Senator Charles Grassely (R-IA), or more precisely his staff, has opened up a goldmine of policy and statistical information on the use of allegedly short-term foreign workers holding U.S. white collar jobs.

He and Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) have introduced legislation to curb the wide-spread and little-noted abuses in the H-1B and the L-1 visa programs. Read more...

The team of five Presidential appointees working on immigration management in the Department of Homeland Security include two people with substantial resumes in the immigration field, two neophytes, and one in-between. All five have law degrees.

The five positions on the current Departmental organization chart that play leading roles in immigration matters are the Secretary, the Deputy Secretary, and three agency heads with ranks at about the Assistant Secretary level. Read more...

The management (or mismanagement) of the flows of immigrants into the United States is, thanks to Congress, an extremely complicated task assigned to at least eight agencies spread over four cabinet departments. If anything, the second Bush Administration's decision to re-organize the immigration process (and dismantle the old Immigration and Naturalization Service) made matters more complex. Read more...

There are four Republicans, compared to five Democrats, on the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security, a subset of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Read more...

There are five Democrats and four Republicans on the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security, which is part of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

All five Democrats drew grades of F on the immigration policy votes followed by Numbers USA, the restrictionist organization. Read more...

The six Republican members of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law can be expected to struggle, probably in vain, to bring some restraint into proposed immigration legislation. The subcommittee is part of the House Judiciary Committee. Read more...

A congressional subcommittee may sound like a minor entity, but when it comes to lawmaking it is where much of the action takes place. Most of the provisions of any bill emerging from a subcommittee are likely to be in place when the parent body, the House or the Senate, takes final action on it. Read more...

Immigration policy is usually made by politicians, and not presidential ones.

As the Obama Administration shows signs of tackling the subject, it might be helpful to sketch the players who have strongly influenced the immigration policy scene in recent years, which I do in this the first of several blogs on the subject. Read more...

The New York Times, in an editorial page item on Sunday, describes the use of illegal workers in the ongoing upstate New York apple harvest from the point of view of a poetic apple farmer.

Exploitation of illegal workers, and the exclusion of unemployed legal residents from the harvest, is described thusly: "It was the usual harvest race, under constant threat of disruption from bad weather and the Border Patrol... Read more...

The very worst sliver of America's immigration policy, one that brought both worker exploitation and a population explosion to an outlying set of U.S.-controlled islands, comes to an end on November 28 after more than a decade of controversy. Read more...

An irony within the immigration policy debate relates to the treatment of incarcerated illegal aliens.

Immigrant advocate groups complain that those being held prior to deportation are sometimes mistreated and sometimes have inadequate medical care.

The irony is that if the immigrant advocate groups had not campaigned so successfully for so much due process for those in the deportation process there would be far fewer detained aliens to worry about in the first place. Read more...