There are lots of ways to use money to beat the immigration laws; some are blessed by Congress (as in investor visas), others are out-right criminal bribery.

I thought I could count all the ways to outwit the system, but learned of a new one (at least new to me) while reading the most recent edition of CIS' e-news roundup, CISNEWS. Read more...

My headline, above, should have been used as the title of the Government Accountability Office's recent tax compliance report. I calculate, based on the GAO report, that those two groups are routinely depriving the U.S. Treasury of an estimated $6 billion a year in income taxes.

GAO, as usual, wrote the report in its trademark, color-me-gray prose, but, unusually, missed a gold mine of government statistics that would have shown the dramatic size of the problem. Read more...

Generalizations are risky, but it appears to me that Obama's Labor Department is rather more careful about flooding labor markets with migratory labor than Obama's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), with the Department of State and other Department of Homeland Security agencies somewhere in between. Read more...

The wage-depressing H-1B program, for high-tech nonimmigrant workers, had another interesting week. This was on top of the smallest set of applications for the program in recent memory – there were just 19,100 petitions filed in early April for the annual limit of 85,000 slots, as noted in a previous blog. Read more...

Sometimes it is useful to review one of those legal battles in which a clearly illegal alien delays his well-deserved deportation – in this case, for nearly 10 full years.

In many instances, of course, a not-so-deserving alien never leaves.

The alien in this case is named Paulin Shabaj; he is a citizen of Albania. Here's his story: Read more...

The issuance of a new, more secure green card and a study by CIS Director Research Steven Camarota were among the topics discussed at this morning's hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

The sole witness was Alejandro Mayorkas, Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), in the Department of Homeland Security. Read more...

While USCIS encourages corporations to hire more foreign H-1B workers on its website, Alberta, the oil-rich Canadian province, has done the reverse and, citing the economic slowdown, has closed its borders to the same kind of high-tech foreign workers. Read more...

The Department of Homeland Security has some interesting rules about what is private and what is public in its record-keeping systems. Let's look at three imagined scenarios:

#1. You are an illegal alien actively engaged in human smuggling. One of your coyote colleagues was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is in jail somewhere. You want to keep him sweet, so that he does not reveal your name. You want to find where he is and you want to make sure he has plenty of money to buy stuff at the facility commissary and to use the phone. Read more...

Once upon a time – back in 1998 – there was a big wind, a really big wind, in Central America. It was called Hurricane Mitch, a category five storm. Read more...

It has been revealed that the Times Square bomber was once an H-1B nonimmigrant worker at one point in his immigration history, and it is likely that the main schemer in the Goldman Sachs mortgage scandal was one, too.

These are just two more blows to a once-mighty foreign worker program that has fallen on multiple hard times. Applications for the program – presumably depressed by the recession – have dropped to all-time lows and it appears that USCIS has started to run an ad on its website to drum up more business. Read more...

How often does a nefarious immigration lobbyist get featured in a movie?

Not often, but the exception, Jack Abramoff, plays the lead role in an about-to-be released documentary, "Casino Jack and the United States of Money," shown in a preview last night on the campus of George Washington University, here in the District of Columbia. Read more...

Immigration policy research is rarely thought of as sexy.

Beautiful women do not come up to you at a party and say, breathily, "That's a wonderful piece of analysis."

But there is a sort of cloak-and-dagger romance in the way that the August Congressional Research Service, an arm of the Library of Congress, more or less releases its studies. Read more...

Presumably reacting to the recession, the flow of nonimmigrants into the United States fell 8 percent in FY 2009 from the previous year's total. The drop was from 39.4 million to 36.2 million, according to data just released by the DHS Office of Immigration Statistics. Read more...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) raised the issue of abuses in the H-1B and L-1 nonimmigrant worker programs at yesterday's hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Grassley thanked the witness at the hearing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, for taking steps to tighten the rules of the H-1B program, as they related to intermediate employers called "job shops" and urged her to pay attention to a DHS Inspector General's report of abuses within the L-1 program. Read more...

The once unstoppable H-1B program that used to bring more than 100,000 new temporary alien workers every year to the U.S. appears to be in trouble, and its friends are rallying around.

USCIS is currently running what looks very much like an advertisement for the program, included in the flashing photo-montage of highlights on its website, and the Grand Old Man of Immigration Law has written somberly about the program and its problems. Read more...

There was an interesting and unconscious test of the attractions of immigration and terrorism policy yesterday on Capitol Hill.

Eight speakers attended a Senate hearing on "visa security"; seven of them spoke only, or almost only, on airports and terrorism; one (John McCain) spoke about illegal immigration. Given the duties of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, any of the eight could have spoken about either subject. Read more...

A total of 1,130,818 persons obtained permanent resident alien status in fiscal year 2009; it was the first time in U.S. history that this number topped one million for the fifth year in a row.

Department of Homeland Security data on the year was released a few days ago. Read more...

The USCIS has begun a comprehensive review of one aspect of its decision-making, and it starts in an interesting place – the migration problems of the rich and famous.

The agency has released a summary of the April 12, 2010, "listening session" which dealt with the "Request for Evidence Project," an examination of the agency's requests for information in connection with the three nonimmigrant visa classes, O, P, and Q, and one immigrant category, E 11. Read more...

Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street powerhouse charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with fraud, is also a substantial user of H-1B workers. Read more...

The USCIS Office of Public Engagement has issued an invitation for comments on its various programs, and it behooves one and all to respond.

The survey is online at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6N2T3BQ and is open to the public. Read more...

A significant think tank has just issued a study on the effects of the proposed legalization of currently illegal alien residents.

It states (on p. 18) that "Our estimates suggest that 87 percent of former crossers and 91 percent of overstayers filed federal tax returns in 2002." Read more...

The Mexican House of Representatives has called for that nation's government to boycott all goods made in Oklahoma because it is upset by that state's unique tax-withholding scheme, according to an AP dispatch. Read more...

A well-attended session at a Washington think tank yesterday provided some nuanced clues as to the intellectual rhetoric that will accompany the upcoming legalization debate.

Briefly: 1) if your research asks soft questions, you will get soft answers, and 2) there are the inevitable statements that legalization is just part of a broader, thoughtful, problem-solving program. Read more...

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, late in the Bush administration, issued an emergency ruling that silently robs the Social Security Trust Fund of nearly a billion dollars a year, every year.

This stealth attack may have been reported in the press somewhere, but I doubt it.

As is everything at the murky intersection of immigration and tax policy, the matter is complicated, indirect, and until now totally hidden from public view. Further, USCIS's adamant, continuing refusal to routinely issue statistics on much of what it is doing makes the murk murkier. Read more...

This morning USCIS announced that the number of H-1B petitions filed in the first week of the month fell sharply from last year's comparable period, and even more dramatically vis-a-vis earlier years. One of the impacts of this is a major blow to the agency's budget. Read more...

An interesting question has arisen as a result of a congressional hearing: would a massive legalization program, as many advocates want, slow the processing of applications filed routinely by citizens and legal aliens wanting immigration benefits? Read more...

The Obama Administration's Labor Department has severely penalized a New Jersey-based software firm for violating the rules of the H-1B program.

Peri Software Solutions Inc. and its president, Sarib Perisamya, were both charged with a series of violations, fined $439,000 and told to pay $1,456,422 in backwages. The Department's press release also said the "company could face a two-year debarment from participating in [the] H-1B program." Read more...

I was talking to a nonimmigrant PhD student from Nepal the other day, and asked him what his dissertation would be about. He is studying engineering at the University of Maryland-College Park and he replied that it would deal with nano materials.

Then I asked, "what can you do with that specialty in Nepal?" Read more...

Supposing you work for a government agency that has just improved its anti-bank-robbery program.

Could you write a press release about it without using the words "bank" or "robber"? Well, USCIS has pulled off a comparable feat visa-a-vis the E-Verify program, whose sole purpose in life is preventing illegal aliens from getting jobs. Read more...

Harris N. Miller, the talented immigration lobbyist, the man who expanded the H-1B program to new, huge dimensions and helped create immigration breaks for the Irish, has a (relatively) new job. Read more...