"Eligibility is not an issue."

The question was the extent to which unqualified illegal aliens were applying for DACA benefits.

The chilling answer came from an immigration researcher who had been studying the reaction of a group of illegal aliens to current and proposed legalization laws.

That person said Wednesday that the attitude in "the community" — an all-encompassing, warm, supportive term often used by immigration academics — was that the benefits were "out there" and there was no down side to applying and losing, but much to be gained if you were found qualified. Hence, the implication was, that everyone was applying — eligible or not. Read more...

Every year the Department of Homeland Security distributes funds to local government entities to help prevent terrorism and every year it makes some outlandish (but politically correct) grants to locations that are unlikely to attract any right-minded terrorist.

Clearly New York, Boston, and Washington have been targets of terrorist attacks and the local defenses need to be shored up, but the grant-makers also have other, and more exotic, ideas. Read more...

If there's one thing that former Secretary of Homeland Security Napolitano and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) agree on, it is that the enforcement of our immigration laws have been (Secretary Napolitano), and still remain (Sen. Rubio), broken.

In 2007, former Secretary Napolitano wrote in the Washington Post that, "No one favors illegal immigration. But there are upwards of 12 million people illegally in this country — people who work, who have settled their families and who have raised their children here. For 20 years our country has done basically nothing to enforce the 1986 legislation against either the employers who hired illegal immigrants or those who crossed our borders illegally to work for them. Accordingly, our current system is, effectively, silent amnesty." (Emphasis added) Read more...

The L-1 is a massive, often exploitative non-immigrant worker program that is even more lightly regulated than the more prominent H-1B program. But in recent weeks it has secured a little badly needed official attention. Read more...

Could the president's decision to ask Congress for a resolution supporting military action in Syria be a major setback for the proponents of amnesty for illegal aliens?

Before Syria entered the mix, advocates for "comprehensive immigration reform" were already worried that the limited number of legislative days through the end of the calendar year would make it difficult to pass an amnesty bill that covers both illegal aliens and their employers, in addition to substantially increasing legal immigration. Read more...

It's understandable that the country's 11.5 million illegal aliens have mostly made their decisions to come here in violation of our immigration laws without considering the cumulative effect of those millions of decisions on country in which they want to live and work. They are focused on their own circumstances and how to improve them.

Americans however, also understandably, have a different focus. Read more...

The libertarian Cato Institute is deeply, vehemently for more immigration; it wants some form of amnesty; it wants more legal immigrants; and it particularly wants more non-immigrant workers, as this page shows.

Immigrants will help the economy grow, they say; we will all prosper if there are lots of additional, willing workers. Read more...

The immigration policy of an moderate, democratic, relatively wealthy country like the United States that is the preferred destination of tens of millions of potential immigrants and the actual destination of over a million new legal immigrants every year is likely to be complex and therefore difficult.

Underlying all the issues and vocal debates about American immigration law are two fundamental facts: Read more...

One of the first acts of the Obama administration's new ICE Director, John Sandweg, was to expand the president's amnesty-by-executive fiat beyond the so-called DREAMers to cover also illegal aliens who are parents or caretakers of children — anybody's children, anywhere, of any immigration status. Like the other decreed amnesties, this directive issued on August 23, is so broadly written that it could cover potentially millions of illegal aliens. It is the next step in the gradual dismantling of enforcement, and perhaps signals a White House understanding that it probably cannot get the mass legalization it seeks the old-fashioned constitutional way, through Congress, and that instead it must resort to the more familiar method of executive action. Read more...

One of the most overused and hackneyed phases in the present immigration debate is: "The system is broken." The metaphor is meant to convey the immigration system is important, that its major elements are dysfunctional, and that therefore the system must be fixed. QED.

It follows from this logic that all the major elements must be fixed and this requires comprehensive reform, or so it is argued. Read more...

Tuesday's blog post was about Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) factual errors at a forum on immigration reform. McCain made incorrect assertions about requirements in the Senate immigration reform bill regarding payment of taxes and participation in an English language course. The senator probably keeps repeating the mistakes because news accounts have repeatedly reported the inaccurate assertions and failed to correct the record. Read more...

Woodrow Wilson spoke of the American states as "Laboratories for Democracy".

The general idea was that other entities could watch as one or more American states tried out innovative governmental techniques and programs.

Such experimentation is going on all the time in the immigration field, but it is done by other nations. Some of it is admirable, some of it is scary, and some of it is somewhere in between. Read more...

Too many worry that allowing more immigrants "would just displace American workers, but that's just a doggone joke," [Sen. Orrin] Hatch told a forum sponsored by FWD.us, a political advocacy group formed by such high-tech leaders as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. (Source: Salt Lake Tribune)

Of course, Hatch and the high-tech billionaires conveniently ignore the fact that: Read more...

Appearing at a public forum Tuesday in Arizona, Sen. John McCain made a pitch for the immigration reform bill passed by the Senate in June to provide a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. But he cited public support for conditions regarding payment of back taxes and English language acquisition that are not in the bill. Read more...

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has warned those interested in immigration reform that if Congress does nothing, the president will be tempted to accomplish by executive action what he was not able to accomplish by signing the Senate's immigration legislation. As the senator put it, "I believe that this president will be tempted, will be tempted, if nothing happens in Congress, to issue an executive order as he did for the Dream Act kids a year ago, where he basically legalizes 11 million people by the sign of a pen." Read more...

There are two basic forms of marriage-related immigration fraud: What I call Class C (for cash or crime), in which the alien pays the citizen for the (nominal) marriage, meaning that both are criminals, and what I call Class D (for deception), in which the alien hoodwinks the citizen into marriage.

In both instances the alien wants to secure a green card out of the process. Class C is apparently a much larger group than Class D, according to experts on such things. Class C frauds can, after all, be organized by one or more middlemen on a mass scale; Class D is, and has to be, a one-on-one operation. Read more...

The Economist recently ran an interesting article about the Conservative Party in Britain and its longer-term strategy in preparation for the next general election to be held May 7, 2015. Three policies have emerged in the Conservative Party as central and believed to be popular with the people, and consequently destined to "put the opposition on the wrong side of popular opinion". Economics, of course, loom large. The policy of interest here, however, is not economic, strictly speaking: that of reducing immigration. In the UK, 11.3 percent of the total population is foreign-born, and there are some estimates of almost 900,000 illegal immigrants. Read more...

The following is by Katherine Telford, who was an intern at CIS this summer:

The immigration bill passed by the Senate in June has been a topic of hot debate for months, and continues to be a source of political controversy. It is often, however, portrayed as a moral issue rather than an issue centered on facts. Various religious groups, including Evangelicals and Catholics, have manipulated the problem of immigration in the United States to be a doctrinal issue. Although I do not view the issue as theological, I investigated the bill from a moral perspective. However, I reached a drastically different conclusion regarding the humanity of large-scale amnesty than those critical of individuals opposing S.744. Read more...

Hundreds of millionaires and would-be millionaires, both citizens and aliens, have demanded help for their "problems" from a tiny Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency designed to help befuddled migrants with the complications of the immigration process.

The entity is the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman; it had, the last time I looked, 32 employees, and is lodged in the Office of the Deputy Secretary of DHS, not in USCIS itself. Read more...

The dilemma for real immigration reformers in Congress is that that the president and the executive branch do have some degree of constitutionally mandated discretion in enforcing immigration laws.

Exactly how much is a matter of debate.

Jeffrey Anderson writing in the Weekly Standard of the president's decision not to deport young illegal aliens characterized that initiative as "pure lawlessness". Read more...

Katherine Vargas, the White House director of Hispanic media, was interviewed yesterday on "Al Punto", Univision's Sunday morning talk show. Here are some excerpts of her responses to questions from host Jorge Ramos (my translations from Spanish): Read more...

On August 5, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared the stage with Jose Antonio Vargas, an illegal alien and self-acknowledged felon, to support amnesty for illegal aliens. At the same time, Zuckerberg turned his back on innocent Americans, including an untold number of children, who are victims of job-related felonies committed by the vast majority of illegal aliens. Read more...

In recent months federal prosecutors, the courts, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a state regulatory body in Virginia have moved against immigration abuse on three fronts, with further progress being reported recently in all these cases, two of which involve the controversial EB-5 program for immigrant investors. Read more...

Immigration reformers in Congress are worried about a possible presidential Plan B that would bypass Congress altogether and simply change existing immigration law by executive action.

Could the president do this? He already has.

Is this a realistic worry? Yes. Read more...

For the first time since 2006, the U.S. Sentencing Commission is reporting a decline in the number of immigration cases in federal court, echoing other indications of a significant decline in immigration enforcement, despite continued high levels of illegal immigration. Read more...

There would be a huge raid on the U.S. Treasury if the Senate's comprehensive immigration bill (S.744) were to become law. It would be retroactive in nature and I estimate it would cost the Treasury roughly $36 billion. Read more...

ICE agents conducted raids on a 16-location car wash franchise called Danny's Family Car Wash in Phoenix last weekend, arresting 14 people and ultimately releasing 179 of the 223 people who were detained for questioning. The New York Times reported that most of the 223 employees who were detained are in the country illegally. An ICE spokesperson, Barbara Gonzalez, told reporters that the arrests were part of a criminal probe targeting the owners of the business for possible identity fraud and other crimes, not an enforcement action directed at the employees. I was struck by the almost apologetic tone of her comments. Read more...

The president and the House GOP are each caught in a bind. Although the two dilemmas spring from vastly different origins, they share a similarity. They both have to do with trust. Read more...

Lefty blogger Josh Marshall chastises his fellow amnesty advocates to stop pretending a bill will pass this Congress. While I hope he's right, I think he underestimates the GOP leadership's pathological desire to save Obama's presidency by passing an amnesty.

Nonetheless, his main point is that the mass-immigration crowd should instead start the campaign against Republicans for killing the amnesty/increased immigration bill: Read more...

Immigration fraud comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it is massive, sometimes just one-on-one; sometimes it is crude and direct, and sometimes very complex. But usually employers of aliens are not the victims, and the population of the United States usually is illicitly expanded.

The last two generalizations were not true in a half-million-dollar case brought in federal district court in New Jersey recently. Read more...