The headline above was not the headline used by the Washington Post of January 9 over an immigration policy story; the Post's bland take was: "Immigrants invest in U.S. businesses in exchange for visas", but either heading would have been equally accurate. Read more...

A comprehensive survey of America's more than 15,000 new PhDs indicates that the ones on temporary visas, such as student visas, have much less debt than their U.S. citizen and permanent-resident (i.e., green-card holding) counterparts. Read more...

Hidden within the pages of a newly released, highly regarded federal report on higher education in the U.S. are these facts: in 2008 there were more new PhDs with temporary visas than ever before, and their degree of reliance on American funding, always high, was higher than in earlier years.

The report thus contradicts the claims of academia that foreign students are a boon to the U.S. economy; more on this below. Read more...

While I think the Casino Visa program is a terrible idea, as I argued in a previous blog – granting 55,000 totally needless "diversity" visas by lottery to people with no U.S. connections – we taxpayers might as well get something out of it if it has to continue.

How about a quarter of a billion dollars a year? Read more...

We all know that the benefits of immigration are highly concentrated, on the immigrants themselves, their family members, their lawyers, and their employers – and that the costs of massive (low-income) migration are spread almost invisibly throughout society in terms of lower wages for many workers, and higher costs for many taxpayers. Read more...

The proposed House amnesty bill (HR 4321) not only grants legal status to virtually all 12 million illegal aliens in the country, it also provides (in Sec. 317) legalization 100,000 wannabe illegals each year for three years who have not yet even set foot in the country. For a summary of the 644-page bill see here, and for the complete text see here. Read more...

Restrictionists should call them Casino Visas, and the awarding body, the Visa Casino. The terms are equally as accurate as Visa Lottery, but the negative implications are – appropriately – stronger. Read more...

Most of the conversation about immigration policy reform these days involves the word "comprehensive", as if this is the best, if not the only, way to tackle the issue. (The latest attempt at a comprehensive bill will be introduced today.) Read more...

Although once-upon-a-time all immigrants were self-starters, only a tiny minority of legal immigrants now are in this category – all because of our peculiar immigration policies.

As promised in a previous blog here is some information on this interesting subset of immigrants. Read more...

"Self Starters" are well regarded in the American culture – they create their own careers without help from family or old-school ties. All legal immigrants to the United States used to be self-starters.

But no more. Read more...

There is a question in current U.S. immigration policy debate that has the potential for tearing apart the Open Borders coalition: should the U.S. recognize same-sex marriages in the immigration context?

In other words, should we grant marital visas to aliens marrying Americans of the same sex? Read more...

The U.S. has been putting numerical limits on most classes of immigrant admissions since the 1920s. There are qualitative rules but no numerical limits for most classes of nonimmigrants – i.e., temporary visitors, like tourists, students, or businessmen.

Given that roughly 40 percent of the illegal alien population in the U.S. consists of visa abusers – i.e., former holders of once-valid nonimmigrant visas – why not set numerical limits on those particular flows of nonimmigrants that contribute most heavily to our illegal alien population? Read more...

Among the people making money by encouraging migration to the U.S. are overseas facilitators offering advice – of all kinds to all comers – on how to get into the States. See my earlier blog.

In Thailand this includes observations about the alleged lack of vigor shown in America's ban on prostitutes. Read more...

It is useful to mention Jack Abramoff from time to time. He's the most lavishly paid, most outrageous, and most jailed of the Open Borders lobbyists.

This week his allies lost one substantive battle, but were victorious in a largely symbolic one.

Abramoff should be remembered for his successful effort to keep the Saipan sweatshops open, and for his advocacy of the job-killing H1-B visas for foreign computer programmers. Read more...

CIS does all of us a service by its annual listing of Immigration-Related Theses and Dissertations, such as Matt Graham's most recent edition published earlier this month.

Each of the approximately 360 papers listed for 2008 represents from one to two year's full-time work, sometimes more, and its completion is usually the last step on the way to the writer's securing a Ph.D. In these studies could contain a treasure-chest of highly useful information and insights that could help the nation as it struggles to define its immigration policy. Read more...

Although one would not know it by reading immigration policy debates, money paid to middlemen, mostly Americans, plays a major role in the whole process.

If one seeks to manage, or at least nudge, events in immigration it is useful to visualize the financial transactions involving the non-migratory actors in the field, the people and institutions that shape migration but do not migrate themselves. Read more...

Two recent decisions by the Obama Administration suggest a bizarre consistency -- no matter what the pressures are from Left or Right, the government will not do anything to or for immigrants that would discourage sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs).

It is not that there is a giant, well-funded lobby for sexually-transmitted diseases, but there might as well be one. Read more...

This is a story about the Russian immigration service, the ghost of Leon Trotsky, and me.

There are three bits of background to bear in mind before I tell the story.

1) Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), founder of the Red Army, was one of the possible heirs to Vladimir Lenin as the dictator of the USSR after Lenin's death; Joseph Stalin won the power struggle and, it is widely believed, caused the murder of Trotsky, by ice pick, in Mexico City. I never met any of them. Read more...

It sounds harmless but the word "streamline" spells trouble in immigration policy debates.

Open Borders proponents are always wanting to "streamline" this or that immigration management procedure, all in the name of governmental efficiency. Read more...

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, most of the other English-speaking nations in the world have adopted a points system as part of their immigrant-screening process. Read more...

When you look at the November election returns as they impact immigration policy, the results are not just apples and oranges, they are: one apple, two oranges – and in the distant Western Pacific, a split coconut. Read more...

As I suggested in an earlier blog, there is much to be learned from other nations' attempt to rationalize their immigration policies, and one of the good places to find out about such matters is the Australian scholarly publication People and Place.

Sometimes you can read about how other nations have sought to solve problems common to all nations of immigration, and sometimes you can read about problems that they are having that may well descend on the U.S. in the near future. Read more...

You had to be watching carefully on election night, but deep in the wilds of Brooklyn there was a noticeable defeat for one of the Roman Catholic Church's leading spokesmen for open borders.

And the pro-open-borders New York Times helped bring about the defeat. Read more...

People interested in immigration to the U.S., and the immigration policies of this nation, might find it useful, from time to time, to look at what other democracies do with their immigration policies.

With that in mind I would like to mention People and Place, an academic, peer-reviewed quarterly dealing with immigration and related issues, and published by Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Read more...

Does poverty-stricken, coup-beset Fiji -- an island nation with less than a million population -- have a technological migration management tool the United States lacks?

As a matter of fact, yes.

A New York Times page-one headline recently reminded us: "U.S. Can't Trace Foreign Visitors on Expired Visas". While we record the arrival of visa-holders, we have no way, currently, of knowing if they have actually left the country, or are still here, perhaps in violation of the terms of their entry document. Read more...

There should be a Nobel Prize in demography to go along with those for studies in economics and other fields.

Were there one, it might encourage more attention to studies of what happens to the environment during population increases, and, more pertinently, how international immigration impacts population growth in an area of in-migration. Read more...

One of the major sources of illegal immigration is the flow of persons into the U.S. with valid temporary visas who later (often quickly) drop out of legal status. Tourists (usually on B-1 visas) and foreign students (on either F-1 or J-1 visas) produce most of this type of illegal immigrants, the visa-abusers, often called visa-overstayers. Read more...

The use of deliberately fuzzy terms -– "undocumented worker" is my favorite -– continues to cloud the immigration policy debate, always to the detriment of the restrictionists' position.

A good example popped up in yesterday's New York Times; the headline was "Ideas for Immigrant Detention Include Converting Hotels and Building Models". In the article the term "noncitizens" was used to define the inmates. Read more...

The principal U.S. migration management agency has done a lot of institutional migrating over the decades. During the late 19th Century, as the Bureau of Immigration, it was first in the Department of the Interior, and then in the Treasury Department. It moved to the no-longer-existing Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903, and then became one of the main parts of the Department of Labor when it was created in 1913. Read more...

The two units within the State Department that deal with migration management are the Bureau of Consular Affairs and its considerably smaller cousin, the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Both are headed by Assistant Secretaries. Read more...