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Abuses in Summer Work Travel Program Extend far Beyond Hershey and CETUSA
| Last week, the New York Times reported on the State Department's decision to bar the Council on Educational Travel USA (CETUSA) from sponsoring young foreigners who come to the United States in the Summer Work Travel (SWT) program. Read more... |
ICE Names "Public Advocate" – Call Him!
| Today ICE announced the creation of a new office to serve as a point of contact for those who have "concerns, questions, recommendations or important issues they would like to raise." Boy, do we! The office will be led by Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, who has been at ICE since 2008, mainly working as an advisor on reforming detention practices. Prior to joining ICE, Strait was a legal services attorney in Prince George's County, Md. Read more... |
Federal Judge Rejects Illegal-Alien Lawsuit Against County Sheriff
| A federal judge in Maryland this week dismissed a $1 million discrimination lawsuit brought by illegal alien Roxana Orellana Santos against Frederick County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins, the two deputies who arrested her, and the County Board. This is a big win for local law enforcement agencies that follow proper policing practices, even when they expose illegal aliens – in this case, one who was the subject of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) warrant. Read more... |
Summer jobs for foreigners crowd out Americans
| Related Publication: Backgrounder Baltimore Sun, February 13, 2012 February may seem a little early to start thinking about summer jobs. But a "cultural exchange" program run by the State Department is already filling jobs in Ocean City and elsewhere — jobs that will not be available when American kids start looking for work. Read more... |
H-1B Question: What Is the Real Demand for High School Turkish Teachers?
| The H-1B program damages America in a number of ways, directly and indirectly, discouraging young American from following high-tech careers and shunting aside skilled U.S. citizens and green-card holders because of their "advanced age", i.e., anything over 35. This has been widely reported by many, including my CIS colleague John Miano, and Professor Norm Matloff at UC/Davis. Read more... |
Upcoming Panel: Summer Work Travel (SWT) Program
| Please RSVP to: Bryan Griffith, (202) 466-8185, press@cis.org WASHINGTON (March 5, 2012) – Late last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered an “extensive and thorough review” of the State Department’s troubled Summer Work Travel (SWT) program, a “cultural exchange” initiative which every year brings more than 100,000 college students from around the world to fill low-wage seasonal jobs in the United States. Clinton's move followed last summer's protests by students working at a Hershey Co. warehouse in Pennsylvania that garnered worldwide attention. Read more... |
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USCIS Gets an Easy $100 million from TPS Roll-Over for Salvadorans
| Suppose you have an absolute and un-regulated monopoly on a product that your customers simply must have — like insulin for diabetics in the old days before other remedies became available. Isn't that a license to print money? Read more... |
Immigration Marriage Fraud and Murder, a Recurring Combination
| I have been collecting news stories that combine immigration marriage fraud and murder. Too often marriage fraud is treated lightly by the press, which uses soft terms like "marriage of convenience" or "sham marriage" to describe this crime. When murder is also involved, the press gets a little more serious, but it often still misses the point. Read more... |
Exit Coming Soon?
| Good news finally has come out of the Obama Homeland Security Department. At a recent House hearing, DHS antiterrorism official John Cohen said that within weeks the department will have a biometric exit portion of the entry-exit system ready to go. Read more... |
Religious Agencies and Refugee Resettlement
| Dowload a pdf of this Memorandum James R. Edwards, Jr., Ph.D., is a Fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies and coauthor of The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform. Read more... |
Panel Transcript: Summer Work Travel Program
| Related Publications: Report, Panel Video Moderator: Mark KrikorianExecutive Director, Center for Immigration Studies Speakers: Jerry KammerSenior Research Fellow, Center for Immigration Studies Sarah Ann SmithFormer State Department Foreign Service Officer Jeff CollinsVice President, Crystal Aquatics Read more... |
USCIS Modifies Key Form — But the PR Department Blurs the Achievement
| USCIS has done exactly the right thing to one of its forms — a form frequently misused by aliens — but its press people have totally blurred this fraud-fighting accomplishment. I know that a discussion of a government form is sure to glaze the eyes, but this time it is significant. The form is the I-797C — the Notice of Action — which formally confirms that something is happening to an alien's desire for legal status, but does not indicate that anything has happened yet. Some aliens have used it to fool the gullible into believing that the alien has full legal status. Read more... |
USCIS Seems to Predict 88% Failure Rate in the EB-5 Investor Program
| If you compare its numbers in two different governmental publications, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) seems to be predicting that 88 percent of the applicants for EB-5 investor visas will not, in fact, get the green cards that they had been promised for their half-million-dollar investments. There is also a possibility that this is not a prediction of program demise so much as a case of the front-office promoters of this highly controversial program not talking to the green-eyeshade types in their own agency who deal with the Federal Register. Read more... |
Are Bilinguals Smarter?
| Well, actually the title of the article in the New York Times is a bit less equivocal. Its title begins with a conclusion, to wit: "Why Bilinguals Are Smarter". And it then goes on to assert that, "Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter." Read more... |
K-12 Education Systems May Be Losing Interest in H-1B
| Recently, various types of evidence have emerged that show K-12 education is losing interest in hiring foreign teachers through the H-1B nonimmigrant worker program. The inherent disadvantages of the program from the points of view of both students and unemployed U.S. teachers were described in two fairly recent CIS reports: Read more... |
EB-5's Institutional Allies Give the Program a Hard Time
| It's bad enough when the critics attack, but when your allies go after you, as they have on the immigrant investor (EB-5) program recently, look out! The controversial, selling-batches-of-visas-for-half-million-a-pop program took it on the chin recently from such normally pro-migration forces as the op-ed page of the New York Times and a privately owned website for EB-5 news that routinely favors the program. Read more... |
Dear Reader: Please Encourage USCIS Do the Right Thing!
| This is a suggestion to my readers on how you can help USCIS do the right thing with a document that is absolutely vital to the employer sanctions program. The agency is in the middle of revising Form I-9, the form used about 70 million times a year by newly hired workers. Its purpose, though you might not know it from reading the form, is to keep illegal aliens (unauthorized workers) away from U.S. jobs. Read more... |
Let's Create American Workers' Desks in Federal Agencies
| Here's an old idea — left over from the Kennedy years — that should be revived: Let's create top-level American Workers' Desks in each of the federal agencies extending big subsidies and big contracts to big business. The (admittedly negative) inspiration for this thought came from a CBS News story titled "Unions say foreign workers get stimulus jobs". This bit of investigative journalism revealed that while federal stimulus money had been poured into Michigan factories owned by two Korean firms, LG Chem and Dow Kokam, many of the jobs created went to newly arrived Korean migrant workers. Read more... |
New York Times Op-Ed Argues Against Deportations of Illegal Alien Parents
| There was an op-ed piece in Saturday's (April 21) New York Times about the plight of children of deported illegal aliens that seemed to argue for a two-tier deportation system: While some non-parent illegal aliens might be subject to deportation, no illegal alien with kids should ever be deported. The authors did not discuss the totally predictable results of such a policy: Read more... |
Turnabout Is Fair Play: A Spoof
| While the members of the U.S. Congress are busily considering how to bring in more high-tech nonimmigrant workers, a counter movement is afoot. A band of techies, advocating the interests of unemployed U.S. computer programmers, engineers, and other professionals, is considering the creation of the HR-1 and S-1 visa program, which would increase the productivity of Congress and lower its costs while bringing some of the world's "best and brightest" to the United States as nonimmigrant lawmakers. Read more... |
Understanding Illegal Aliens and Illegal Immigration
| According to Businessweek, Jose Antonio Vargas, a former Washington Post reporter who admitted he is an illegal immigrant said: "We're not who you think we are and immigration is not who you think it is". So just who are illegal immigrants and just what is immigration? Read more... |
H-1 B Program Grace Notes
| There is so much going on with the H-1B program that it's worth taking another look at recent developments. I-9 "Errors". We learned from a Reuters story written in Mumbai that Infosys, the big software firm and massive user of H-1B workers, is being investigated for I-9 "errors" by the Department of Homeland Security. Read more... |
The Supreme Court Hears Arguments on Arizona’s S.B. 1070
| Today the Supreme Court heard Arizona v. United States, the case involving Arizona’s S.B. 1070, also known as the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act." I was able to watch part of the argument and take the photos and video below. Though the decision will not come out until summer, the Court's questioning has many concluding that the Court is more likely than not to side with Arizona on at least some, if not all of the issues. Here's a sampling of the latest headlines: Read more... |
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Senators Waste Time on Chatter at DHS Oversight Hearing
| One of the most tightly rationed governmental resources is the allocation of a few minutes for a legislator to question a member of the president's Cabinet. Both the frequent waste of this time and its expenditure on specific public policy issues were illustrated in Wednesday's appearance of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano before the Senate's Judiciary Committee. Each senator had a single, seven-minute turn at questioning her. (See the hearing notice and screening of the session.) Read more... |
A Look Inside a USCIS "Stakeholders Meeting"
| USCIS convenes "stakeholders meetings" in Washington and its regional service centers as a technique to reach out to what it regards as its "public". I took part in one such gathering this morning dealing with an intricacy in the EB-5 immigrant investor program; it related to how an investor can — or cannot — use an investment in an office building to claim a green card for his or her half-million-dollar investment. Read more... |