Bolstered by the re-election of President Obama, the foreign-born children of illegal aliens (DREAMers) are now demanding that all illegal aliens be granted amnesty from both the violation of federal immigration laws as well as from the multiple job-related felonies that they have committed. Read more...

The globalization pendulum may be swinging back toward a healthier position, columnist Robert Samuelson observes. Several decades in the making, the globalization trend might be subsiding a bit. This has ramifications for immigration, as well. Read more...

We have suggested in this blog that many proposed EB-5 investments (for would-be immigrant investors) are pretty marginal, but here's one that is so bad that its marginality merits extensive coverage in a Canadian newspaper, Toronto's Globe and Mail.

An American businessman, Greg Jamison, tried and failed to get the financing he needed from rich aliens so that he could gain control of the Phoenix Coyotes, a professional hockey team in the middle of the desert, according to the paper. Read more...

Last week, ICE quietly announced that it was terminating 32 local enforcement task force partnerships, known as 287(g) agreements, some of which have been operating successfully for as long as ten years. This follows the revocation earlier this year of seven other task force agreements in Arizona. ICE has offered no specific reasons for the cancellation of these agreements, other than that it thinks it can do a better job without its local partners. Read more...

One of my favorite newspaper columnists, George Will, has gone a bit off track in his recent column about the Homestead Act of 1862. Will cites a National Park Service official's characterizing this act as "the first comprehensive immigration law." As much as I like George Will, I'm afraid he misapprehends important points in his otherwise interesting column about a 19th-century law intended to draw population to America's wide open spaces out west. Read more...

The administration continues to go out of its way to be nice to illegal aliens, and others from Haiti, who are now in the U.S. with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). TPS was granted to Haitians in the U.S. originally because of the earthquake of January 12, 2010. Read more...

Last month's elections in Utah should raise concerns for moderate non-Hispanics in both major political parties who think that they are going to be rewarded by Hispanic activists if they support legislation that benefits illegal aliens. Read more...

An article last week in Mexico´s largest newspaper passed a remarkable judgment on the civil rights of Latino immigrants in the United States. It said they don´t exist.

"For more than half a century, the civil rights of the immigrants of Latino origin have been non-existent, which has made them the slaves of the modern era," reported El Universal, in an analysis that was also published elsewhere in Latin America. Read more...

Memorandum to: President Obama and Speaker Boehner
From: David North, CIS
Re: There's $100 billion available from immigration sources to avoid the "Fiscal Cliff" Read more...

A group of Filipino teachers here on H-1B visas won a court battle in California earlier last week against the Filipina-owned contracting company that had exploited them over the years.

The press headlines were misleading, however, trumpeting "Filipino Teachers in US win $4.5 million". Read more...

Ted Robbins, NPR’s fine reporter in Arizona, used some hard numbers in his recent story about border security.

Said Robbins: “Since the mid-1980s, the U.S. Border Patrol has quintupled in size — growing from about 4,000 to more than 20,000 agents. The government has built some 700 miles of fencing and vehicle barriers. It has placed thousands of ground sensors, lights, radar towers and cameras along the border.” Read more...

Last month I reported the alarming news that ICE intended to take a pass on deporting Roberto Galo, a Honduran who was convicted of killing Drew Rosenberg in a 2010 traffic crash in San Francisco. Adding insult to the Rosenberg family's horrific injury, the ICE Public Advocate, whose office was created and funded to assist the public with their concerns about immigration law enforcement, has ignored repeated attempts by the victim’s father to contact him and discuss the case. Read more...

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...