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Glowing Portraits of Illegals vs. the Categorical Imperative

The New York Times did it again Friday morning, on the front page, as it did on the op-ed page Thursday. It trotted out glowing portraits of specific illegal aliens as part of its campaign to pass the Gang of Eight's comprehensive immigration law. Friday's heroes were people granted temporary legal status under the administration's fiat Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Read more...

2 Weeks in a Row, Rubio Produces an Awkward Sunday Disconnect

Senator Rubio's people need to talk to Senator Rubio's people about the senator's principles regarding character assassination. The past 48 hours have made clear that there is a severe disconnect between what the senator claims to believe and what his supporters are saying in their attacks on organizations critical of the Senate immigration reform bill. Read more...

Bulletin: NYT Editorial Shows Concern for American Workers

The New York Times published a remarkable editorial on Sunday. It made me wonder if the editorial board is beginning to feel that U.S. immigration policy-makers and business leaders should be more concerned with the fate of American workers and less interested in expanding the alphabet-soup of visa categories that every year brings hundreds of thousands of lower-wage foreign workers to every level of the American economy. Here is an excerpt from the editorial: Read more...

The Beauty and Danger of Sen. Klobuchar's Speech

Yesterday on the Senate floor, Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) gave a speech that was a fine illustration of how the emotion of immigration complicates the job of policy-making. The emotion was especially poignant in the last 400 words of her 2,300-word speech, in which she told her family's own story and projected it onto the current policy debate. I reproduce her comments here as she actually delivered them, not as they appear in the Congressional Record, which apparently relied on a written text. Then I offer a brief comment. Read more...

Hoeven-Corker Amendment and the Pelosi Rule

It's ba-ack! The ugliest, most monstrous procedure of legislative sausage making is now being employed by senators on both sides of the aisle. They're resurrecting this approach to hurry a vote on a major, humongous amendment to a major, controversial bill. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (R-Calif.) infamously said of the Obamacare legislation that lawmakers needed to rush to "pass the bill so you can find out what's in it". I'm dubbing this the Pelosi Rule — an inadvisable, reckless approach that should never, ever be allowed for justifying the rushed passage of legislation under an arbitrary deadline. Read more...

The IT Industry Should Learn an H-1B Lesson from America's Schools

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

Drama vs. Demographics in the S.744 Debate

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...

President Obama's Big Bang Theory of Hispanic Reelection Support: Part 2

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...

Match #3 in Internal H-1B Squabble Goes to the Body Shops: Microsoft et al. Lose

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...

Widening Existing Vulnerabilities

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...

Immigration Implications of the Demise of DOMA

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...

New Ad Pushes Amnesty via Promises of Enforcement

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...

Better SAFE than Sorry

In late June, the Senate passed S.744, its version of "comprehensive immigration reform", a bill whose immigration enforcement and border security provisions are nearly all eviscerated by the fine print (see, for instance, "Must-Read Articles on the Schumer-Rubio Bill"), and whose signal accomplishment would be to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, permitting them to remain in the United States whether or not the enforcement "benchmarks" of the bill were actually ever met. Read more...

A "What if..." Scenario about Congress and Immigration

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...

Visa Integrity and Security = A SAFE America

Informed statisticians inside the government and out calculate that, at a minimum, about 40 percent of those living in our country without permission initially entered legally through land, sea and air ports of entry and then simply overstayed their periods of authorized admission, melting into the interior and working illegally, often by assuming the identities and using the critical data (such as Social Security numbers) of citizens and lawful residents. In other words, nearly half of the illegal-alien population consists of individuals who abused our visa and visa-waiver systems. The phenomenon has risen to a crisis level. This is why I find it odd — anachronistic in the extreme — that the tipping point for the Senate, in its embarrassing rush to pass an immigration reform bill, any immigration reform bill no matter how flawed, was a last-minute amendment providing for a "surge" of Border Patrol agents on the southern land border. Read more...

Removing Criminal Aliens and Protecting Public SAFEty

There are major differences between the immigration bill passed a few weeks ago in the Senate and the SAFE Act, the immigration bill pending in the House of Representatives, especially in the approach taken toward aliens who, in addition to being in the United States illegally, commit criminal offenses. Read more...