DHS continues to spend substantial staff resources on the alleged problems of tiny migrant populations, while giving short shrift to bigger issues.

It hides its priorities by never discussing in public the size of the populations involved. Read more...

Would you pay $37,000 to obtain a "letter of refusal"?

Probably not, but if you were in the topsy-turvy world of immigration enforcement and immigration linguistics you might be tempted to do so.

Several illegal aliens living in California bought such letters from diplomats employed by Armenia, according to an ICE press release about the arrest of five people involved in the scheme. Read more...

Publicists working for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have carefully hidden the central role of the Diversity Visa program (the visa lottery) in an extensive and brutal forced labor case involving young women from Africa.

The Diversity Visa program brings 50,000 people to the U.S. every year; people with no connections to the U.S., people without either needed skills, or refugee status, or money to invest; people who have simply won a free government lottery. For more on this program see this blog. Read more...

The exploitative H-1B program for permitting corporations to hire nonimmigrant high-tech workers at cut-rate wages got a couple of unrelated but well-deserved kicks in the ribs last month.

A federal court ruled in favor of a USCIS memorandum designed to limit some of the worst abuses of the program, and the U.S. Labor Department forced a software firm to pay $1 million in back wages to 135 of its workers. Read more...

Can we logically link the following three phenomena:

• massive illegal immigration,
• historic high rates of teenage unemployment, and
• historic high rates of teenage obesity?

Sidney Weintraub, a very distinguished scholar specializing in Latin America, works with a prestigious think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. He released this message today (since removed from the CSIS site), which I quote in full:

Reliability of Mexican Authors
Sidney Weintraub

"Going home" has a pleasant overtone. "Being deported" does not.

Unfortunately the open borders people have totally outmaneuvered the restrictionists linguistically. They have caused the media to use soft words to describe the lawbreakers, like "unauthorized immigrants" and "undocumented workers," while using harsh words like "arrest" and "deportation" for normal enforcement actions. Read more...

DHS is, at least, consistent.

Whether a would-be alien worker is rich or poor, a chum of the ambassador or a friendless waif, a distinguished artist or a minor-league criminal, some arm of the Department of Homeland Security is busily making it easier for that alien to come to, or stay legally in, America.

No matter how narrow or wide the visa category, DHS keeps expanding openings in the immigration structure, one at a time. It is a highly detailed, time-consuming task, but it continues month after month. Read more...

The recent release of data on the immigration judges' asylum decisions by the TRAC system reminded me of the uses and abuses of the asylum process, an interesting but relatively minor part of the immigration system.

These data also cast some light on our role in Iraq, as noted below. Read more...

It was probably a coincidence, but two quite different studies of alien populations were issued within 24 hours of each other, each showing that migrants appear to be less interested in the U.S. than formerly.

The more numerically significant of the two, the report of the Pew Hispanic Center, as noted in a posting by Mark Krikorian, estimated that the number of illegal aliens in the country had dropped to 11.1 million from 12.0 million two years earlier. That's a decrease, over two years, of 7.5 percent. Read more...

An arm of the Department of Homeland Security is apparently paying some subdued, indirect attention to the 14th Amendment controversy – should "anchor babies" be allowed, as they are now, to become citizens at birth?

It has issued a somber message to pregnant alien women thinking about coming to this country. (For more on the birthright citizenship controversy see the new Backgrounder by my colleague Jon Feere.) Read more...

The newly issued 2009 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics provides some useful insights into how our government deals with immigrants, while simultaneously not providing some badly needed policy-relevant data. Read more...

It has been known along the southern border for decades that some birth certificates, particularly in rural areas, were both suspect and likely to be used in U.S. passport applications.

Not all midwives and rural county clerks were beyond suspicion.

But what better way for illegal aliens, usually of Mexican extraction, to obtain instant legalization than to obtain State Department-issued U.S. passports? Read more...

America needs a vigorous conversation about the size of our future population, and a vibrant organization making the pro-slow-growth argument.

Such an organization would, among other things, argue for a much lower rate of immigration, but it would do so from a possibly sturdier foundation than the one currently available to the restrictionists. Read more...

We all know how nicely the Bush and Obama Administrations treated JPMorgan and the other big Wall Street banks.

But the fact that JPMorgan has a cushy relationship with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services may not be as well known.

In fact, JPMorgan and the international trade in workers might be called a "three-fer": Read more...

This is a tale of how two governments, the mighty United States, and the not-so-mighty Bahamas, handle the same story – the apparently increasing illegal migration from Haiti.

If you look at a map, you can see that the quickest way to get from Haiti to the U.S. is through hundreds of miles of Bahamian waters.

On Monday the government of The Bahamas issued a press release saying: Read more...

Increasingly (and appropriately) Congress, in recent years, has been placing ceilings on some inflows of nonimmigrants. These ceilings apply only to a tiny minority of nonimmigrants, and of nonimmigrant categories.

As might be expected, the mass-migration lobbyists have been busily expanding, where possible, and where they cannot, defining away these numerical limits. Read more...

It is not OK for government employees to play pool or poker during office hours, but it is OK, apparently, for them to play expensive games with scarce taxpayer-supplied, immigration-control funds.

Congress, its semi-autonomous watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) have all had their frivolous moments recently. It might have been better for the nation had the people involved spent their work days inside a pool hall. Read more...

It would be helpful if people realized that deportation is simply restitution, not punishment.

If you rob a bank, and the cops catch you before you spend the loot, the criminal justice system will do two things: it will restore the money to the bank (restitution) and toss you in jail (punishment). Restitution is simply restoring the status quo, making things like they were before the crime happened. Read more...

Reading the recently released Pew report on the remarkable fertility of illegal aliens – twice that of Americans generally – I detected something else.

Our borders are not only porous for adult illegals, they are clearly not kid-proof either.

Mentioned, but not stressed, in the media coverage of the Pew study is one fact: there are 1.1 million foreign-born children of illegal alien parents. They are all 17 or younger. The strong implication is that almost all of them are in illegal status. Read more...

If a comprehensive amnesty program is not in the cards, which seems to be the case, one of the ways for Open Doors lobbyists to admit more migrants is to manipulate congressional ceilings on migration.

Perhaps it would be useful for those interested in controlling immigration to describe how this has happened in the past, and how it might happen in the future. Read more...

One of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries centered on the detective's noticing that a dog that might have been expected to bark did not do so.

I am beginning to wonder why there has been so little detected illegal migration from Haiti after the earthquake. Are we getting the whole picture? Read more...

I must admit that I was more than a little naive when I wrote a blog entitled "A Double Whammy in That Appropriations Bill" regarding last week's Senate vote on a supplemental appropriation bill involving both border enforcement and higher fees for the H-1B and L-1 visas.

"Some of the funding," I wrote, "for the additional enforcement – will come from discouraging nonimmigrant worker programs, a small-scale double whammy."

Very small scale, in turns out. Read more...

While the Senate's effort to soothe restrictionists with some more Border Patrol agents and a couple of unmanned drones is an inadequate gesture, as Mark Krikorian's "Cheap Date" blog indicates, at least part of that supplemental appropriations package is quite commendable.

That relates to some of the funding for the additional enforcement – it will come from discouraging nonimmigrant worker programs, a small-scale double whammy. Read more...

A group of about 350 H-1B teachers from the Philippines, working in Louisiana, have been badly exploited by a recruiting agency, according to a recent article in USA Today.

I sense that there was not one, but three sets of victims of this scheme. Read more...

I feel sorry for the guy, and am pleased that the Border Patrol rescued him from the flooded Rio Grande, but the news story reminded me of the seldom-remarked-upon klutz factor in illegal immigration.

According to the account he was stranded in a tree while trying to cross the flooded river and had been there for five days. The BP spokesperson said that he was "severely dehydrated." Read more...

There's a new ranking immigration lawyer at the Department of Justice; his background is corporate law, civil rights battles, and Yale. Read more...

The long, detailed memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that was leaked late last week, upon inspection, proves to be a serious document that says a lot about the agency. Here's a somewhat blurred copy of it.

It confirms my suspicion that USCIS is not a semi-judicial agency, weighing the pros and cons of public policy, but an active promoter of immigration in all of its many forms. Read more...

In an earlier blog I reported about on an inept internet middleman that offered to file a visa lottery application for me (for a fee).

It did so even though I said I had been born in the U.S. (which is true) and that my mother had been born on Bouvet Island, an obscure, never-populated Norwegian possession in the Antarctic (which was not true and could not possibly have been true, since no ne has ever been born there). Read more...

Once in a while it is nice to see the wealthy and pampered – like tax-dodging, yacht-owning citizens and their illegal immigrant sidekicks – zapped just like the sweltering peasants at the Arizona border.

That's what happened on Long Island Sound to – I kid you not – the Rich family, their 63-foot private vessel, and two illegal aliens. It was all in the New York Times on July 27. Read more...