flows of legal nonimmigrant workers (such as H-1Bs), who while legal, also tend to depress labor markets, to the detriment of legal resident workers. Read more...

How often does a restrictionist get to write the following sentence?:

"USCIS and the Ninth Circuit both combat fraud in an immigration program."

Not often. The Ninth Circuit and USCIS both tend to lean toward open-border policies, but not in this very specific case. Read more...

Every so often the U.S. Labor Department does the right thing vis-a-vis immigration, but gets reversed by the courts.

It happened the other day with a Fifth Circuit decision to, in effect, lower wages for H-2B workers to below levels set by the Labor Department, thus indirectly encouraging employers to use more of these workers, and thus to expand legal migration. Read more...

While scrolling through the most recent Pew Hispanic Center data, dealing with country-of-origin profiles of the various Hispanic communities in the United States, I encountered a real puzzle:

Why are the Peruvians in the U.S., (median household income: $51,734) so much more successful than the Dominicans (median household income: $35,644)? Of the 10 Hispanic communities in the U.S. listed by Pew, the Peruvians were at the top of this and several other scales, and the Dominicans were at the bottom. Read more...

USCIS has announced a tiny bit of additional visibility regarding decisions on immigration cases decided by its Administrative Appeals Office, but any wholesale reduction of the existing secrecy does not appear to be likely. Read more...

Newly released data show huge and growing numbers of cases caught up in the immigration courts, while providing an intriguing (to me, at least) way of tracking the geographic distribution of illegal aliens within the U.S. by their nation of birth.

The numbers are numbing. As of the end of September, 261,083 cases were pending in these courts, all waiting for individual hearings before the judges, virtually all facing deportation if they lose. Read more...

We all know the concept of chain migration. In some cases a bold migrant does something unusual. Unlike so many migrants, he or she settles, or is settled, in a place where there are no countrymen. He or she then starts a chain migration going through family and friends.

For instance, some refugee agency settled a Kurd in Nashville some years ago, and that unlikely city is now the informal Kurd capital of America. Read more...

The inevitable first question has to be, how does an alien bribe a federal official regarding a gondola at a ski resort?

But the more significant question is, how could a blatant bribery attempt like this one be so badly handled by the Department of Homeland Security?

It all started long ago, as it often does in immigration cases, back in November 2004. Read more...

The otherwise useful article in the Sunday New York Times about aliens voting illegally slipped over the USCIS' slippery defense mechanism in the case, but to me it stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. I will get back to that in a minute.

The article, "Immigrants Find Voting Can Come at a Cost," told of the case of an immigrant from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts who voted in New York as a permanent resident alien, and, as a consequence, faces deportation. Read more...

If you want to understand a nation's immigration policy, and its consequences, you should examine – or just leaf through – Australia's annual report, Population Flows: Immigration Aspects 2008-2009 Edition.

The document, which covers the year ending June 30, 2009, is the very model of a modern report on a nation's immigration; the United States produces nothing like it.

Now, the Aussies have several advantages over us.

The good news about the Investor's Visa Program (which gives everyone in the alien's family a green card for a two-year-long, half-million-dollar investment) is that its use apparently has dropped by about 50 percent in FY 2010.

The bad news is that, with each passing year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approves a larger and a larger proportion of the EB-5 applications presented to it. Read more...

If you think American entities sometimes have trouble enforcing the immigration law, you should hear about how some other countries handle the challenge.

This week's prime example features the small Central American nation of Belize, with China, Cuba, and Haiti all playing supporting roles. Read more...

As the World Series approaches, let's ask a question: what if the Baseball Commissioner and all the team owners decided to "streamline" the baseball statistics that they had previously provided to the fans.

What if, in order to save money, they fired the score keepers and shut down the scoreboards in the parks, keeping track of only the runs scored, and games won or lost? What if box scores disappeared from the newspapers? Read more...

Here's the rest of the story about JPMorgan, the U.S. government generally, and USCIS, specifically.

As I noted in an August 20 blog posting, JPMorgan received about $94.7 billion in bailout funds, some of which it has repaid. In addition, regarding the international trade in workers, it: Read more...

They really love us in Ghana, or at least that's the indications from the results of last year's Visa Lottery. (More on Ghana shortly.)

This is the program that brings 50,000 immigrant visas a year to people around the world who are: A) lucky, and B) have no family or financial ties to the U.S., and who are neither refugees nor needed workers. By definition, these are people who would not qualify in any other way to get an immigrant visas. Read more...

It was several decades ago, I was doing some research at the southern frontier, and I was chatting with a Border Patrol Supervisor near the Rio Grande. He was relaxed and talkative, apparently between crises.

I had raised the subject of Social Security numbers and illegal aliens.

"You know, one of my buddies and I kicked around an idea about that," he said. Read more...

The people who have naturalized in the U.S. in the last decade are less well educated, and earn less in constant dollars than those who went through that process 20 years earlier – and there are far more of them.

That's the sobering news that can be seen in a recent publication of the DHS Office of Immigration Statistics; it is entitled "Characteristics of Persons Naturalizing in the United States Between 1980 and 2008" and was written by James Lee. Read more...

ICE has denied a range of data on immigration enforcement – data previously available – to a Syracuse University online clearinghouse.

According to a statement from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), ICE has refused to release anonymous statistical data on arrest location, the nature of the criminal charge, and the detention facility where the alien is being sent. Read more...

Can restrictionists look to the population movement to help hold down immigration? How about to environmentalists?

I spent yesterday at a stimulating conference in Washington of migration, population, and environmental activists sponsored by the Population Media Center. My impression was that many of the population people were sympathetic to immigration limits, and the environmentalists were rather less so. Read more...

Just about the quickest way to secure a permanent visa in another nation is to marry someone who lives there.

You do not have to have a good education, or marketable skills, or be persecuted; all you need is a willing marriage partner. Money often helps. Read more...

You rarely hear about international migration to Puerto Rico, for the simple reason that people are much more likely to leave that island than migrate to it.

But, as a recent ICE press release indicated, illegal immigration is so widespread in the American system that there are illegal aliens even in that perpetually depressed territory. Read more...

A recent issue of Immigration Daily reminded me that there is yet another way to thwart the enforcement of the immigration law, one that is available to only a select few.

This is through the introduction of private immigration bills in the Congress. These are a sort of migration-oriented version of the congressional earmarks we hear so much about, the appropriations for members' pet projects that get funded outside the normal budget process. Read more...

You could tell by the title of Friday morning's hearing "Protecting America's Harvest" that the House immigration subcommittee's agenda was tilted towards agri-business. Read more...

There's a nice contrast between two of the sets of administrative courts handling immigration cases – the Labor Department's Board of Alien Labor Certification Appeals (BALCA) and the DHS' Office of Administrative Appeals (OAA).

BALCA is considerably less secretive than OAA as this instance shows.

The case before the DOL panel involved an employer who wanted a labor certification, and thus a green card, for Donaciano Miranda, one of his workers. Read more...