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...

Remember that child's game, "Button, button, who's got the button"? Kids form in a circle, and one child goes around with a button in hand, pretending to drop it into each child's hand in turn, but secretly only puts it into one. Everybody then guesses who has the button. Even the one who has the button guesses somebody else to deflect the truth. Eventually, though, the one who has it must 'fess up if pointed out, and becomes the next to distribute the button.

Well, we seem to have the farcical bureaucratic equivalent of the game going on and, as usual, it involves the ICE-house gang. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), as you know, is the agency within Homeland Security that, under Director John Morton's leadership has become the Keystone Kops of the federal set. Read more...

During his visit to El Paso in May 2011, President Obama mocked calls for border security. After declaring that sufficient measures had been taken to stem illegal crossings, he joked that his critics would always demand more, perhaps even calling for alligators in a moat. While the line drew howls from the national media, local residents did not laugh. The quip revealed only ignorance or callousness to the escalating dangers that are part of their daily life. Read more...

The amnesty march of the evangelical Right's "leaders" continues, with soft-headed figureheads (some likely harboring mixed motives) trying to bring along parishioners to embrace mass legalization and open-borders.

But those occupying the pews don't agree. Their hesitation is highlighted in a recent article in the Deseret News. Read more...

There has been a lot of noise and confusion in Congress and in the press about the meaning of "border security". But in today's blog I want to highlight a statement about the connection between border security and immigration reform legislation that was made at the Wilson Center on Thursday.

The statement by MIT professor Chappell Lawson was provocative in two respects. Read more...

Congressional inquiries prompted by ICE's recent release of immigration detainees, many of whom have criminal convictions or charges, reveal that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has billions of dollars in unexpended revenues, including resources for detention space. Read more...

It is significant that President Obama released an unknown number of illegal aliens from detention on the 20th anniversary of the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Despite claims that those released pose no threat, case studies of two of the WTC bombers indicate that the federal government does not have the capacity to safely determine whether illegal aliens are threats to public safety. For some aliens the public safety analysis is likely based on their U.S. records — which may look clean on account of their having been in the country for a very short period of time. Read more...

It is probably obvious to anyone who has read any of my occasional blogs or other writings for the Center that I'm strongly pro-enforcement on the immigration issue. To me, it comes down to what I believe is in the best interest of American society, writ large, and fundamental fairness to all of those intending immigrants who sit patiently abroad waiting for their visa quota number to come up. Read more...

Immigration marriage fraud, often taken all too lightly by the press, has yet again been linked with murder.

This is the fifth time we have seen this linkage in the last couple of years, with previous cases noted in an earlier blog. Read more...

Contrary to the claims of illegal alien advocacy groups, many of the detainees being released by ICE under the bogus pretext of sequestration-mandated budget cuts are in fact criminals, and hardly harmless, according to a variety of sources.

Here are some categories of detainees who were released from ICE detention over the last week: Read more...

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently explained his participation in the "Gang of Eight" working to provide legal status to illegal immigrants and to create a new guestworker program by saying he thinks there is a "shortage of labor." But the statistics for his home state of South Carolina do not seem to support this conclusion. Read more...

Today, February 26, 2013, marks the 20th anniversary of the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The deaths of six and injuries sustained by more than 1,000 people were facilitated by a number of illegal aliens, one of whom fraudulently acquired U.S. citizenship through the 1986 amnesty included in the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Each of the alien terrorists exploited the U.S. immigration system as detailed in the Center for Immigration Studies report "The Open Door: How Militant Islamic Terrorists Entered and Remained in the United States, 1993-2001". Read more...

Earlier today the Associated Press ran an article saying that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had started releasing "several hundred" illegal aliens held in DHS detention facilities because of the impending sequestration of federal funds.

This was an odd move — presumably designed to scare the Congress into resolving the sequestration crisis. Read more...

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has announced that ICE detention capacity and Border Patrol salaries will be slashed in order to meet the requirements of the sequestration exercise. This move suggests that she views the nation's fiscal crisis as an opportunity and cover to accomplish the administration's immigration enforcement reduction agenda. Read more...

Grover Norquist and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) appear to be trying their best to use immigration policy to relegate the Republican Party to permanent minority status.

Democrats must be jumping with joy as Norquist and Rubio repeat over and over again: "Hispanics are the future of the Party. Hispanics are the future of the Party. Hispanics are the future of the Party" — in spite of clear evidence that most Hispanics are now, and will continue to be, Democrats. Read more...

Suppose there's a law-enforcement operation that works 99.92 percent of the time, and when it does not work, it is a short-term inconvenience for criminals.

That's pretty commendable, right?

Unfortunately the Los Angeles Times does not see it that way Read more...

In a surprising and refreshing reversal, last year ICE leadership, when confronted with data showing a decline in criminal alien deportations in the wake of the Obama administration's "prosecutorial discretion" policies, decided to allow ICE agents in the field to use conventional, tried-and-true law enforcement techniques to identify and remove more illegal alien criminals, according to memos obtained and released by USA Today — to a point. Read more...

People in the immigration field are well aware that visa abusers present an enormous challenge.

The release of "Binational Dialogue on Mexican Migrants" at a briefing on Capitol Hill today reminds me of the problems created by "study abusers" who will surely twist this report to advance the interests of the mas migration forces. Read more...

The Spanish-language Univision televison network normally ignores stories about the costs that illegal immigration imposes on U.S. communities. It frames the story of illegal immigration as a melodrama in which the illegals have a right to come to the United States and demand full incorporation into American civic life. Read more...

You know those eyeglasses you can buy — called Transitions lenses, I think — that are crystal clear as long as you're in a fairly shady place, but get progressively darker with increasing light until they're sunglasses in bright daylight? That's what I think of when I consider the Obama administration's track record on transparency, contrary to what is promised on the White House website: Read more...

A small bit of the Justice Department — the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices (OSC) — has, totally out of character, actually moved to discourage employment bias against U.S. citizens!

This entity usually spends its energies beating up on employers who are a little too vigorous in their efforts not to hire illegal aliens, but this time it has issued a press release saying it found a Florida employment agency that had violated the law: Read more...

A discussion on Univision's Spanish-language "Al Punto" program on Sunday showed how advocates of "comprehensive immigration reform" think they can achieve passage of their legislation this year. Read more...

Last year the State Department announced its intention to prohibit foreign students who come to the United States with the Summer Work Travel program to be employed in the Alaska seafood-processing industry.

But the powerful industry quickly brought in some heavy political guns, especially Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), who prevailed upon State to postpone the ban for the 2012 season. Read more...

Bloomberg Businessweek has now joined the cheering section for "comprehensive immigration reform". This week it features a story under a headline that proclaims "While Nobody Was Looking, The Border Got Secured".

But this declaration – which is ridiculed as absurd by residents of U.S. side of the Mexican border – is more the fault of the editors who wrote the headline than it is of reporter Elizabeth Dwoskin, who wrote it. Read more...

America used to discourage dependency on public resources. We used to turn back would-be immigrants who were likely to become public charges. Now, the U.S. government is aggressively encouraging welfare dependency! And that includes immigrant welfare enrollment. Read more...

This one is a little convoluted.

The government wants some detained aliens, under some conditions, to be released on bond while their status is being sorted out.

With that in mind, the government has licensed certain bail-bond insurance companies to do this work. Read more...

Buried deep in federal government bureaucracies, tenacious mid-level directors worked arduously eight years ago to prepare minimum standards for issuance of birth certificates, something recommended by the 9/11 Commission and enacted into law by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA). Read more...

On Monday, this blog conducted a truth-squad exercise, citing Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) refutation of Univision anchor Jorge Ramos's assertions about the advanced state of border security. McCain correctly pointed out that despite improvements in the effort to stem illegal immigration "thousands and thousands" of illegal immigrants still make it across the border. Read more...

The headline on the ICE press release is more positive, if less telling, than the one above; it reads "Nogales Tunnel Task Force Shuts Down Cross-border Tunnel".

It is another account of how Mexican drug traffickers, using patience and medieval skills, have managed to dig yet another tunnel under the border, a tunnel that our enforcement people noticed only when large bundles of marijuana started showing up on our side of the line. Read more...