This morning C-SPAN’s "Washington Journal" included a pair of calls, one right after the other, expressing frustration with immigration-law enforcement at opposite ends of the country. The first came from a man who identified himself as Gil, a Border Patrol agent from Hebronville, Texas. The second came from Sam in Boston, who said he is a small contractor. Here is some of what they said. Read more...

Here's an example of selective truth-telling, from a story in Saturday's New York Times titled "Finding a Path to a U.S. Visa, Often by Luck":

[S]ome opponents of more lenient [amnesty] policies have contended that the deferred action and other immigration programs might tempt some illegal immigrants to commit fraud in order to qualify. [Emphasis added.]

According to public records detailing the daily meetings of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, she has been quite busy reaching out to amnesty activists over the past few years. While the schedules available online only cover January 2009 to June 2011, and while there is a section missing between August and December 2010, the list is quite revealing. It appears that advocates of high levels of immigration and amnesty have easy access to the White House. Read more...

Yes, it is true, if you look hard enough there will be a saint or two in the federal prison system. I suspect there will also be a Harvard Law graduate or two. But no news article on the prison population would dream of selecting the imprisoned Harvard grad as the poster child for the population of those jails.

An article in this morning's Washington Post, on the other hand, headlined "Betting the farm — for green cards", picks a highly atypical family that benefits from the immigrant investor (EB-5) program as its poster children. Read more...

Comments made by Dieter F. Uchtdorf, second counselor in the LDS (Mormon) Church's First Presidency, coupled with earlier public statements issued by the church on the subject of immigration reform, raise questions about whether Mormon leaders are exceptionally naive or simply mean-spirited and cruel. Read more...

Brookings has put out the latest example of bogus immigration polling. Here’s the New York Times lede: Read more...

There is a long, painful story in the March 22 New York Times, "Officials Still Seek Ways to Assess Border Security", about how to measure the effectiveness of immigration control, with the notion being that there is a political need to have some indication that we have illegal immigration in hand prior to any amnesty. Read more...

On March 5 this blog reported that a commission of prominent Americans and Mexicans has suggested that Mexico should establish its own border patrol after the United States adopts "comprehensive immigration reform". Once the reform is in place, they said, "Mexico should actively prevent unauthorized northward migration by ensuring that people who leave the country to enter the United States do so at designated crossing points and with the required documents." Read more...

"'Progressives stress the economics, conservatives stress the culture', said [University of Virginia researcher Bradley] Wilcox. 'We say both matter. They both are undercutting the viability of marriage for young adults today.'" Read more...

Rand Paul’s amnesty speech before the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce was a pastiche of establishment cliches. Permit me to select some and respond:

Growing up in Texas I never met a Latino who wasn’t working.

In January this blog expressed surprise that a Harper's magazine article hostile to Nebraskans who mobilized against illegal immigration had little to say about the ruthless, wage-slashing strategy of Hormel that had driven Americans from the local meat-processing plant in the town of Fremont. The plant, like many others in recent decades, hired a workforce that drew heavily from illegal immigrants. Read more...

I've been looking at the Republican National Committee's "Growth and Opportunity Project", released with a certain amount of understatement a couple of days ago. It has been alternatively described as a look forward and as a post-mortem of why the Republicans lost the election. Read more...

The United States is very much alone in granting immigration visas to siblings of citizens, as this table shows: Read more...

The Senate Gang of Eight has apparently considered one sliver of rationality in its daily dose of planning America's national assisted suicide. The sliver of sanity is curbing chain migration. Read more...

There were more births to Chinese tourists in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands last year than there were to the indigenous population, the Marianas Variety is reporting in its March 14 edition. Read more...

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, was recently quoted in an ABC News story about the dangers of nonimmigrant worker schemes:

"Programs like the bracero program or temporary guest-worker programs where individuals were tied to an employer, they got exploited", he said. "They got cheated out of wages [and] they weren't given what was rightfully due to them. They were forced to work under unsafe conditions. They were forced to accept substandard wages. They couldn't say anything, because if they did, [the employer] would jerk their permit and deport them."

Ever heard the claim that Latinos are "natural conservatives"? The person repeating the conventional wisdom of the Beltway apparently hasn't examined the evidence.

That's why, for Republicans, to buy that canard spells disaster. The most recent evidence comes from a new Latino Decisions poll. It shows two-thirds of Latinos support "comprehensive immigration reform" that includes special immigration privileges for foreign-born gays and lesbians. Read more...

It is now apparent that an immigrant investor in the EB-5 program can secure at least some immigration benefits without actually investing any money. Read more...

Day laborers – individuals who line the streets across the country on a daily basis looking for work in low-paying, low-skill professions – are becoming increasingly visible throughout the United States and are perhaps the most vivid example of our government's failure to adequately enforce immigration laws. The Los Angeles metropolitan area alone has more than 27,000 day laborers on about 125 street corners on any given day. Read more...

With states facing a new REAL ID compliance deadline of July 15, 2013, and DHS enforcement action tentatively set to begin as early as autumn 2013 (DHS hopes), DHS tells me that five more states have submitted compliance packages to the DHS REAL ID Office that DHS says meet the law's certification requirements. These five all have submitted the compliance packages since the December 21, 2012, DHS press release setting forth its compliance and enforcement policy. Read more...

Within our immigration system there are three negatives to avoid:

1. Bad public policy;
2. Fraud against the United States and its citizens; and
3. Fraud against individual aliens.

One often encounters a single negative, such as someone seeking to enter the United States with bad documents; he would be in Class B. Read more...

As the Republican Party looks to improve its image among Hispanics, it probably shouldn't consult Notre Dame sociology professor and immigration expert Jorge Bustamante.

In a column last month for La Reforma, one of Mexico's most prominent newspapers, Bustamante said those who hope Congress will approve legislation to legalize illegal immigrants are in for a disappointment when the debate reaches the Republican-dominated House of Representatives. Read more...

When the government decides not to spend the needed amount of tax moneys on immigration enforcement, it can always argue that it is helping to reduce the national debt.

When the same government, presumably only lightly motivated to regulate migration, decides not to charge adequate fees for enforcement activities to immigration-related entities profiting by lax regulation, it has no such defense. There is no public sector savings, all the savings go to the private entities that use the program. Read more...

Apparently, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is rolling in dough. It's giving $800,000 more to propaganda efforts "aimed at mobilizing regular Catholics to push for the bishops' immigration platforms", i.e., mass legalization and open borders.

That comes on top of the $3.5 million the group has already spent to promote mass amnesty. For some wacky reason, this political money gets labeled "antipoverty" activity. That's really bizarre. And it flies in the face of the facts. Read more...

The phone call yesterday afternoon from CBS News puzzled me; the reporter wanted to know the extent to which proxy marriages played a role in immigration-related marriage fraud.

"It is certainly possible, but I have no specifics for you", I told the reporter, and wondered why the question was being asked. Read more...

In a recent blog I complained of Syracuse University's TRAC analysis "that all too often the most serious Level 1 offenders have only been convicted of traffic violations." Objecting to this depiction and the mindset behind it, I said, "First, we should not assume that traffic offenses are always 'minor'. Vehicular manslaughter, negligent homicide, and driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics all strike me as serious offenses." Read more...

In 2001, when Jorge Castaneda was the foreign minister in the administration of Mexican President Vicente Fox, he developed a plan that he hoped would encourage the United States to provide legal status for his countrymen living illegally in the United States. Read more...

As the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) pursues driver's license security law compliance under the REAL ID Act of 2005 in the coming months it will be imperative that the underlying material requirements are available for all 56 jurisdictions (the 50 states plus D.C. and the five island territories) to incorporate into their driver's license issuance processes. With DHS granting a six-month grace period (until July 2013) to comply with the driver's license security law, according to a December 2012 press release, stakeholders are still rumbling that two key elements of the 36 compliance requirements do not exist. They are both right and wrong. Read more...

An H-1B placement operation in Texas has been charged with mistreating its workers, misleading the U.S. government, and engaging in both visa fraud and wire fraud.

Earlier this month, Dibon Solutions of Carrollton, Texas, and six of its current or former executives were hauled into federal court in Dallas to face these counts. The principal defendants are Atula and Jiten "Jay" Nanda, two feuding brothers who had at one point owned the company jointly. (They are currently engaged in a separate court battle with each other over the control of the firm.) Read more...

As we noted last week, former Mexican deputy foreign minister Andres Rozental says the problem of illegal immigration would be solved "if immigration reform functions and we get to the point where it becomes easy to legally cross the border to get a job."

Rozental, whose comment came at a Wilson Center discussion of the report of a binational commission on which he serves, supports "comprehensive immigration reform". CIR would — among other things — provide legal status for illegal immigrants and a guest worker program for future migrant flows. Read more...