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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...

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...

The Washington Post's Insult Artist, Part 2: Dana Milbank on Russell Pearce's Immigration Views

Critics of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his views on legal and illegal immigration, like the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, are busy perfecting novel methods with which to impugn his character and positions. Consider Milbank's reverse double character smear, aided by a mischaracterized policy parallelism, and topped by a determined, and successful, effort at caricature. Read more...

Administration Moves Ahead on Three More Little Amnesties

The Obama administration has moved ahead on three more little amnesties in the last few weeks, all largely under the radar and all linked with the concept of victimhood. Read more...

Maps Show 330 Illegal Aliens Crossing Ariz. Border in One Night in March, Including Ultralight Incursion

During the night of March 23, 2012, illegal activity was significant along 12-mile stretch of border in the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation in Arizona and extending into the United States northwest about 80 miles to the Sonoran Desert National Monument's Vekol Valley on I-8 and about another 20 miles north of the interstate. None of this area is privately owned; it is all owned and operated by the federal government with the exception of the Tohono O'odham Nation's border property. Read more...

Obama's Catch-and-Release Policies Blunt Secure Communities

Desperately seeking to acquire some credibility with the vast majority of American voters who want to see immigration laws enforced, the Obama administration is on a steady pace to complete implementation of the Secure Communities (SC) program in every state, perhaps even ahead of the 2013 target date. With Louisiana and Nevada most recently completed, the map is nearly all colored in. Rumor has it New England, possibly including the sanctuary states of Vermont and Massachusetts, could be finished next. Will the full activation of Secure Communities nationwide mean the end of sanctuaries for criminal aliens as we know them? Not quite. Read more...

Making Significant Decisions About Aliens Without Interviewing Them

Do you suppose you could gain permanent legal entry to the United States without actually talking to a federal official? Could that decision be made solely on a written application? Sounds unlikely. But it happens much more often than you would think. Aren't all would-be legal visitors to the United States first interviewed by a State Department official overseas, and then, at least briefly, by another government official at the airport? No. Read more...

Blurring the Line Between Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Visas

This may sound a little specialized, but the lines between immigrant and nonimmigrant visas have blurred a bit over the years — and sometimes that is not a bad thing. There are three different variations on this theme: Read more...

USCIS Promises NOT to Correct Previous EB-5 Mistakes

USCIS promised last week not to correct prior errors if they produce more visas in this program. It did not say so in so many words, of course. The promise relates to a particular — and peculiar — economic scenario in the EB-5 immigrant investor program and was described in elegant legalese. Read more...

Another Bit of (Hidden) Good Immigration News from the Government

Every so often the administration does something useful in the immigration field, but it never stresses the fact. Last month, I reported how it had changed a government form (I-797C) in a highly useful way to prevent fraud, but USCIS described it as a money-saving operation. Read more...

U.S. Sells Visas for Less Than the Net Worth of the Average U.S. Household

One of the bizarre elements of our immigrant investor (EB-5) program is that we sell visas for a sum that is less than the net worth of the average American household. Read more...

USCIS Ombudsman Wants to Help Incompetent Employers Hire Alien Workers

The policy tilt of the USCIS Ombudsman is perfectly clear: no matter what the rules are, No matter how many millions of unemployed residents of the United States there are, let's make sure that every possible alien worker is hired. If an employer wants to hire a foreign worker rather than a resident one, there are certain basic requirements, like filling out some forms, and paying some fees. It is sort of a low-level test: If you can't fill out the forms correctly you don't get the worker, and maybe, just maybe, you have to hire an American instead. Shocking, I know. Read more...

Golly, Did Italy Really Give Legal Status to 12 Million Illegal Aliens?

If you take a quick look at the bottom of the figure below you may come to the conclusion that Italy has legalized 12,170,000 illegal aliens. That's a very large number, particularly in the context of that nation's population of 60,500,000 or so, and the estimates that we have 11 to 12 million illegal aliens in the United States, with a population more than five times that of Italy. Read more...

Two Ignored Immigration Policy Strategies: Diversion and Emigration

When discussing U.S. immigration policy, more than 99 percent of the discussion is about two Ds: denying entry to some would-be immigrants and deporting illegal aliens who are already here. Limiting entries and forcing some exits are, of course, the most important parts of immigration policy, but there are two other rarely discussed approaches that I will cover here and in a future blog: diversion and emigration. Both, if used with care, could reduce the growth rate of our population, if not reducing the total size of the population. Read more...

You're Good to Go, or Thoughts on Encouraging Emigration: Part I

One of the more rarely discussed elements in the whole immigration/population situation is the rate at which people, notably earlier in-migrants, leave the nation. Obviously the departure of X persons cancels out the arrival of X persons, but the number of arrivals is usually the overwhelming focus of our attention. My suggestion here is that more attention be paid to the encouragement of voluntary departures, in addition to the usual efforts to limit illegal arrivals and to cause forced departures of those who should not have arrived in the first place. Read more...

DHS Deals Citizen Grandparents Three Financial Blows

If you are a grandparent and one of your grandchildren is about to graduate from college and look for a job, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has just attacked your family finances in three significant ways: It is taking money away from the fund that pays your Social Security; It is taking money away from the Medicare fund; and In some cases it is paying employers not to hire your grandchild, but to hire a foreign college graduate instead; the bonus to that employer for hiring the alien graduate can be as much as $4,950 a year (if the job pays $60,000 a year). Read more...

Strange Numbers — Immigrant Investors Losing Interest in Green Cards?

Some strange numbers have just emerged from the government's immigrant investor (EB-5) program. It looks like Obama administration efforts to lure more aliens into making half-million-dollar investments in exchange for green cards may be bringing in more initial money, but that, simultaneously, earlier investors may have decided they do not want the green cards or recognize that they do not qualify for them. Read more...

USCIS Does Right Thing on Some Applications, but Does Not Announce It

One of the ironies about the regulation of immigration is that when the government does the right thing it is usually silent about it; you only hear about it because of the screams of the immigration bar. Alan Lee, a prominent immigration attorney, writing in the June 1 issue of Immigration Daily, bemoans what he regards as the rising rates of denials and other negative rulings in connection with nonimmigrant worker programs, trends I have not seen mentioned in any government press releases. Here are some of the figures, all based on USCIS statistics, that upset him: Read more...

USCIS Verbal Magic: "Immigrant Investors" Become "Alien Entrepreneurs"

For years USCIS has been using the term "immigrant investor" to describe the EB-5 program, which gives green cards to otherwise inadmissible alien families for making short-term, half-million-dollar investments in the United States, a subject covered in a recent CIS Backgrounder. In late April, however, the agency decided to use the term "alien entrepreneur" instead, and Immigration Daily printed the USCIS document in question. Read more...

The 21st Birthday, Hailed by Most, but Dreaded by Some Aliens

One's 21st birthday is routinely a time for celebration. One is old enough to buy liquor and is regarded by most laws as an adult, with all its rights and responsibilities. When I was younger the birthday also meant that my peers and I could vote. That birthday, however, is a day of dread for some aliens, because it marks the end of some migration rights that go to children, but not to adults. If you had a right to some immigration benefit that you lost on this birthday you have, in the jargon of the trade, "aged out". Read more...

Death Threats and Bond Defaults Linked to Different H-1B Programs

Death threats were linked in a court document to one major H-1B program and a $19 million bond issue default to another H-1B user, the latter according to this week's New York Times. The death threats were made against Jay Palmer, the stand-up U.S. citizen who blew the whistle against Infosys, one of the largest of the Indian bodyshops in the H-1B business, and the bond default was announced by Wells Fargo, trustee of a series of bonds issued by three tax-supported charter schools run by the controversial Turkish Gulen movement. Read more...

Proposal: Let's Look at All the Foreign Worker Programs as a Whole

Let's stop looking at the nonimmigrant worker programs one at a time and instead address them as a worrisome whole. That was the central idea presented at a meeting hosted yesterday by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive Washington think tank. Read more...

Beyond the Hoopla — Older Immigrants Are Economic Disasters

We keep reading the publicity about the economic value of immigrants — and some of them are truly helpful — but when all is said and done and they retire, they are, as a group, economic basket cases. The basic data for that conclusion, if not the conclusion itself, come from a report just issued by the Migration Policy Institute, the Washington, D.C.-based more-migration think tank. Read more...

DOJ Expands Gun Rights for Certain Nonimmigrant Aliens

The Department of Justice has used its power to define legal terminology to give a large class of nonimmigrant aliens gun rights that they did not have previously. Whether intended to be one or not, it is simultaneously a victory for the more-guns people and the more-migration people, an interesting (and to me, depressing) two-fer. Read more...