The director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) offered no help at all yesterday regarding the influx of nonimmigrant workers vis-a-vis the current high levels of unemployment in the United States. Read more...

One would not know that there were swirling immigration controversies from the content of yesterday's hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security on the proposed 2011 budget of USCIS. Read more...

The in-house immigration appeals agency in the Department of Homeland Security, the Administrative Appeals Office, does not provide statistics on what it does. Read more...

A Nebraska Appeals Court late last year decided that an illegal alien who was hurt while working in a meat plant should get workers' compensation benefits, according to an article in the Lincoln Journal Star.

From the point of view of restrictionists, is that the right call? Read more...

DHS Secretary Napolitano decided earlier this week to allow Greece to join the Visa Waiver program, so beloved by our tourist industry and other Open Borders types.

As one consular official (who will remain unnamed) e-mailed: "Let me get this straight. In the middle of the biggest financial meltdown to hit a European country in decades, we have added them to visa waiver?" Read more...

In addition to the prominent immigration policy decision-makers – the president, the chairs of the congressional committees and the presidential appointees in the Executive Branch – there are many other sets of less obvious policy players, located deep in the federal bureaucracy.

Today I learned of a group whose leanings were known to me, but for whom I had no name. They are the quietly Open Borders officials within the State Department, termed the "Black Dragons" in a recent article. Read more...

The Social Security Administration, along with the Department of Homeland Security, operates the E-Verify screening program to identify potential illegal alien workers.

But, according to the SSA's own Inspector General, in a recent report the SSA, as a large employer, did not fully use the E-Verify system to screen it own employees.

The federal government encourages all employers to use the system, and insists on it for some of its contractors, but apparently the HR types in SSA did not get the message. Read more...

Today's New York Times carries a story about a private-for-profit language school in Florida that "was a front for the sale of fraudulent applications for student visas."

A total of 80 people, including the managers of the Florida Language Institute in Miami, were arrested, the Times reported.

According to ICE, the agency in charge of the arrests, the students "rarely, if ever, attended classes". Read more...

We at CIS are often highly critical of the government, but a Justice Department publication just appeared that is worthy of high praise.

The praise is for the publication itself, the FY 2009 Statistical Year Book of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), not necessarily for the program being discussed. The 129-page report is online as a pdf here. Read more...

It's bad enough that people can buy their way into the United States, as described in a previous blog.

But if a bill (S. 3029) introduced by Senator John Kerry (D-MA) passes the price will be reduced to $100,000. The price was once was $1 million, then it fell to $500,000.

And the $100,000 does not even have to be your money. Read more...

What happens when an obscure USCIS appellate body handles disputes about visas for religious workers?

In my review of the 62 decisions made in 2009 made by the Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) the answer appears to be – carefully and narrowly.

Bearing in mind the definitions I am using discussed below, it looks like 32 of the decisions went against the churches and/or religious workers, and 30 were more or less in their favor. Read more...

We often read about how the nation's high-tech corporations say they use the H-1B program to bring the world's best and brightest to the U.S.

But is that how they really use the program? Only some of them do, according to Prof. Ron Hira of the Rochester Institute of Technology; the rest use it as a handy source of relatively low-cost talent. Read more...

Sometimes it is hard to tell the significance of a government document just by reading it.

Sometimes the true impact becomes clear only when the activists speak out. A case in point: the recent USCIS announcement regarding employer-employee relationships in the H-1B program. Read more...

In a recent blog, "Our 89-Year-Old, Self-Created Booby Trap in Immigration Policy," I pointed out how huge backlogs of approved visas for would-be immigrants have always caused additional pressure to expand immigration.

The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (the Barbara Jordan Commission), some 13 years ago, noted an even more significant problem regarding these backlogs, particularly in the siblings, nieces, and nephews program: Read more...

Four score and nine years ago our forefathers did something doubly stupid.

Not only was the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 clearly racist with its country-of-origin quotas, it also introduced a structural defect into our immigration system that has haunted us ever since. Read more...

The British Government is going to introduce a little behavior-modification into their citizenship (naturalization) screening process.

The London Telegraph reports that the art of queuing – which the Brits are so good at – will become part of their citizenship tests. Read more...

The Obama Administration has taken one step forward, and another step back, in two released regulations about nonimmigrant workers. Read more...

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will be in Mexico City February 16-18 for talks on airline security, according to a DHS press release.

While she's there will she raise the issue of interior repatriation of the illegal aliens caught at the U.S./ Mexico border? Probably not, and that's a shame. (The word immigration is not mentioned in the press release.) Read more...

The generally-accepted concept in the restrictionist community is that federal agencies and courts nearly always rule in favor of the alien. I think that's true.

But I found an exception: a series of recent decisions by the Department of Labor's (obscure) Board of Alien Labor Certification Appeals (BALCA).

Truth to tell it was in the middle of the weekend blizzard and I was unconsciously looking for something useful to do other than shoveling snow. Read more...

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) offers much detailed information to Haitians and their advocates on how the temporary legalization fees of $470 can be waived in the Haitian Temporary Protected Status program.

It offers considerably less information on fee waivers to the Congress. Read more...

What do you do with a middle-sized visa program when two different government agencies find that 30 to 33 percent of its applications are fraudulent?

If you are Congress, you renew it. Read more...

While some restrictionists may think that immigration lawyers always win their cases, this is not so.

The highest immigration judicial authority in the land, the Executive Office of Immigration Review, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, publishes a little list, available to all, of 374 immigration lawyers (at the time of this writing) who have been disciplined by EOIR. Read more...

Why should the application period for the Temporary Protected Status for Haitian illegals be extended over 180 days?

This was among my thoughts over the last few days as I attended a DHS "Stakeholders Meeting" on fee waivers for TPS applicants in Washington, and as I was interviewed by both NPR, on the left, and Fox News, on the right, regarding this program. Read more...

* With apologies to the late Ralph Chaplin, the I.W.W. organizer who wrote the words to "Solidarity Forever"

Here's a thought: Maybe before we consider another amnesty for illegal aliens, we should complete the last amnesty – the one voted by the Congress a generation ago, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Read more...

One of the perpetual problems with America's efforts to manage international migration is that they are always underfunded.

The State Department has proposed about $84 million a year in increases in its nonimmigrant (i.e., temporary) visa fees, and has asked for public comment. (See the second page in this notice from the Federal Register).

We should all rally around and encourage the State Department in this venture. Read more...

One of the ironies of the new Temporary Protected Status program for Haitians illegally in the country on the date of the earthquake is that they can use illegally obtained welfare benefits to support an application to waive the $470 application fee for the TPS program.

I doubt that there will be much utilization of this quirk – there are some useful bars to the award of such benefits to illegal aliens in these programs – but the Department of Homeland Security seems to be unaware of the possibility of the illicit use of programs such as Food Stamps and TANF (the old AFDC). Read more...

The Miami Herald tells us that something like 200,000 Haitians, now in the U.S., illegally, are going to be given temporary legal status in the U.S. through grants of Temporary Protected Status. The number is much larger than earlier estimates issued by the government, and might be an over statement. Read more...

It is highly likely that there will be a flood of Haitian refugees in the next few months, no matter how heroic the Administration‘s efforts are to meet the short- and long-term needs of the people in Haiti.

It is time to make some hard-nosed suggestions about the distribution of those refugees. Read more...

The open-borders supporters continue to push the linguistic boundaries as they seek to impose on all of us new and fuzzier ways of discussing immigration policy, a subject covered in an earlier blog of mine. Read more...

In an earlier blog I said that it would cost about $100,000 each for a rich alien family of five to secure green cards through the investor visa program. I also said that the program generates jobs for Americans. I was wrong on both accounts.

The jobs can be hard to identify and the costs can be much less. Read more...