ICE has just opened its Online Detention Locator System (ODLS) and I was curious about its contents and its utility. It tells people on the outside the names of those inside the ICE facilities.

Without having any detailed information on the detention system to compare it with, I found ODLS easier to use, more informative, and more accessible than I had expected. I also found it providing much more data (on different subjects, of course) than what one can glean from its sister agency, USCIS, a point to which I will return later. Read more...

Sometimes it is useful to view a public policy dispute from a different angle.

Let's compare, for instance, the posture of the restrictionists on the mainland of the U.S. to those in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Those on the mainland say we should try to enforce the immigration law, and hold down the annual arrivals of new immigrants. There is an unspoken assumption that the new arrivals and the long-term residents will all face the same tax laws. Similarly, everyone assumes that any U.S. citizen can be a state's governor. Read more...

Big disgraces in the immigration field beget little disgraces.

I was doing something on the internet the other day and was reminded of the long-term foolishness of America's Visa Lottery – it gives away 50,000 green cards every year to people who have no connection to the U.S., who are not refugees, and who bring neither needed skills nor money. They simply add to our burgeoning population. That's the big disgrace. Read more...

There is exactly one continuing means-tested federal assistance program that deliberately provides benefits to illegal aliens and nonimmigrants – that is WIC, which stands for women, infants and children.

Yet WIC, a $5 billion a year means-tested program, has been totally ignored in the new USCIS proposed rules which will make it easier for illegal aliens and nonimmigrants to waive fees for substantial immigration benefits which was discussed in a recent blog of mine. Read more...

Should you have to write a little memorandum to the government, in English, if you want a lifelong immigration benefit and cannot or do not want to pay, say, $470 for it?

The benefit could, for instance, convert you from illegal to legal status, and then allow you to work legally in the U.S. – maybe for the rest of your life. Or it could make you a citizen. Read more...

One of the central and unstated concepts of the more-migration types is that family unity can only be achieved in the United States.

If family member P is in Atlanta, and family member Q is in Uruguay, say, without a visa to the States, then American immigration law, the advocates would claim, is breaking up the family. In many of these situations the family could easily be united in Uruguay, but that is never mentioned.

Similarly, if A is married to B, and B gets deported, the strong possibility that the family could be reunited in, say, Uruguay is not discussed. Read more...

There have been two developments involving the H-1B nonimmigrant worker program recently; one is a major Senate proposal to deny H1-B workers to companies engaging in mass layoffs, and the other is a testing scandal related to a very small segment of the program.

The first is a proposed congressional action, the second, while set in concrete, deals only with physical therapists, and then indirectly. Read more...

USCIS announced Monday that they will give Haitian nationals another six months to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and the right to work that goes with it. No additional steps will be taken to cope with fraud in the second stage of the process.

The deadline for applications had been this July 20; it will now be January 18, 2011.

In both the earlier and the later period for applying, one must claim to have been in the U.S. on the date of the Haitian earthquake, January 12, 2010, in either legal or illegal status. Read more...

Foreign workers may displace Americans from many jobs, but as elected members of a state legislature?

A bizarre, migration-related, and up-to-date listing on a U.S. Department of Labor website raises that possibility, and even quotes a prevailing wage for such workers.

Think about mythical Assemblyman John Migro, a citizen of the Solomon Islands, representing San Diego in the California State Legislature. Somebody has got to set his salary, right? DOL can do that for you. Read more...

There are four basic ways of becoming an illegal alien in the US, and perhaps the government is focusing too much attention on the least of these flows. The four routes are:

1) You can sneak across a border without being noticed, or, in government words "enter without inspection." You are then an EWI.

2) You can enter legally at a port of entry, using your own name, on a valid visa, and subsequently decide to violate its terms, typically by staying longer than you should, or working when you should not. That makes you a visa abuser. Read more...

Does the U.S. want to push about two million, mostly not-very-interested-in-education young people into our already overcrowded and under-funded colleges so that they can claim legal status in the U.S., which they now lack?

That's one question that is not asked in a new report on the proposed DREAM Act, a specialized amnesty proposal that relates to people who came to the U.S. illegally before the age of 16. Read more...

It's odd that the government has not figured this out for itself.

There is a continuing, one might say chronic, shortage of Immigration Judges in the Justice Department. When then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales poked into the problem in 2006 there were 24 fully funded vacancies. Now according to an excellent report, "Backlog in Immigration Cases Continues to Climb," there are 48 of them. Read more...

Some recently released Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) numbers reminded me that a huge chunk of the American population is the responsibility (in some manner) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Putting together some numbers which OIS records but does not assemble, we have the following: Read more...

The House Appropriations Subcommittee for Homeland Security reported last week that it had flatlined funds for Border, Immigration and Trade Security functions. Read more...

Both the British and American governments want to change their nations' immigration policies; both, apparently, are currently engaged in maneuvers that fuzz the issues.

There are both parallels and differences between the two nations' systems, as they face similar questions: Should migration be reduced? And what should be done about the current population of illegal aliens? Read more...

Legalization advocates had what sounded like a pretty frank discussion of their legislative strategy, at the 7th Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference in Washington Friday.

The annual summertime gathering of pro-open borders policy wonks and some immigration lawyers took place at the Georgetown University Law School, and was sponsored by the Migration Policy Institute and the Catholic Immigration Network Inc. Read more...

The talk about what to do with America's illegal alien population has been focused on two alternatives: enforcement and legalization.

Stricter enforcement would, it is argued, deport some illegals, cause others to self-deport, and cause potential illegals to stay in their homelands. Read more...

Remember the story about the blind men who examined different parts of an elephant and came up with widely differing views of what it was? The man who felt the tusk was sure it was a big piece of polished wood, the one who touched the trunk said it was a snake, and the one who grasped one of the legs called it a tree.

This is essentially what happened yesterday at a hearing of the immigration subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives regarding the nation's immigration courts. It was hard to tell that the witnesses were describing the same entity. Read more...

It is an unattractive old story, but it keeps happening.

Newly-arrived aliens, usually with little or no chance of getting green cards, are cheated by their countrymen who promise – for stiff fees – legal status.

Recently four such schemes have come to light as prosecutors have hauled the immigration schemers into court, in New York and Pennsylvania. Three of them involve Haitian applicants (and con artists with what sound like Haitian names) and will be described later in this blog. Read more...

Two federal occupational health officials, discussing the severe job-site health issues of immigrants yesterday, simply ignored the variable of legal or illegal presence.

No one is arguing that a physician should not set the broken leg of an illegal alien, but it would be helpful if records were kept as to the likelihood of broken bones among different kinds of migrants. Read more...

While it is taboo to talk about a policy that would prohibit the admission of migrants who might not be able to assimilate – such as Muslims who insist that women must wear the burqa – soon it may be possible to use the variable of cultural assimilation to give amnesty to an illegal alien. Read more...

USCIS has just been sued by an employer's group for doing the right thing with a segment of the H-1B nonimmigrant worker program, according to an AP story.

It had not been clear to me earlier this year that the policy memorandum on the use of the H-1B program by the so-called "body shops" (who play the same role as crew leaders in the harvest of farm crops) was very significant, but the court case suggests it was the right move. Read more...

The news article from Germany carried a chilling lead sentence:

The more devout a young Muslim male in Germany is, the more likely he is to resort to violence, according to a federally financed study...

The "federal" mentioned in the story is the German federation, not our own, and it serves to remind us how reluctant our government is to examine the impact of religious extremism. Read more...

Some months after the State Department proposed to raise its migration-related fees, and many months after the Obama administration urged Congress to let the Labor Department do so, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposed to raise its fees. Read more...

As the amnesty/legalization debate heats up, there will be many a research report on the subject that suggests the impact of immigration on the rest of us is pretty bland.

One type of research that produces these seemingly soothing results was on display on June 7 at a seminar sponsored by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. Giovanni Peri, a professor at UC-Davis, used regression analysis to examine census data in a report entitled "The Impact of Immigrants in Recession and Economic Expansion," He concluded: Read more...

Sending Mexican nationals apprehended at the border back to the interior of Mexico is, of course, a good idea. It puts them back in, or at least near, their home communities, which presumably discourages, but does not eliminate, further attempts to cross the border illegally.

Routinely, Mexican nationals caught near the border are simply taken back to the nearest port of entry, and released into Mexico, where they are free to try to cross again the next night. Read more...

James R. Edwards Jr.'s recent blog on the nation's self-inflicted conflict between fighting poverty, on one hand, and importing it through an Open Doors immigration policy on the other, reminded me of a ludicrous extreme of this internal tension. Read more...

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of DHS is reluctant to issue statistics about many of its operations, but it does – as a service to aliens, citizens, corporations, and their lawyers – publish somewhat out-of-date information on the processing times of some of the petitions it handles, but not all of them.

These waiting times have dropped considerably, and commendably, in the last couple of years, but it is interesting to see where USCIS priorities lie. Which classes of petitions do they handle quickly, and which less quickly? Read more...

A news article in Sunday's New York Times reminded me of a conversation I had long ago with a retired diplomat.

He had been our Consul-General in Manila, one of the busiest centers of visa applications in the world: Read more...

They are both border states, both with substitute governors, but the immigration-related policies of New York State and Arizona could not be more different.

At opposite corners of the country, and with totally different political bents, Arizona is at the forefront of the movement to control illegal immigration, while New York has adopted a much less-well-publicized program to help certain criminal aliens escape deportation. Read more...