The process through which the Senate's immigration bill was developed and amendments for it were considered and discarded at a rapid pace is unfolding in the context of a genuine trust crisis in the American civic culture.

Over the past half-century, Americans have become increasingly distrustful and skeptical of their government, especially at the national level. Read more...

The Senate Judiciary Committee took a giant step backward on Tuesday, adopting a considerably softer set of rules for H-1B workers, thus pleasing the big high-tech firms while hurting American workers.

Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), and others created — off stage — a last-minute compromise on the subject, which passed the committee by a voice vote and led later to a 13-5 vote in the committee on the proposed bill itself (S.744). Read more...

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Monday warned about the vulnerability of the U.S.-Mexico border to penetration by Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. But her statement was marred by major ambiguity and several factual inaccuracies.

"There is evidence of actual and potential terrorists entering via the Southwest border, principally members of Hamas and Hezbollah," Feinstein said at a session of the Senate Judiciary Committee to consider immigration reform legislation. Read more...

One of the ironic glories, or better described, horrors, of S.744, is the vast array of different, usually powerless, populations who are hurt by its provisions.

The powerful, egged on by the greedy, have designed the bill to meet their various wants with little regard for the impact of the provisions on largely silent populations. Read more...

The battle over biometrics intensified Monday at the Senate Judiciary Committee as Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions angrily said a 2009 DHS study showed it is feasible to use biometrics to confirm the departure of temporary visa holders from U.S. airports.

Sessions said the report, which he first learned about last Friday, "completely rejects" claims by some committee members that a biometric system is not available because of technical problems and affordability issues. He said a system could be in place in a short time and at a reasonable cost. Read more...

One of the most alarming effects of the Schumer-Rubio amnesty, if enacted in anything close to its current form, would be the legalization of tens of thousands of illegal aliens who have already been a public safety threat in their community. The eligibility criteria established for the amnesty and most of the new guestworker provisions excuse a wide variety of criminal behavior, including gang membership, drunk driving, vehicular manslaughter, identity theft, and immigration fraud (see this analysis). In addition, the bill offers amnesty to those who have repeatedly and flagrantly violated immigration laws. Read more...

One of the more obscure arguments against more migration appeared — of all places — above the fold on the front page of Sunday's New York Times. That is the red carpet of America's print journalism.

The lede of Sabrina Tavernise's report from Brownsville, Texas, was exactly on target:

Becoming an American can be bad for your health.

The headline was equally pertinent: Read more...

Friday's Charlie Rose program included discussion of how the Obama administration's triple whammy – controversies involving Benghazi, the IRS, and the Justice Department – could reverberate in the attempt to pass immigration reform legislation. Here are comments of Bloomberg's Al Hunt, the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty, and CNN's Jessica Yellin: Read more...

Trust in government represents a leap of faith on the part of Americans, especially when it comes to large, complex, and extremely consequential policy legislation like the immigration bill now before Congress. That leap of faith actually consists of dual parts of hope and confidence.

Trust rests on the hope that our leaders are acting in good faith and putting forward immigration proposals in the public interest and not primarily partisan policy proposals. It also depends on confidence that an expectation of fairness and evenhandedness in the policy debate process has not been misplaced. Read more...

Amidst the swirl of confusion, obscure parliamentary moves, and partisanship, as the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up some 200 proposed amendments to the Gang of Eight's S.744, one vote is likely to be crucial. Read more...

Yesterday's session of the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to mind the ambivalence of St. Augustine when he famously implored the Lord to make him chaste, but not yet.

The committee's prayer seems to be, "Oh Lord, give us a biometric identification system that would make immigration policy credible, but no hurry." Read more...

We are often reminded that America is diverse country held together by a commitment to a creedal core and that is partially true. But it is also a country held together by a common cultural heritage and the set of premises and institutions that follow from it. And, finally but crucially, it also is bound together by the feelings of emotional attachment that the members of America's national community feel toward the country, its public institutions, and to some degree each other. Read more...

The Census Bureau has released new projections that examine the impact of different levels of immigration on the United States. The projections, analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies, show what demographers have long known: immigration has only a small impact on slowing the aging of America. Read more...

The disappearance of Sen. Charles Schumer's (D-N.Y.) proposal for a national employment card gets my nomination for mystery of the year in the national immigration debate. Just a few years ago, Schumer trumpeted the idea as essential to effective immigration reform. Read more...

Some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, to borrow from George Orwell, are more equal than others.

If you are ProPublica and want to know about conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Department sends you floods of documents on 31 "social welfare" entities — within 13 days. (See this ProPublica account of their FOIA request.) Read more...

President Obama and the Gang of Eight senators are repeating a number of talking points designed to elicit support for amnesty, or as they call it, "'earned legalization," for immigrants who have come to the United States illegally. The so-called "path to citizenship" is part of a bipartisan Senate immigration bill. Read more...

The Gang of Eight's version of the H-1B program — an expansive, permissive one — prevailed in Tuesday's mark-up before the full Senate Judiciary Committee. For the webcast of the session, see here. Read more...

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) got considerable agreement this morning with his claim that Congress should press for completion of the entry/exit system that it ordered in 1996 to track those who overstay their visas. But he failed to win enough votes for his proposal to amend the immigration bill by requiring that the system be up and running at U.S. ports of entry before illegal immigrants could be given provisional legal status. Read more...

This morning, on the MSNBC program "Morning Joe", investigative reporter Lisa Myers made pointed observations about the Obama administration's mania for controlling the news and squelching critics. She was speaking in light of the cascading revelations about the Justice Department's seizure of Associated Press reporters' phone records and about the IRS targeting conservative organizations for special scrutiny. Read more...

Democrats and many Republicans view the current immigration legislation now being considered in Congress primarily through a political prism. For Democrats, the new legislation presents the opportunity to add many millions of new immigrants — sympathetic to their party's perspective of larger and more "helpful" government — to the country's voting rolls and thus help bring about their dream of a permanent Democratic majority. Read more...

An American citizen I know apparently suffered age discrimination at the hands of a smallish H-1B employer and is fighting back. (Though I know the name, he or she will remain nameless for reasons explained below.)

The citizen is 61 and has been doing serious IT work for a long, long time. The citizen applied for an advertised job with a New Jersey firm looking for a 15-month-employee as a project manager to work on an IT contract with an "investment bank" in New York City. Read more...

Grover Norquist’s piece last week at National Review Online was the usual we-were-mean-to-the-Irish-so-we-need-open-borders stuff, but three points I think are worth making.

First, Norquist misrepresents the central feature of the Schumer-Rubio bill when he writes that: Read more...

My CIS colleagues and I have been pointing out, in some detail, all the many faults of the Gang of Eight's all-embracing immigration bill, S.744, and justly so. It is a terrible piece of legislation.

But, on the other hand it is virtually impossible to draft something of this length — it started out at 844 pages and keeps growing — without doing something useful, if only by accident.

I have identified two harmless provisions that sadly will disappear when the bill is finally sunk, as I think it will be, by the House of Representatives. Read more...

The Gang of Eight's immigration bill has now grown from 844 pages to 867 pages.

One of the changes is to include "comprehensive immigration reform" in the title. Read more...

Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to adopt 22 amendments to the Schumer-Rubio bill, none of which fundamentally improves the bill, and a few that make it worse. Read more...

One of the sensible things that the Congress does from time to time is to create or extend a specific program on a short-term basis. It allows the system to operate, but gives it a "sunset" — a certain date that will end it unless Congress acts to extend it.

In this way, Congress can look at the program to see how well it is working and then make a decision as to whether or not to: 1) kill it; 2) make it permanent; or 3) give it another period to prove itself by giving it a later sunset. Read more...

According to the Washington Post, during debate on amendments to the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill:

Democrats on the committee, along with two Republican allies who participated in developing the legislation, countered that the federal government has invested record amounts of money and manpower on border enforcement, helping to reduce the amount of people trying to cross illegally.

History shows us that for the most part, advocates of "comprehensive" immigration bills are only after the legalization portion and will do everything in their power to undermine the enforcement provisions as soon as the bill becomes law. A report published only a few years after passage of the 1986's Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) proves this. The amnesty had only started to roll out, and yet the National Council of La Raza produced a report calling for an end to workplace enforcement – the central enforcement provision of IRCA.

The author of the La Raza report was Cecilia Munoz, currently the Obama administration's chief immigration advisor. (Munoz was recently profiled in the New York Times.) Read more...

After writing criticisms of the New York Times's coverage of immigration in which I expressed dismay at the paper's seeming disinterest in the negative effects that foreign workers can have on U.S. workers, I want to express my admiration for Monday's story out of Georgia by Times reporter Ethan Bronner, "Workers Claim Race Bias as Farms Rely on Immigrants". Read more...

In addition to the instant amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens and their families and huge new guestworker programs, the Schumer-Rubio bill will change the rules to allow more than 1.4 million family visa applicants to bypass the current waiting list and be admitted immediately and begin working, even before they are approved for a green card. This little-noticed re-write of the V visa rules will also admit another 2.9 million immigrant visa hopefuls to enter the country as temporary visitors. Read more...