Last week I read a number of articles documenting the rise in CEO pay, including this one at Slate.com.

The fact that other people are making money by itself does not concern me. But in combination with the decline in middle class income, we see a disturbing trend. When these CEOs use their bloated incomes to depress the wages of ordinary Americans, there is a real problem. Read more...

Since Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, the dominant narrative among substantial segments of the GOP's "elite", aided by their "friends" in the Democratic Party and their allies, has been Hispanic panic. Read more...

It's bad enough that USCIS is not as active as it should be in rooting out immigration-related marriage fraud. It is worse when the American military, albeit unwittingly, helps fund it, as a recent article in Military Times indicates.

All too often citizens — both civilians and members of the military — agree to loveless marriages with aliens so that the citizens get some money and the aliens get green cards. If the marriage is a sham, that's a violation of the federal law and if caught all concerned can go to jail and the alien is likely to be deported.

What I realized recently is that frequently it is not the alien who is paying for the lawless marriage, it is Uncle Sam, or more specifically our armed services. Read more...

Richard Neustadt's classic analysis Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan emphasized that presidents, for all their advisors and supporters, ultimately must rely on themselves to accomplish their policy purposes. He called this need self-help and every successful president has made use of it.

In Neustadt's analysis, self-help is used to further the president's major policy preferences, not the president's primarily personal and political self-interest. Where the latter begins and the former ends, however, is not always easy to discern. And that is especially the case for presidents like Mr. Obama, who consider themselves to be great historical figures. Read more...

The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted last week to admit more high-tech foreign workers in some categories than the annual supply of them.

In its eagerness to meet the wishes of the high tech industry — and steal jobs from qualified American workers — the Republican majority on the committee, with the single, commendable exception of Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), voted to allow as many as 55,000 green cards to be issued annually to aliens with advanced science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degrees from American universities. Read more...

In an interview broadcast Sunday on Univision's "Al Punto" program, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda sharply criticized the just-passed U.S. Senate bill's provisions to lengthen the border fence and limit the number of temporary worker visas. His comments, together with those of Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, contradicted the claim by many advocates of the Senate bill that emigration from Mexico is declining rapidly. Read more...

The president's reelection and historical legacy were hanging in the balance. Half measures wouldn't do and hadn't worked.

President Obama had tried to build his credibility by presenting himself as being serious on immigration enforcement in order to get Republican help on passing major immigration reform. But he undercut that effort by putting into place a series of executive actions that narrowed and limited immigration enforcement: Read more...

Shown below is an older, unemployed American engineer (white hair, no jacket, apparently kneeling, perhaps pleading, on the outside of the circle) and a younger Asian, presumably a high-tech executive (dark hair, jacket, sitting at the table, presumably listening) at a Silicon Valley gathering. The photo, from today's New York Times, was taken by Noah Berger, and was used to illustrate an article headlined (in the paper version) "The Idled of Silicon Valley: A Bill Allowing More Foreign Workers Stirs a Tech Debate". It is on the first page of today's business section, page B1. Read more...

Before yesterday's vote on the Senate immigration bill (which passed 68-32), many senators made final comments to wrap up the discussion. Here's a look at some of the more interesting comments, followed by some commentary:

Chuck Schumer: "If the bill passes, anyone who wants to try to cross the border illegally will have to get over an 18-foot steel pedestrian fence, past border agents standing every thousand feet apart from Brownsville to San Diego. Future waves of illegal immigration will be prevented if this bill is passed. And that’s not a wish. It's not a hope. It's a fact." Read more...

President Obama's August 2011 enforcement statement and policy were misleading because he couched this major policy change as a response to "limited resources". This was not true, but that did not keep it from being repeated. For example, in December 2011 a DHS spokesperson was quoted as saying that his agency "has implemented immigration enforcement priorities that focus limited resources on convicted criminals, repeat immigration law violators, fugitives, and recent entrants." (emphasis added) Read more...

Thursday's Washington Post has an article on H-1B visas that addresses a red herring that H-1B supporters often throw out: Why would an employer use an H-1B for cheap labor when they have to pay several thousand dollars in fees to get the visa?

The Washington Post gives the answer: Read more...

Illegal aliens are living so deep in the shadows that they were on hand in the Senate galleries for this afternoon's 68-32 vote for the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill, and they yelled out Obama's campaign chant when the vote was announced.

Lots of bloviation beforehand about how "historic" the vote was. No one mentioned that the Senate passed an amnesty in 2006 that wasn't approved by the House. Was that "historic", too? Read more...

Caught between his ambitions and his circumstances, the president tried to present himself as unusually strict on immigration enforcement.

However, he failed to convince Republicans whose help he needed to pass an immigration bill in order to cement his appeal to the Spanish-speaking-descent community. They saw the administration's increasing use of discretion as questionable, at minimum. Read more...

There were never any “No Irish Need Apply” signs in 19th-century shop windows; it’s what historian Richard Jensen calls “a myth of victimization”. But, incredibly, there are signs now that say, in effect, “No Americans Need Apply”, like this one in the window of an Asian restaurant in my town, seeking kitchen help and a dishwasher: Read more...

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), whose bipartisan amendment to fortify E-Verify was blocked Wednesday in a partisan quarrel over Senate procedure, described its purpose with the urgency of a man on a mission to avert a disaster he has seen before.

"I'm passionate about this," Portman said on the Senate floor. He insisted that his amendment was essential to the Gang of Eight's announced commitment to avoid another wave of illegal immigration with their bill for comprehensive immigration reform. Read more...

I have been both fascinated with, and appalled by, the over-emphasis on border security in the current debates about the legalization of some 11 million illegal aliens.

It is as if the minds of Congress have slipped into reverse historical gear, and are dealing with the high drama of the wars between the U.S. Cavalry and the Indians on the western frontier during the 1800s. Read more...

During Wednesday afternoon's debate of the immigration reform bill, Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) read a guest column in the Des Moines Register that blasted the bill for failing to address weaknesses in the nation's immigration courts. The column was written by former immigration court judge Mark H. Metcalf. You can read it here. Read more...

Time and circumstances were closing in on President Obama in 2011. The presidential election was fast approaching. He had no major accomplishments to his credit that the public supported. Enthusiasm among his ardent supporters had waned and skepticism about his leadership efforts among the general public had increased. Read more...

Setting aside the policy question of recognizing same-sex marriages – it does not bother me but it certainly bothers others – what will the impact of the Supreme Court's Defense of Marriage Act decision be on the extent of legal immigration to the U.S.? Read more...

It has been depressing to listen to Sens. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and McCain (R-Ariz.) talk about the "border surge" they hatched in order to con — er, persuade — reluctant Republicans to vote for the immigration reform bill.

"This is the toughest, strongest, most expensive border provision that we have had," huffed Sen. Chuck Schumer, pretending to believe that the surge will actually become law and double the size of the Border Patrol while doing little to improve interior security. Read more...

Amidst all the talk on Capitol Hill about the alleged "need" for more alien workers, here is a bit of contrary news: Read more...

The president was caught in a bind. He had promised that immigration reform would be one of his top agenda items during his first year in office, or at least his first term, and it wasn't. What's more, activists from the Spanish-background community were angry that he had broken his promise. They pushed him to make a commitment to immigration "reform", which, in their minds and his, required a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11.5 million illegal aliens living and working in the United States. Read more...

During the Senate immigration debate last Friday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) enthusiastically described the breakthrough he had brokered with Republican senators who wanted tougher border security measures. In outlining the deal laid out in the Corker-Hoeven amendment, Schumer contradicted the arguments he presented nine days earlier in opposition to the border-security amendment proposed by John Cornyn (R-Texas). Read more...

Like the scales falling from the Apostle Paul's eyes, a prominent member of the Evangelical Immigration Table has distanced himself from the front group after learning of its funding by liberal atheist billionaire George Soros through the open-borders National Immigration Forum.

Eric Metaxas, who penned stellar biographies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and William Wilberforce, has cut his ties to the NIF's project that gives the impression Christians broadly support mass amnesty and the Senate amnesty bill in particular. Read more...

The United Kingdom is about to experiment with an interesting reverse twist on our visa waiver program – a technique that should be considered by our Congress.

Visa waivers are offered by the United States to would-be visitors from a carefully constructed list of nations that do not produce many visa over-stays, such as Japan and Great Britain. It eases travel for these aliens, pleases the lobbyists from the American travel industry, and does not produce much of a headache for the United States. Read more...

Heading into his 2012 reelection campaign, the president had a large problem. He had managed to accrue only a mediocre record of accomplishment in the area that mattered most to most Americans — the economy. Moreover, the president's policies and, in some cases the lack of same, had diminished the enthusiasm of several groups that had been among his staunch supporters in his first presidential campaign.

One of these groups consisted of legal American residents with roots in Spanish-speaking countries. Hispanics, it was endlessly repeated, were America's fastest growing ethnic group and that their presence in large numbers in the so-called swing states made them an important constituency to engage, and a crucial one for the president to win. Read more...

Among the faux enforcement improvements being hyped by supporters of the deceptive Schumer-Corker-Hoeven substitute amendment to the Gang of Eight bill is a new section titled "Removal of Nonimmigrants Who Overstay Their Visas". Not exactly.

The new provision (Section 1201) says that no later than six months after the enactment of the bill, the DHS Secretary shall begin dealing with those foreign visitors who arrived after the bill's enactment and who overstayed their temporary visa by at least six months. The Secretary is required to deal with at least 90 percent of the overstayers. Read more...

Last Friday on the Senate floor, Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) gratefully acknowledged the role Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had played in forging an amendment that Corker was sponsoring with fellow Republican John Hoeven of North Dakota. The amendment was an effort to win Republican support for the immigration reform bill with a massive increase in spending on border security.

Said Corker in a tribute to Schumer, "My last call last night, at 12:33, was with him. And my first call early, early this morning was with him. I thank him for the way he has worked with us to try to work through Republican sensibilities." Read more...

A document circulating on the Hill highlights some of the Corker-Hoeven substitute amendment's worst provisions. The amendment leaves in place the basic structure of the Schumer-Rubio amnesty: mass amnesty first, real enforcement never.

The gory details include: Read more...

The Hoeven-Corker amendment has been incorporated into the full text of the amnesty bill (S. 744) expanding it from its original 800-plus pages to just under 1,200 pages.

The first thing that jumps out about the Senate's desperate attempt to pass comprehensive immigration reform is just how similar this process is to the 1986 amnesty, which granted illegal aliens citizenship with a promise of future border security and restrictions on the employment of illegal aliens. And we all know how well that worked out! Read more...