It is well known that many H-1B workers are, in effect, indentured by employers who have filed to obtain green cards for them — they are nominally free to leave, but it can be hard to keep your resident alien application alive after leaving the employer who set it in motion.

But, as I have learned recently in conversations with would-be H-1B workers at a major D.C.-area university this spring, the feeling of indenture starts even earlier. Read more...

The H-1B nonimmigrant program for high-tech and other professional workers bears a couple of prominent bruises as the FY 2013 filing season opens.

While network TV routinely ignores abuses in the immigration system, today's full-throated "CBS This Morning" treatment of the misuse of H-1B and B-1 visas was a welcome exception to the rule. Read more...

What do you do with a backlogged set of immigrant-worker applications at a time of high unemployment? In the United States such queues just keep growing, but not in Canada. Read more...

While supporters of the H1-B program say it brings us the "best and the brightest", a careful examination of a recent federal court case in Ohio – strangely masked in secrecy by the judge – shows us how shabby the program can be.

The case involves: a young alien man with a mysterious legal status, probably an illegal alien, who has a bachelor's degree from a marginal educational institution, a private one that accepts all applicants, and his employer, a mortgage finance company in trouble in two different states. Read more...

By now we are all familiar with the charge that many major users of the H-1B program for high-tech and other professionals, including at least some of the India-based "body shops" or out-placement organizations, are biased against American workers, especially older (i.e., 35-plus) ones.

And now one has been charged in court with being sexist, too — by a woman with an Indian name. Read more...

If you compare its numbers in two different governmental publications, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) seems to be predicting that 88 percent of the applicants for EB-5 investor visas will not, in fact, get the green cards that they had been promised for their half-million-dollar investments.

There is also a possibility that this is not a prediction of program demise so much as a case of the front-office promoters of this highly controversial program not talking to the green-eyeshade types in their own agency who deal with the Federal Register. Read more...

USCIS has done exactly the right thing to one of its forms — a form frequently misused by aliens — but its press people have totally blurred this fraud-fighting accomplishment.

I know that a discussion of a government form is sure to glaze the eyes, but this time it is significant.

The form is the I-797C — the Notice of Action — which formally confirms that something is happening to an alien's desire for legal status, but does not indicate that anything has happened yet. Some aliens have used it to fool the gullible into believing that the alien has full legal status. Read more...

Here's the story: Eight hapless Mexican would-be illegals got hopelessly trapped in the mud on a near-freezing day and needed three fire departments, two units of the Border Patrol, and the El Paso County Sheriff's Office to rescue them. Read more...

One of the favorite, sneaky ploys of the more-migration people is to arrange — they usually say "just in this one special case" — for someone else to make a nation's immigration decisions.

In the news lately, though not quite labeled this way, are knotty immigration questions in Canada and the UK; questions that arose, or may arise, because of this someone-else-decides mechanism. Read more...

Marriott is building a 492-room hotel in downtown Los Angeles with the help of the EB-5 immigrant investor program. The job-creation numbers for it simply do not add up. Read more...

Many think the H-1B temporary worker program is overused and does harm to many skilled Americans who might otherwise hold these high-tech and other professional jobs. This examination may be helpful to those of us who study the program .

Critics of the program notice, appropriately, how it has lowered wages for both U.S. residents and foreign workers in high-tech industries, how it has discouraged Americans from doing graduate work in these fields, and how it puts foreign workers into a virtual indentured worker status. Read more...

The Department of Homeland Security is about to create Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Syrians in this country, legally and illegally, because of the near-civil war in that nation.

Now is the time to re-think our reaction to such situations. Read more...

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
— Luke 2:8.

The worker has been, literally, out in the wild and living in a trailer or tent seven days a week, 365 days a year. He does it in all kinds of weather.

He's been guarding a valuable herd of sheep, helping with their births, tending their every need, and fighting off varmints. Sometimes, for months on end, he rarely sees another human being. Read more...

Uruguay is copying what the Mexican government has done for years — issuing consular cards to identify a group of its citizens here — who are, incidentally, largely in illegal status.

It is an unfortunate move, and there are no indications that our government is doing anything about it, although it could. The cards, matricula consular in Spanish, give a sheen of plausibility to the people carrying them and, while not an indication of legal presence in the United States, the cards do help the illegals with such activities as opening a bank account. Read more...

One worries that government agencies, in their formal reports, gild their lilies and hide their failures.

But a glance at the USCIS Ombudsman's most recent report shows a different story.

To summarize, the Ombudsman has made 16 formal recommendations to the head office of USCIS since December 5, 2008, and only three of them have been implemented. The following table from the report shows first part of its summary: Read more...

Instead of spending its limited resources on important issues — like who should and who should not come to the United States — USCIS has, yet again, spent executive energy and federal money on a population so tiny that one would need a microscope to find it. Read more...

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Fiscal Year 2011 Highlights Report has just been released.

I expected it to be self-congratulatory, larded with bureaucratic language, and sprinkled with some half-truths, but also to be a slick, well-written, well-presented document. Read more...

We recently reported that the judicial branch has decided that sleeping with an illegal, and sharing your house with him, is not "harboring" an illegal entrant. In that case, as noted in a recent blog, the more-migration people used a very tight (and I think out-of-date) definition of harboring, which, in turn, may lead to still laxer interior enforcement.

Harboring an illegal alien is against the law, unless you define "harboring" away. Read more...

I have been collecting news stories that combine immigration marriage fraud and murder.

Too often marriage fraud is treated lightly by the press, which uses soft terms like "marriage of convenience" or "sham marriage" to describe this crime.

When murder is also involved, the press gets a little more serious, but it often still misses the point. Read more...

It's not exactly front-page news, but some powerful members of Congress are seeking special deals for two almost forgotten groups of immigrants, those from Ireland and Israel.

It sounds like the politics of New York City 50-60 years ago. You might call it quaint, like a Broadway revival of Abie's Irish Rose.

But it serves to remind us of the slow growth of the political power of newcomers, which swells decades, even generations, after the maturing of the underlying demographic and cultural trends. Read more...

Suppose you have an absolute and un-regulated monopoly on a product that your customers simply must have — like insulin for diabetics in the old days before other remedies became available.

Isn't that a license to print money? Read more...

A recent article in a Canadian daily reminded me that there are two kinds of immigration marriage fraud.

The most common one is what I call the bilateral model, in which two consenting adults enter a marriage created to give a visa to one partner, and cash to the other, the citizen.

The other, more unusual one might be called the unilateral model, in which the alien cons the unwitting citizen into marriage, with a visa in mind, and then abandons the spouse when the papers arrive. Read more...

The effort to weaken interior immigration enforcement is, of course, waged all the time on many fronts, executive, legislative, and judicial.

One of the oddest weapons used by the other side in this battle has just popped up. It is the suggestion that the government should be using 1917 dictionaries as it defines "harboring" when applied to those who help illegal aliens stay in this country. It comes from a distinguished, conservative judge, Richard Posner of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Read more...

All nations, great and small, have immigration policies. Lately it appears that some of the smaller ones could give some lessons to the big one we live in.

The Bahamas, for instance, is, by Caribbean standards, rather prosperous; 50 years ago its unemployed came to the United States to help with the Virginia/West Virginia apple harvest, but now it is receiving temporary foreign workers to do farm and other low-paid work.

But that little nation has its priorities right and has reduced by 2,299 the number of alien work permits issued in 2011 compared to 2010. Read more...

The H-1B program damages America in a number of ways, directly and indirectly, discouraging young American from following high-tech careers and shunting aside skilled U.S. citizens and green-card holders because of their "advanced age", i.e., anything over 35.

This has been widely reported by many, including my CIS colleague John Miano, and Professor Norm Matloff at UC/Davis. Read more...

Two different aspects of "birth tourism" have come to light recently.

The birth tourism issue is a subset of the broader birthright citizenship matter; birth tourism involves pregnant alien women visiting a nation briefly to have a child that acquires that nation's citizenship instantly. The mother and the baby then leave, at least for a while. Read more...

There were two underlying themes at a recent House Immigration Subcommittee hearing that deserve a little more attention.

The hearing, on February 15, dealt with the explosive report by the Acting Inspector General of DHS, Charles K. Edwards, in which he explored the extent to which USCIS, during the Obama administration, has pushed rank-and-file staff members to approve marginal applications for immigration benefits. Read more...

When you dangle prospects of investment money before some capital-starved businessmen, you can be assured that the creativity juices will be stimulated.

This is certainly the case with the USCIS's immigrant investor program, called EB-5, because it deals with the fifth class of employment-based immigrants in the Immigration and Nationality Act. For more on the program generally, see CIS's recently-published Backgrounder on the subject. Read more...

Some aliens' battles with the U.S. government go on for 10, 12, even 15 years.

Then there is Fernando Arango.

He started his relations with the government successfully, but on the wrong foot, when he arrived in the U.S. from Columbia in 1980 with a green card obtained through a fraudulent marriage. (It ran in the family. His sister arrived in the same manner.) Read more...

Most people are not aware that the fine print of the Department of Homeland Security's new budget includes a set of grants "to help strengthen the nation against risks associated with potential terrorist attacks and other hazards" . . .

. . . to be awarded to Indian tribes.

A total of $6 million has been set aside for this purpose; it even has its own initials, which are THSGP, for the Tribal Homeland Security Grant Program. It is a small part of a much larger activity. Read more...