In terms of limited green card visas, who comes first?

• The brilliant, young inventor with a PhD from a distinguished American university or
• The otherwise undistinguished alien who made at least half a million dollars by, for instance, running a casino?

Do we want the best and the brightest or do we want someone with half a million he is willing to invest in the U.S., assuming both are from the same country, such as China? Read more...

It's a good thing North Carolina (and Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia) saw fit to enact stronger E-Verify laws that go into effect in 2013, because the Obama administration is making no effort to address the rampant identity fraud that enables illegal aliens to get jobs and wreak havoc in the lives of unsuspecting Americans. Read more...

This is not a story about bribery, but another report on the odd mix of secrecy and openness that marks immigration cases in America's courts and semi-courts.

There is a specific employment-based, green-card immigration case, which happens to be in U.S. District Court in Eastern Michigan. The judge's decision intrigued me on PACER, the federal courts' electronic data system, so I read the full text of the judgment.

In any court case, that's the end of the story (the substance of which will be reported in a subsequent blog), but I wanted to know how it started. Read more...

Once again, the current Congress is under pressure to change fundamental parts of our immigration system in order to fix the problems created by previous Congresses that were too generous. Special interest groups are pushing to eliminate provisions in immigration law that now help prevent green card allocations from being monopolized by immigrants from just a few countries. If the proposed changes are approved this month by the U.S. Read more...

If Washington enacts a mass amnesty, even one that limits illegal aliens' new legal status to some kind of provisional or temporary immigration grounds, it will likely add to taxpayer health care costs and risk depriving Americans from timely health care.

Obamacare exempts illegal aliens from eligibility for Medicaid or a premium subsidy and from the individual mandate to get health insurance or pay a fine. But once they gain legal status, former illegals are likely to become eligible for Medicaid or the taxpayer subsidy for paying their premiums. Read more...

DHS has released the latest numbers from the president’s illegal “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) amnesty, its DREAM Act by fiat. During its first four months, through last Thursday, about 368,000 applications had been received, and about 103,000 illegal immigrants have been amnestied, allowing them to get a work card and a (legitimate) Social Security number. Read more...

Starting on February 1, 2013, America will have a new legal class of aliens — they will be undocumented permanent resident aliens.

This bizarre new category of immigrant was created by a notice in the December 14 Federal Register by order of United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Read more...

While most immigration policy attention is focused on a possible "comprehensive reform" bill and on the ongoing White House-created amnesty for "childhood arrivals", both involving massive numbers, the administration continues to press forward to also bring in small flows of additional migrants (and workers) by tweaking the existing system.

Today's examples of proposed small flows — neither one curtailed in any way by numerical limits — relate to two extremes of the migrant population:

• The spouses of some of the best-paid H-1B workers (professionals); and
• Teenage and young adult children of crime victims (probably a poverty-stricken group).

Maybe I am cynical, or perhaps paranoid, or both, but I sense that the administration may be juggling the financing of two immigration-related appeals systems in such a way as to encourage more immigration.

What follows is convoluted, a D.C.-based version of inside baseball; it may or may not reflect a deliberate bias. I have no evidence that it does, but it certainly looks that way.

One appeals system, if funded fully, would increase the outflow of deportees; another, if fully funded, would bring in additional immigrants, and bring them in more quickly. Read more...

One of the signal, continuing failures of U.S. immigration policy has been the practice of returning illegal aliens to just the other side of the U.S.-Mexican border when they are forced to leave the United States, rather than sending them deep into Mexico where most of them live.

Finding themselves thousands of miles from home, and probably broke, many of the once-captured illegals decide to try to enter the United States again and, of course, many succeed. Read more...

As reported by CNN, a new Politico-George Washington University Battleground survey "indicates a majority of American voters say they support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants". A closer analysis of the poll, however, indicates that the results should not be interpreted as a mandate for amnesty. Read more...

Those arguing for more immigration of high-skilled workers often trot out an argument that ties 1) securing patents with productivity, and then 2) ties the number of patents to the incidence of foreign workers.

In other words, the more foreign workers, the more patents, the more production, and hence more general prosperity for America. It sounds superficially plausible. Read more...

A hearing in a Los Angeles federal courtroom that started this week may cast some light on two quite different, but related, immigration-policy matters:

• A squalid program to exploit Filipino H-1B teachers and deny jobs to citizen teachers, run by a good-sized Louisiana school district; and
• The potential utility of using a class action lawsuit to correct the resulting abuses.

USCIS statistics released Wednesday reveal how seriously the new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty has slowed work on all other agency programs.

That analysis does not come from the agency, but a simple review of the numbers shows the negative impact of the new caseload on the continuing work of USCIS. Apparently the agency has not added enough additional staff to cope with all the young people, primarily from Mexico, who entered the nation illegally before the age of 16, and who now want the short-term legal status offered by that program. Read more...

Substantial applicant fraud in part of the immigrant investor (EB-5) program was officially recognized by an unexpected source at a USCIS "stakeholders" meeting Monday in Washington. Read more...

Professor Jose E. Limon, director of the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame, made an interesting contribution to the discussion of the Latino vote Monday night at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington. He suggested that identification with the Democratic Party has solidified as an enduring feature of Mexican-American identity. Read more...

The Washington Post story on today's corporate lobby day for open borders has this hilarious lead:

For years, pro-immigration conservative activists have tried with little success to gain an audience with top Republicans in Washington.

Defenders of the visa lottery, which is slated for elimination in a bill that just passed the U.S. House on Friday, have tried to portray this program as an essential category that invigorates our immigration flow. Others, including Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), have said ending the program would be "racist, if not in its intent, than certainly in its effect." Some media descriptions of the visa lottery have also given this false impression, that the visa lottery program benefits mainly black immigrants from Africa, who they say have no other legal channels to enter. Neither portrayal of the visa lottery is accurate. Read more...

Last week, The Wall Street Journal broke the story of two brothers, 30-year-old Sheheryar Alam Qazi and 20-year-old Raees Alam Qazi, naturalized United States citizens of Pakistani origin, arrested In Fort Lauderdale by the FBI for plotting to commit terrorist acts involving weapons of mass destruction in the United States. Read more...

If you are worried about the over-population of America, as I am, you might have been cheered by this headline: "Report: U.S. birth rates hit record lows, largest drop among immigrant Latinas".

And you might have been puzzled by this text:

The numbers tell the picture quite clearly. Between 1990 and 2010, for example, the birth rate among U.S.-born Hispanic women dropped from 82.4 percent to 65.4 percent.

Wow! One hundred of these women used to have 82.4 babies a year, and now, 100 of them have only 65.4 babies a year? Read more...

A coalition of high-immigration activist groups has filed a lawsuit against Arizona over the state's decision to not issue driver's licenses to illegal aliens granted deferred action (DACA) by President Obama. In their complaint, the groups misrepresent DACA, inaccurately describing the program's eligibility criteria. Specifically, the attorneys wrote: Read more...

Does our military establishment want to recruit anyone from the new set of amnesty grantees, those granted short-term legal status by Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program?

Apparently not.

Given the White House's glowing description of this population of illegal aliens, those who arrived before the age of 16 and were under 31 on June 15 of this year, one might expect that the Department of Defense would look upon them as a useful addition to the pool of potential military recruits. Read more...

The Canadians are having a delightful and totally appropriate battle over foreign workers — coal miners from China.

Here's the situation: Read more...

The Republican answer to the DREAM Act was introduced Tuesday by Senators Kyl and Hutchison, and it's called the ACHIEVE Act. (Why do they insist on making up these names?) It has basically the same outlines as the rumored Rubio alternative (interestingly, Rubio is not on this new bill). I assume they took it on because they're both retiring, meaning they're free of political constraints, but it falls short of what’s needed. Read more...

If there is any legislative move on a version of the DREAM Act, a possibility Mark Krikorian discussed in a recent blog, we should insist on at least this one minimal requirement: every applicant must be interviewed, in person, by a USCIS officer — not by a consultant or by contract staff.

While the officer's decision might be subject to supervisory review, the original recommendation should carry substantial weight in the overall determination of the case. Read more...

Two incremental immigration measures might pass in the next year, and their outlines are clear. Read more...

If a report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) implies that immigration law enforcement on the job site is minimal, you know it must be true. Read more...

The Obama administration has quietly abandoned the pretense that it will try to deter local sanctuary policies that actively obstruct immigration law enforcement, such as an ordinance in Cook County, Ill., that orders the sheriff's officers to ignore holds placed by ICE on criminal aliens. Read more...

Amazingly, Paul Krugman made sense in a Sunday blog posting (my emphasis): Read more...

A Politico story on the GOP leadership's attempt to stampede conservatives on amnesty has a sentence that neatly summarizes the high-immigration Right's hallucinogenic approach to the issue:

Now, key Republicans are circling back to this argument: Legalizing undocumented immigrants will make them pay more taxes, earn higher wages and bring an underground demographic of workers into the official American economy.