This latest iteration of the decade-old amnesty con contains the same old “back of the line” baloney as its predecessors. In other words, illegal immigrants will supposedly not be able to cut ahead of those who didn’t break the law. But, of course, that’s nonsense, because the only line they might have to wait in is the line for an actual green card. Read more...

Today's New York Times and Washington Post ran news articles about how a group of eight senators has cobbled together a "comprehensive immigration reform" plan that will introduce a massive amnesty program after some "tougher enforcement" strategies have been put in place.

The proposed enhancements of immigration enforcement are largely symbolic and are designed to sound good, rather than to actually reduce the populations of legal and illegal immigrants.

Here's a little checklist on some of the weakest of these proposals: Read more...

Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick's immigration op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal is the usual string of cliches, and thus hardly worth commenting on. But given the authors, the venue and, frankly, my job, I'll give it a go.

Immigration hubris. The piece is a list of subheaded assertions, so I'll follow its format. The authors' introductory point is that immigration changes must be wholesale — "comprehensive", in the current jargon: Read more...

Senator Rubio was on Mark Levin’s show Wednesday (view the YouTube video below right to listen), revising and extending his earlier remarks on amnesty to the Journal and the Times. He seems to be walking back some of what he said last week, asserting the need for “triggers” to “certify that, indeed, the workplace security thing is in place, the visa tracking is in place, and there’s some level of significant operational control of the border.” Whatever its superficial appeal, this trigger idea is an old gimmick used to reconcile the “enforcement first” demand with amnesty. Read more...

The stories plastered all over the front pages of newspapers in the Boston area reveal that the nanny accused of delivering what the police report called "abusive head trauma" to a one-year-old child, who later died, is an illegal alien. This case is further illustration of the serious deficiencies in our immigration enforcement system, and the tragedy that can result. Read more...

This past December, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report entitled "Border Security: Additional Actions Needed to Strengthen CBP Efforts to Mitigate Risk of Employee Corruption and Misconduct". Read more...

Establishment Republicans like Grover Norquist, Haley Barbour, Charles Krauthammer, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) all panicked following the defeat of Mitt Romney and, like a routed army with no leadership, they are in full retreat. However, in this case they are not just throwing their arms away as they desert the battlefield, they are also jettisoning their principles. Read more...

Unlike many of my CIS colleagues, I consider myself a liberal. One reason is that I believe government regulation is necessary to curb abuses of the free market. Another is that I think government should be involved in checking the free market's tendency to devalue the work of those at the bottom and to concentrate too much wealth at the top.

I believe that we need to restrict immigration, especially of the unskilled and poorly educated, in order to protect the social safety net and limit the ability of employers to displace American workers or drive down their wages. Read more...

With Obama's health law continuing to be put into effect, new regulations have been rolled out that relate to enrolling people in Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and for premium subsidies through the exchanges. The regulations squarely address aspects of verification of immigration status. Bottom line, it directs states and others to take someone's word for it that he or she is "lawfully present". Read more...

Two of the characteristics of the lingo of the immigration business are its often-convoluted nature and its double-negatives.

For example, cancellation or suspension of removal is good news for the alien — it means that he will not be deported — but voluntary departure is bad news, it means that he has to leave the country (but not in custody).

But the indoor gold medal in the field of awkward, multiple-negative, complex convolutions in immigration law terminology must go to this wonderful headline in the January 7 issue of Interpreter Releases: Read more...

Last week ICE arrested Roberto Galo, the unlicensed Honduran who killed a young man named Drew Rosenberg in a traffic crash in November 2010, and is detaining him without bond. Galo's arrest is appropriate but, incredibly, despite the fact that Galo repeatedly violated California driving laws and killed someone, ICE had to make an exception to its policies in order to take him into custody and seek his removal. Read more...

Sen. Marco Rubio has effectively endorsed President Obama's approach to immigration, and that endorsement was in turn endorsed by Rep. Paul Ryan. Or, as Julia Preston put it in the New York Times yesterday, "Strikingly, Mr. Rubio's principles did not sound that different from proposals for an immigration overhaul by Mr. Obama, Democratic leaders and a handful of other Republicans."

So, in considering what can now accurately be referred to as the Obama-Rubio-Ryan amnesty plan of 2013, there's one central question that Rubio and Ryan need to be asked: Do they trust President Obama to enforce the immigration laws in the future, after today's illegals have been legalized? Read more...

Here's a puzzling, immigration-related, political and philosophical question, one that may call for the diagramming of the sentence below:

If we are going to have an amnesty for illegal aliens, which is not a good idea, should it be designed to make it relatively harder for more-useful potential residents of the United States to cheat the system than for less-useful potential residents to do so? Read more...

Facing a final compliance deadline of today, January 15, 2013, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last month issued a press release providing a six-month grace period for states to become fully compliant with the federal driver's license law known as the REAL ID Act of 2005. DHS states that enforcement would then begin at the earliest in the autumn of 2013. Read more...

Last month I reported on a case of puzzling, partial judicial secrecy about an immigration case in a blog entitled "It's a Sealed Court Document, But if You Cross My Palm with Silver ...". Read more...

As evangelicals get pushed into liberal immigration policies, too few Christian commentators have voiced much reason. They're typically long on emotionalism and anecdote and short on analytical rigor.

But one recent voice did reflect a degree of thought, balance, and use of the sense God gave him. Read more...

The Wall Street Journal article on Senator Marco Rubio's amnesty plan makes me want to take piano lessons or learn ice sculpture — because it's Groundhog Day for immigration policy, and it's like yesterday never happened. Read more...

On January 7, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) — which bills itself as "an independent, nonpartisan think tank dedicated to the study of the movement of people worldwide" — held a symposium entitled "Immigration Enforcement in the United States: The Rise of a Formidable Machinery".

Alright, I admit it was rude, but I laughed out loud when I read the MPI lead-in announcing the event. "Formidable"? Hardly. This administration has done more to dismantle the effective enforcement of immigration laws — and to use presidential orders to circumvent the proper role of Congress in establishing immigration policy — than any other administration in recent history, perhaps in all of American history. It is the executive branch equivalent of "judicial activism" and, sadly, our legislative leaders appear unable or unwilling to push back and stop the assault on their constitutionally mandated role. Read more...

I'm delighted Doris Meissner has responded to my critique of the report she co-authored for the immigration-expansionist Migration Policy Institute, which falsely claims that we spend more money on immigration enforcement than on all other federal law enforcement combined. Read more...

Read "Immigration Vox Populi on C-SPAN, Part One"

More comments from callers to Thursday's Washington Journal: Read more...

It is a strange combination, but it keeps appearing.

Some alien, or sometimes a group of them, is absolutely brilliant at some kind of activity, but a total klutz at managing immigration regulation.

Sometimes this odd mix is used as an argument that we really should loosen our immigration laws on behalf of some partially-brilliant group, or an individual. Here are three examples of this mix of talent and ineptitude. Read more...

The basic shape of "comprehensive immigration reform" has long been amnesty and huge increases in future immigration in exchange for tougher enforcement. This is the same package we got a generation ago, though the increases in immigration (which worked out to a one-third jump in the number of arrivals) was passed in 1990, a few years after the 1986 passage of the amnesty/enforcement part of the deal. Read more...

When I was an immigration reporter, I learned that C-SPAN's Washington Journal frequently provides a valuable national cross-section of public reaction to immigration. Today and tomorrow, I want to reproduce excerpts from callers to Thursday's program. (You can watch the whole program here.) I am not including comments from the studio guests, which included our own Mark Krikorian, as well as Clarissa Martinez of the National Council of La Raza, Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum, and National Journal reporter Fawn Johnson. Read more...

A good – and very public – test of an agency's priorities is what its press people write about.

If you apply that test to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) you will see that while immigration is the agency's first name, its staff of publicists seem to prefer writing about just about everything else. Read more...

A small bit of immigration policy good news floated out of Oklahoma recently, one involving a highly useful tax idea that should be spread nationwide.

Though the foreign-born population there is a mere 5.1 percent, according to the U.S. Census, compared to 12.5 percent nationally (in 2009), Oklahoma has a state legislature that is interested in combating illegal immigration, and it is quietly showing the way for the rest of us. Read more...

In the latest installment of the Obama administration's "amnesty by executive decree" scheme, DHS has announced the creation of a new waiver that will enable an unknown number of illegal aliens who have married U.S. citizens or who have moved here illegally to join naturalized family members to avoid penalties enacted by Congress in the mid-1990s. Read more...

I've decided to bring an occasional feature to this blog: a look at the job my former colleagues in the press do covering immigration. I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities in the coming months. But my first look will be back in time—to a story that ABC posted on its website last October. I came across it recently. Read more...

One of the obvious troubles with amnesties is that they usually set in motion additional chain migrations – still more immigrant arrivals that would not have happened had the original amnesty not taken place.

Congress has recently acted in the case of one notable alien from Nigeria, to let him become a legal permanent resident, but, at the same time, to make sure that he does not start any unlimited chain migration. It makes an interesting precedent should the next Congress – despite the advice of the Center for Immigration Studies – contemplate an amnesty of any kind. Read more...

Those bright, sunny days immediately following reelection of the president seem to be facing the possibility of scattered showers, possibly thunderstorms, where "comprehensive immigration reform" (CIR) is concerned – so, at least, hints the Los Angeles Times in an article published last weekend. Read more...

It is hard to believe, but foreign students are still being allowed to attend flight schools that are not authorized by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). They have up to February 11 to sign up to get their student visas. Read more...