Every president has to confront how history will view him and his time in office. Reelection provides some solace and an advantageous starting position for historical assessment, but it is no guarantee. Just ask Richard Nixon.

Presidents need not be great historical figures in order to be considered successful. There are successful presidents that bend circumstances to achieve their goals and those who successfully adapt and navigate the political currents they face while putting their own stamp on the results.

Whichever of these two paths are most psychologically congenial, presidents have essentially three specific ways that they can be "successful" and establish a solid historical legacy. Read more...

How much attention did USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas pay to EB-5 applications filed on behalf of Terry McAuliffe's electric car company, GreenTech?

The question — involving two Democrats seeking promotion (McAuliffe is the candidate for governor of Virginia in the fall election) — may be crucial to their careers, Mayorkas' probably more than McAuliffe's. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) weighed in last week with what one observer called a "devastating" 97-page analysis of Mayorkas' role in the EB-5 (immigrant investor) case. Read more...

There are major differences between the immigration bill passed a few weeks ago in the Senate and the SAFE Act, the immigration bill pending in the House of Representatives, especially in the approach taken toward aliens who, in addition to being in the United States illegally, commit criminal offenses. Read more...

Republican strategists see immigration reform as the salvation of their party. Leading Republican senators along with a few Republican House leaders are at the forefront of the amnesty push. So assuming they get their way, how will headlines and news reports read in the future?

November 2013. House Republican Leadership Caves; Path to Citizenship Now the Law Read more...

A headline from Bloomberg really stretches the story into the spin-and-fiction zone. The "news" item claims "Yes Votes on Immigration Revamp Haven't Hurt Republicans". Believe that and you're a gullible dolt. Believe that as a politician and you may find yourself an ex-politician. Read more...

bluff (bluf)
v. bluffed, bluff·ing, bluffs
v.tr.
1. To mislead or deceive.
2. To impress, deter, or intimidate by a false display of confidence.
3. Games To try to mislead (opponents) in a card game by heavy betting on a poor hand or by little or no betting on a good one.

Does President Obama really want to sign an immigration bill? Or does he really not mind if the effort fails so that he will have what some believe will be a potent issue to use against Republicans in the 2014 midterm congressional elections? As Chief Deputy Whip Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) phrased it, "The question is, how much energy does the White House put in to actually getting a remedy? Or do they want to keep the issue for 2014?"

There's evidence for both positions, but ultimately there are very good psychological and political reasons to believe that only one is right. Read more...

This week's winner of the Bury-the-Lede Award goes to Seema Mehta of the Los Angeles Times for her story about the discussion of immigration policy at a town hall meeting held by Democratic Rep. Karen Bass.

Mehta spent the first 480 words of her 620-word story summarizing Rep. Bass's concerns about the future of the Senate bill, giving special attention to her denunciation of Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) for his notoriously wrong-headed remarks about illegal immigrants. Read more...

One of the groups advocating for mass amnesty, including the grotesque Senate-passed S.744, is a labor union front group called the Restaurant Opportunities Center. ROC is pursuing loopholes in Obamacare to give taxpayer-funded health care to illegal aliens.

ROC, it turns out, deserves special opprobrium for not only advocating on behalf of illegal aliens, but for employing a prominent one, apparently knowingly. Making ROC even more detestable, ROC collects federal funds, which essentially frees up its own bucks for its offices in Washington and elsewhere. More on the federal dole later. Read more...

Jiamei Tian, the disturbed woman who sprayed green paint on the Lincoln Memorial and other treasured sites in Washington, is an illegal alien. (She is a Chinese national and a visa-abuser; though the media uses softer terms, such as the fact that she has an expired visa.)

The storied high school valedictorian that we hear so much about, the Mexican teenager who wants to attend medical school so that he can help the poor, is also an illegal alien.

Both narratives are gripping and both are totally beside the point. Read more...

"Meet the Press", hosted by David Gregory, is, as noted, a rather conventional news program. Yet, every once in a while, it results in a very clarifying set of exchanges.

One case in point was the following exchange between New York Times columnist David Brooks and Rep. Raul Labrador on the July 7 show: Read more...

Just back from braving the wilds of western New York, and I see that a federal judge in Dallas has dismissed a civil suit by ICE agents challenging the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty (Obama's administrative version of the DREAM Act). The agents claimed that Obama's illegal amnesty forced them to violate federal law, contrary to their oath to bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution. Read more...

Two foreign service officers (FSO) in opposite corners of the world recently have been implicated in cash-for-visa scandals that have raised new questions about the State Department's lack of oversight in the visa issuance process. In May, Michael Sestak, an FSO who was serving as the non-immigrant visa (NIV) chief at the U.S. Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, was arrested in California and has been charged with conspiracy to commit visa fraud and bribery. Read more...

It is now clear that there will be no action on the nomination of Alejandro Mayorkas to be deputy secretary of DHS until after the August Senate recess. He is currently director of USCIS.

More specifically, the Senate resumes work on September 6 and current DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano is scheduled to leave her office on September 7, so it appears that Under Secretary Rand Beers, now acting deputy secretary, will become acting secretary on that date, assuming that Napolitano leaves as scheduled. For more on the succession complications at DHS, see this earlier blog of mine. Read more...

Informed statisticians inside the government and out calculate that, at a minimum, about 40 percent of those living in our country without permission initially entered legally through land, sea and air ports of entry and then simply overstayed their periods of authorized admission, melting into the interior and working illegally, often by assuming the identities and using the critical data (such as Social Security numbers) of citizens and lawful residents. In other words, nearly half of the illegal-alien population consists of individuals who abused our visa and visa-waiver systems. The phenomenon has risen to a crisis level.

This is why I find it odd — anachronistic in the extreme — that the tipping point for the Senate, in its embarrassing rush to pass an immigration reform bill, any immigration reform bill no matter how flawed, was a last-minute amendment providing for a "surge" of Border Patrol agents on the southern land border. Read more...

A story on Monday night's "PBS News Hour" reported on an effort in Boston to confront the crisis of youth unemployment. Despite that effort, said correspondent Paul Solman, there are many fewer jobs available in Boston today than there were in the late 1990s.

Solman described the dimensions of the problem, reporting that 12 million Americans in the 16-19 age cohort are unemployed. One of his interviewees said American employers need to be mobilized to hire young workers for whom job experience is a vital part of preparation for adulthood. Read more...

"Meet the Press", hosted by David Gregory, is one of the nation's oldest and most respected Sunday news shows. Each week it invites noteworthy political leaders and opinion makers to deliver their views and discuss them with the host and in turn have them discussed by a panel of political commentators. Read more...

Republican Rep. Raul Labrador has represented Idaho's first congressional district since 2010 and was a member of that state's House of Representatives before that. In Congress he has become an important voice on immigration, and for good reason. He was born in Puerto Rico, raised by a single mother, made his way through Brigham Young University, and then the University of Washington Law School. Read more...

While, thanks to the arrival of the little Prince of Cambridge, the succession plans for the British monarchy are well established for the next 60 years, the succession for the secretary-ship of Homeland Security is not clear 60 days from now. Read more...

I have spoken with President Obama once, for about 10 seconds. It was the spring of 2006. He was a senator. I was a reporter. As he walked past my position off the senate floor, I asked his response to those who say illegal immigration has displaced many young black men from the workplace.

Sen. Obama said this as he kept moving: "Well, there are a lot of other issues facing young black men."

Yes, but this is an issue, as a call yesterday from a black man in Georgia to C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" showed. Read more...

During an appearance on "Face the Nation", House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told Bob Schieffer, "We have a problem with 11 million people who are here without documents."

Unfortunately, this means that the Speaker is developing public policy based on an erroneous premise because, as I wrote in 2009: Read more...

Many journalists, pundits, and pollsters still seem to be under the impression that the Senate's amnesty bill (S.744) requires illegal aliens to pay back taxes. It doesn't. When the bill was first being written, the idea of requiring illegal aliens to pay back taxes for the period they worked off the books was considered, but quickly abandoned. Read more...

In my last blog on the "Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement (SAFE) Act", an immigration bill pending in the House of Representatives as H.R.2278, I discussed the terrorism and national security provisions in Title II of the draft legislation. Read more...

A large EB-5 project in Aberdeen, S.D., Northern Beef Packers Limited Partnership (NBP), has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, probably leaving some 160 alien investors (mostly Chinese) with little or no financial return for their 160 half-million-dollar investments, according to local reports. Read more...

A new report tracking the number of ICE detainers issued confirms that interior immigration enforcement has declined significantly in recent months. This report corroborates my previous analysis of another set of ICE statistics that revealed a considerable deterioration in interior enforcement since 2011. Read more...

In a blog on July 23, Center fellow David North wrote of the controversy surrounding Alejandro Mayorkas, presently the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and nominee to be number two in USCIS's mother department, Homeland Security (DHS). Read more...

My favorite government agency is the Government Accountability Office. Not only are they frequently the smartest people in the room, they have no political agenda. So they don't have an eye on the next election, and they don't give a damn about the exploding heads on cable TV. Read more...

Alejandro Mayorkas, the USCIS Director who has been nominated to be Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had an easy confirmation hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee Thursday — but only because the Republican senators boycotted it. Read more...

It is time to take a closer look at the impact of the clauses in the currently pending immigration bills that would, in effect, staple a green card to the advanced STEM diploma of all aliens completing those degrees in the United States. Read more...

In prior blogs, I've been discussing the strengths of the "Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement (SAFE) Act", an immigration bill pending in the House of Representatives as H.R. 2278, including its commitment to legitimate interior enforcement as well as border initiatives, and the framework it establishes for improved federal-state-local cooperation where immigration law and policy are concerned. Read more...

The Associated Press headline and lede are ominous:

Homeland Security Official Probed

President Obama's choice to be the No. 2 official at the Homeland Security Department [Alejandro Mayorkas] is under investigation for his role in helping a company secure an international investor visa for a Chinese executive, The Associated Press has learned.