If you believe that reporters need to play it straight with their reporting and pundits have an obligation to rise above cheap disdain toward those with whom they disagree, you can only shake your head at MSNBC's coverage of the immigration policy debate. Read more...

Statistics from U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) indicate that the agency is rubber-stamping the applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. They report that 99.5 percent of applicants have been approved, which is well above approval rates for other legal programs, which have fraud and rejection rates in the double digits. Read more...

As probably most readers of the Center's website know, a federal lawsuit was filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in a challenge to the Obama administration's end run around Congress when it refused to move forward with DREAM Act legislation, and instituted instead an administrative deferred action program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or "DACA") under the guise of its Department of Homeland Security's "prosecutorial discretion" policies.

Many people (myself among them) believe that the program is both unconstitutional, because it infringes on the lawmaking prerogative unique to Congress under the separation of powers, and illegal, because it is not an act of prosecutorial discretion, but rather an abuse of discretion. Read more...

The Hill, the Capitol Hill newspaper, has noted in an editorial that the new immigration reform bill was produced by a "bipartisan group of eight senators [who claim it] will both secure the border and create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants." The paper said that accomplishment "follows months of difficult negotiations in which the Gang of Eight sought to address weaknesses that have killed prior immigration bills."

True enough, as far as it goes. But there has been little reporting on efforts to shape the bill for purely commercial purposes. The public needs to understand what is being done along the axis of influence that ties K Street and Capitol Hill. There, dozens of lobbyists are representing the interests of a myriad of employers who want to shape the bill to suit their purposes. They also perform the complementary duty of raising money for the politicians whose opinions they seek to shape — and for whom many of the lobbyists previously worked. Read more...

There are some tough-looking new rules in the Gang of Eight's proposed legislation seeking to discourage employers from becoming dependent on H-1B workers.

This is in S.744, the omnibus immigration "reform" bill, and the new H-1B rules are typical of the deceptive elements that are so common in that package. Read more...

Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is claiming amnesty is necessary so that the United States can determine the identity of illegal aliens in the country. However, basic enforcement of existing immigration law is all that is necessary to acquire the identities of all illegal aliens. Instead of promoting amnesty, Sen. Rubio could demand that the Obama administration enforce 8 U.S.C. § 1302, "Registration of Aliens", which makes it "the duty of every alien" to register their presence in the United States if they remain here 30 days or longer. Read more...

While amnesty advocates are exploiting the horrific Boston Marathon attack as justification for quickly passing an amnesty, the Center for Immigration Studies finds that the failed FBI background checks of terrorism suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev indicate that the government does not have the capacity to adequately vet the backgrounds of 11 million illegal aliens, and that an amnesty might actually facilitate terrorism. Read more...

Author's note: This is the second of two blogs on the subject of the Boston Marathon terrorist bombings. Read Part 1.

Two bombs serially exploded at the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 15, wounding 280-plus people and killing another three. By the early morning hours of Friday, April 19, two brothers, in a panic that their photos had been released by police to the media as suspects of interest, went on a crime spree involving a carjacking, an ATM theft, and the murder of one police officer and serious wounding of a second. They were tracked and the older brother died in a shootout at the scene while the younger escaped, only to be found and arrested 20 hours later (Friday evening), wounded and hiding in a boat. Read more...

Last week, during a budget hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) asked DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano about my recent testimony in the ICE officers' lawsuit pointing out that total removals and removals of criminals have declined by 40 percent since the implementation of the administration's lenient "prosecutorial discretion" policies. Read more...

Too many mass immigration proponents gloss over the real costs and drain on America's public resources that chain migration causes. And you hardly ever hear a peep in lame-stream news media. A rare exception comes from Bloomberg, in an essay by a Princeton researcher. Read more...

An excellent column by former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey for the Wall Street Journal notes that "Tamerlan Tsarnaev [one of the brothers accused in the Boston Marathon attack] is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI."

This sentence is loaded in several ways, but is directly relevant to the debate over the Schumer-Rubio amnesty proposal now being debated in the Senate. Read more...

Author's note: This is the first of two blogs on the subject of the Boston Marathon terrorist bombings. Read Part 2.

In an interview broadcast Sunday morning on the Univision news program "Al Punto", Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) corrected an erroneous description of the new Senate immigration reform legislation by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Sen. Rubio, who has emerged as one of the most outspoken and widely quoted advocates of the bill, has published a detailed analysis of the bill on a webpage that describes it as providing "the toughest border security and enforcement measures in U.S. history". Read more...

I've been contemplating the linguistic gymnastics that the Gang of Eight has used — not only to describe their massive, 800-plus page immigration bill as "stringent but fair", but also within the bill itself. They (the gymnastics) are a wonder to behold. Read more...

A recent Senate hearing featured a confrontation between two Arizonans known for strong wills and large egos.

They were Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who as governor of Arizona in 2005 declared a state of emergency on the state's southern border and now insists that the border is secure; and Sen. John McCain, who as a member of the House of Representatives in 1986 voted for the notorious Immigration Reform and Control Act and now vows that its failure will not be repeated. Read more...

According to the Terrorist Screening Center, 98 percent of the approximately 550,000 individuals on the terrorist watchlist are foreign-born. Roughly 10,000 to 20,000 on the watchlist reside within the United States. It is therefore not surprising that four of the 13 most notorious terrorism arrests since 2009 involved naturalized U.S. citizens. Five cases involved native-born U.S. Read more...

While no immigration data on the Brothers Tsarnaev have been confirmed, it may well be that the bombing in Boston will complicate matters for the Senate’s Gang of Eight that is promoting comprehensive immigration reform (CIR). Read more...

In 1990 Congress authorized a bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by then-Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), hereafter the Jordan Commission. The Commission was mandated "to review and evaluate the implementation and impact of U.S. immigration policy and to transmit to the Congress reports of its findings and recommendations." Read more...

A report from NBC's Kelly O'Donnell suggests that yesterday's defeat of gun control legislation in the Senate might be good for the Gang of Eight's immigration reform bill.

Reporting on yesterday's vote for the "Morning Joe" program on MSNBC, O'Donnell said: "The politics was about more than gun rights. Later today a bipartisan group of senators will roll out immigration reform. Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who fought hard to get enough votes on background checks, found that with two politically hard votes, some senators chose immigration over guns." Read more...

The so-called "Gang of Eight" senators have released their plan for "comprehensive immigration reform" — The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. A comprehensive immigration bill, if enacted, would constitute, for better or worse, the most fundamental change to American immigration law since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (the Hart-Celler Act). Read more...

Three of the leading congressional advocates of the comprehensive reform legislation that will be debated in the Senate and House over the next several months made solemn pledges this week about what the bill would offer. If what Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) promised matches up with what the bill actually provides, it would represent an historic compromise to resolve our long-simmering immigration policy crisis. It will meet a key test. It will be hard-headed, but not hard-hearted. Read more...

The key political problem amnesty advocates face is a trust gap. The public, rightly, doesn't believe promises from the political class that they're newly committed to enforcing immigration laws after decades of non-enforcement.

One key provision of the Schumer/Rubio immigration bill tells you all you need to know about its phoniness. It requires the development within 10 years of a check-in/check-out system for foreign visitors. That's important because nearly half the illegal population came here legally but never left. Only if we record who leaves can we know who's still here illegally. Read more...

The Gang of Eight in the U.S. Senate has advocated 10-year wait for a green card for most of those in the proposed amnesty followed by a three-year period before naturalization could begin.

How should we think about that?

My position is that any broad-brush amnesty is a bad idea because it would encourage more illegal immigration in the future. That certainly was the result of the IRCA legalization of the 1980s. Read more...

When observing the folks who make up our political class, I'm often of the opinion that, somehow, reality is always just slightly distorted around them — as if they are in another, alternate universe altogether and they only seem to share space and time with us, but not in any meaningful way. Read more...

The breathtaking casualness of the Gang of Eight — and the media — as they deal with the exploding population of the United States was demonstrated in this morning's New York Times with this off-hand remark:

The legislation also aims to eliminate the backlog of 4.7 million immigrants who have applied to come here legally and have been languishing waiting for green cards.

These numbers are drawn from a recent CIS Backgrounder, "Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature", by Harvard Professor George Borjas, who is generally recognized to be the nation's leading immigration economist. They show only the non-fiscal economic impacts of international migration. Were tax and welfare balances to be shown, since immigrants are, on average, a low-income population, the picture would be even more dramatic. Read more...

If the government's experts tell us that we are producing far more high-tech grads than the industry needs (as they do), why are the politicians thinking about importing even larger cohorts of alien tech workers? Are the pols, maybe, paying more attention to the lobbyists than to the facts? Read more...

Every day, 30,000 authorized federal, state, and local government users query US-VISIT's data in order to accurately identify people and determine whether they pose a risk to the United States. US-VISIT supplies the technology for collecting and storing biometric data, provides analysis of the data to decision-makers, and ensures the integrity of the data.

By using biometrics, US-VISIT is helping to prevent the use of fraudulent documents, protect visitors from identity theft, and stop thousands of criminals and immigration violators from entering the country.

— US-VISIT website

Dictionary.com defines the interesting German word schadenfreude as "satisfaction or pleasure at someone else's misfortune". Every language should have such a word, although I suspect many don't because few of us admit to such feelings — they're among life's guilty little pleasures. Read more...

Lane Beattie, president and CEO of the powerful Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, threatened Republican Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee with recall if they don't bow to the Chamber's demands for immediate amnesty for illegal aliens and their employers.

Beattie characterized the senators' requests for more time to evaluate and debate the overhaul of the nation's immigration system as "absolutely ridiculous to me". Then he played the recall card: "Good night. Maybe it's time to recall and get some people who understand what we need in business because in businesses we need some immigration changes. (Click here to listen to Beattie.) Read more...