Here's an idea. Instead of adding 20,000 Border Patrol agents at our southern border, let's make that 18,000, and use the money saved for 2,000 of them to fund, say, 4,000 Mexican Border Patrolmen (or better, Mexican Marines) at their southern border. Read more...

Elected political leaders often confuse support with popularity. They think that espousing views that correspond to the least common denominator of public understanding and opinion is the key to political success. And, regrettably it often is, at least in the short term. Read more...

The "Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement (SAFE) Act", an immigration bill pending in the House of Representatives as H.R. 2278, is a modern marvel of legislative honesty and symmetry: it means what it says, and says what it means. Read more...

Based on their public comments and actions, it is clear that the business interests that support comprehensive immigration reform hold American workers in extremely low esteem and that they all too frequently take an anti-American approach when it comes to hiring and retaining workers. Read more...

What if Congress decided to give a potential free immigration pass to a group of about 250,000 aliens with limited educations?

And then Congress guessed that most of the resulting migrants would settle in four specific American jurisdictions?

And then agreed to pay for some of the financial impacts of the new migrants, but only in those four jurisdictions?

How would the four jurisdictions handle and measure the impact of the newcomers, and what else would happen? Read more...

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has just announced a unique agreement with the government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in which boat people interdicted on the high seas headed for Australia to seek asylum will instead be shunted to processing camps in PNG. If determined to be legitimate refugees, they will be resettled there, instead of Australia. Read more...

USCIS has defined alien video gamers as athletes for immigration purposes in response to the pressure from lobbyists.

As humorist Dave Barry would say, "I am not making this up."

The July 16 Time headline is: "Pro Gamers Get U.S. Work Visas, Thanks to Industry Lobbyists". Read more...

Those who advise the GOP to "get right" with Hispanics by supporting the Senate's massive immigration bill never consider the downside of traducing principles in the hope of gaining votes. Perhaps it can be said of "death by pandering", as the Washington Post' Kathleen Parker suggests is the case with "principled martyrs," that, "[P]rincipled or not, you're still dead in the end."

But death by pandering strips you of both your integrity and your honor. Worse, it doesn't give you the opportunity to make your case and try to gain supporters for your perspective.

In essence, it is just giving up. Read more...

The case of Cesar Benitez, an illegal alien serial rapist with numerous prior offenses, including repeated immigration violations, illustrates the pressing need for the SAFE Act, now under consideration in the U.S. House as a welcome alternative to the Schumer-Rubio bill.

Benitez was arrested in April 2012 for hiding in a women's bathroom at a Target store in Allen, Texas, and peeping at a 13-year old girl in the next stall. They caught him in nearby Plano, where police also sought him for similar offenses, charged him with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, and set bond at $1,500. Read more...

A recent bit of investigative journalism by Politico showed that few illegal aliens are taking advantage of the in-state tuition breaks offered by many state universities.

This news should, but probably will not, shoot some holes in the endless propaganda about how a whole generation of future leaders are losing their prospects because of a nasty insistence on the enforcement of the immigration law — about all those illegal aliens who are high school valedictorians who want to go to medical school so they can serve the people, etc. Read more...

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker writes that if the GOP doesn't die a demographic death, it may just commit suicide by standing for its principles. Republicans, she writes, "seem to be adopting the self-immolation tactics of principled martyrs," and she continues, "Of course, principled or not, you're still dead in the end."

Maybe. But consider that the public has very little detailed information about the actual Senate bill and that when they learn that what they have been told or promised is not actually in it, their support drops. Or to quote a poll headline: "39 Percent Favor Reform Plan That Cuts Future Illegal Immigration by Just 50 Percent." Read more...

(Ms. Kephart recently returned from a Special Counsel position with the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she advised and supported Senator Jeff Sessions' (R-Ala.) work during the committee's consideration of immigration legislation.)

Read Part 1

The Senate-passed S.744 has three distinct, mandatory airport exit requirements, only two of which involve seaports. None solve the air carrier problem, only one provides funding, and all conflict with current law. Read more...

Michelle Cottle is a fine writer. A scribe for the Daily Beast, she writes vividly and with fervor, especially when she rips conservatives. Of the Tea Party, for example, she has written that "the movement's anarchic, bottom-up structure may give its gatherings tons of snap, crackle, and pop, but it is lousy for formulating and delivering a coherent message."

So when the Black American Leadership Alliance this week teamed up this with Tea Partiers for a rally demanding that Congress "recognize the devastating effects illegal immigration and amnesty have on low-skilled workers, particularly those in minority communities," maybe it was inevitable that Cottle would ignore the message and slash the cracklers. Read more...

If you listen to supporters of the Gang of Eight's vast immigration bill, including many establishment Republicans, the GOP faces a dire choice: adapt demographically and support the bill or die.

Those who prefer that their party do neither have now been given an another choice, this time by Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker. They can commit principled suicide. Read more...

The University of Northern Virginia (UNVA) — a very marginal institution that relied heavily on foreign students, notably those from India, and that was raided two years ago by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — was closed Wednesday, July 17, by the State of Virginia, not by ICE.

As is all too often the case, an institution outside the immigration business has stepped in and done the work that should have been done by the Department of Homeland Security, as the Securities and Exchange Commission did recently in a $145 million immigrant investor (EB-5) fraud case I described in an earlier blog. Read more...

Note: This is the first of several blogs on the Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement (SAFE) Act, an immigration bill pending in the House of Representatives as H.R.2278. This blog reflects on those aspects of the bill that encourage cooperation among and between the federal, state, and local governments where their interlocking responsibilities are concerned. Read more...

Though the Senate Judiciary Committee's marathon immigration hearing took place some time back, it's worth another look as a reminder of why public opinion of Congress is so low. Many people think that congressional hearings are meant to be an opportunity for open discourse and deliberation where experts are called to testify and inform our leadership about the various impacts of legislation. Unfortunately, hearings are often nothing more than political theater and the experts often nothing more than special interests and props. Read more...

One of the least covered stories involving illegal immigration to the United States is its effect on American workers. As the March for Jobs made clear Monday, young blacks have been especially affected by job displacement as employers have hired millions of illegal immigrants. Those who addressed the problem included members of Congress and other immigration activists. But the most poignant and powerful voices were those of black leaders. Here is a look at some of their comments. Read more...

The conventional immigration narrative, favored by supporters of comprehensive immigration reform, is that the Republican Party is doomed to electoral oblivion if the House doesn't pass a bill that mirrors S.744, the Senate Gang of Eight's 1,200-page bill. Read more...

The Obama administration and the new Mexican regime are taking some useful — if tiny — steps in the right direction regarding sending Mexican illegals back to the middle of that nation.

For decades the pattern has been to ship illegal aliens captured by our government back to our southern border, send them to the other side; then, all too often, the illegals try to cross again, frequently successfully. Read more...

Frank Morris, a CIS board member who will be one of the featured speakers at Monday's March for Jobs in downtown Washington, has sharply criticized Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers's stance on immigration. Morris charges that Conyers, whose immigration positions are especially significant because he is ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, is willfully "blind" to immigration's negative effects on his constituents. Read more...

A liberal-ish reader comments on my article at National Review Online on the political fallout for the GOP of passing an amnesty/mass immigration bill: Read more...

Advocates of amnesty and higher levels of immigration have come out with a new advertisement that attempts to sell their agenda by highlighting only the border provisions of the Senate's immigration bill (S.744) — provisions that will never see the light of day if the open-border crowd gets its way. The American Action Network's amnesty ad is designed to appeal to conservatives and refers to the amnesty as "conservative immigration reform". Read more...

The Farm Bill, which also authorizes the food stamp program, is being re-considered by the House of Representatives after that legislation failed to pass recently. Given the power of the farm lobby, the bill is certain to become law later this year.

While the bill is in limbo, the House should add a modest amendment that would see to it that families including illegal aliens (gently termed "undocumented non-citizens" in Department of Agriculture regulations) are not more eligible for food stamps than all-citizen families, which is now the case in most states. Read more...

On June 26th, the Supreme Court voided key portions of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Although most media outlets, such as the Los Angeles Times, focused on the changes to tax, inheritance, health, and Social Security laws and policies the ruling would bring about, it seemed evident to at least some observers that another consequence of the decision would be in the way federal immigration authorities confer benefits to homosexual foreign spouses of American citizens petitioning on their behalf. Previously, such petitions were denied. Read more...

Many members of the GOP's senior leadership pushing for "comprehensive immigration reform" and their supporters in the Democratic Party agree: Because of America's changing demographic profile and the GOP's troubled relationship with the Hispanic community, it must embrace comprehensive immigration reform, or die as a major political party.

That conventional wisdom certainly does translate to a political existential threat, if it's true; but it's far from clear that it is. Read more...

(Ms. Kephart recently returned from a Special Counsel position with the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she advised and supported Senator Jeff Sessions' (R-AL) work during the committee's consideration of immigration legislation.)

The national security implications of the recently passed Senate immigration bill, S.744 (the "Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act") are pervasive. The kinds of damage that S.744 would do to national security, if passed, are manifold and are at least as bad as the border security provisions that have received significant attention. Read more...

As with any piece of comprehensive legislation, the Senate immigration bill S.744 has winners and losers. The winners are those who benefit from illegal immigration and from a big, ongoing supply of foreign workers. The losers are those who don't.

Winners Read more...

The only joy — and it is a minor one — in the ongoing immigration policy conflict in Congress is to watch two sets of worker-exploiters battle each other over H-1B slots.

The most recent round between the Indian out-placement firms (or body shops) and the IT giants (Microsoft, Intel, IBM, et al.), also called product companies, was won by the former. Had it been a football game, the score would have been:

Placement firms: 35
Product firms: 0

That encounter was played out in the House Judiciary Committee. More on that later. Read more...

The Obama administration is rushing to get its signature health law implemented — and it treats illegal aliens better than native-born Americans. Starting in 2014, key elements of Obamacare take effect, including the individual mandate to have health insurance or else pay a fine. Read more...