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Law Prof Predicts Supreme Court Will Uphold S.B. 1070
| Temple University law professor (and CIS Fellow) Jan Ting analyzes the Supreme Court's decision to hear Arizona v. United States and predicts that S.B. 1070 will be upheld as constitutional in a new op-ed: Arizona law will be upheld Read more... |
“A Cavalier Attitude”: The State Department’s Legacy of SWT Failure
| Related Publications: Panel Transcript, Panel Video Download a pdf of "Cheap Labor as Cultural Exchange" View the Table of Contents Jerry Kammer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. 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... |
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Massachusetts Senate Attempts to Stop Illegal Alien Access to Driver's Licenses
| According to an article in the Boston Globe, the Massachusetts Senate seems to be locking horns again with the state's traditionally more liberal House over illegal immigration. The House for years has leaned toward supporting illegal immigration, and the state has not complied with federal driver's license standards or required verification that people are authorized to work. Read more... |
How Employers Cheat America’s Aging By Hiring Foreign Workers
| To better understand the importance of losses to Social Security, Medicare, and Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA) trust funds, and the mechanisms that produce them, the Center for Immigration Studies is providing what we believe to be the first published estimation of these revenue shortfalls, program by program. Read more... |
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Puzzling Press Coverage of Marriage Fraud Case
| There is something puzzling about the press coverage of a marriage fraud case that recently ended in a Kansas courtroom. But, first let's look at the case itself. Usually visa-creating marriage fraud involves: An alien seeking a visa by paying a citizen for a phony marriage; and About as much sex as a dispute between two accountants. On August 23 a jury in Federal District Court in Wichita convicted a Jamaican woman of marriage fraud in a trial that turned both of those generalizations on their heads. Here's a quick summary of the immigration aspects: Read more... |
Sulzberger’s Voice
| This report describes how the New York Times editorial page has rejected the moderate liberalism that helped build consensus for a landmark 1986 immigration reform and now poisons the national debate by attacking as racists those who disagree with its proposals. Read more... |
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Immigration Enforcement Fact Sheet
| Statistics on immigration enforcement from a variety of sources present a mixed picture of immigration enforcement today, with many indicators suggesting a significant decline in immigration enforcement activity over the last several years, and other showing only modest increases. Read more... |
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"You Can’t Deport 11 Million People" Statement Reflects Mistaken Image
| The frequently heard comment "You just can't deport 11 million people" reflects a mistaken mental image of the illegal alien population. In the minds of, or the unconscious of, those making that statement is a vision of a static population of 11 million people, all in the same big room, all staying put, with no one arriving or leaving. I call this the stadium model. Read more... |
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The Migration Equation: Big Business+Big Agriculture+Big Labor+Big Religion=Big Immigration
| If, as they say, politics makes for strange bedfellows, then immigration politics in today's America makes for absolutely bizarre bedfellows. Business and agriculture rarely have anything useful to say about unionization and the labor movement. Conversely, labor leaders routinely disparage employers, whether in business or agriculture, for their views on wages, benefits, and employee working conditions. And religious leaders frequently shun involvement in such earthly matters, preferring instead to focus on the moral health of their flock and the nation as a whole. Read more... |
Immigration Bill Contains Slush Funds for Pro-Amnesty Groups
| The pro-amnesty lobbyists who helped craft the Schumer-Rubio immigration bill included within the bill two "slush funds" amounting to $150 million that may be supplemented with additional taxpayer dollars for years to come. Slush fund grantees are "public or private, non-profit organizations" described in the bill as including "a community, faith-based, or other immigrant-serving organization whose staff has demonstrated qualifications, experience, and expertise in providing quality services to immigrants, refugees, persons granted asylum, or persons applying for such statuses." In other words, the grantees would include many of the groups involved in writing and promoting the amnesty. Read more... |
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The Fiscal Impact of Immigration
| I have worked on the issue of immigration’s fiscal impact for a long time, having presented my first academic paper on the subject at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association almost two decades ago. I can thus say with confidence that the Heritage Foundation’s recent report on the fiscal cost of illegal immigrants is the most detailed and exhaustive ever done on this topic. Read more... |
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CBO Report as S.744 Rorschach Test
| The Congressional Budget Office's report on the Senate immigration reform bill quickly served as a Rorschach test for the opposing sides in the Senate debate. Here are excerpts from two very different reactions to the report Wednesday on the Senate floor. The first is from Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and the second from Jeff Session (R-Ala.). Menendez Read more... |
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The Life of Julia, Amnesty Applicant
| In May 2012, the Obama re-election campaign released a slideshow titled, "The Life of Julia" which promoted the idea that government programs and President Obama's agenda items were critical to the success of a hypothetical female named Julia. The campaign effort received a lot of criticism from both conservatives and liberals and led to many parodies. The original version was quickly taken down after the election. Read more... |
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Some Thoughts on the Immigration Side Effects of the DOMA Decision
| 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... |
No Americans Need Apply
| 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... |
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Investor Visa Program Gets Another Black Eye, This Time from the FBI
| The immigrant investor (EB-5) program got another black eye, this time from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the Associated Press. A USCIS-licensed regional center in South Texas, used as a conduit for funds in the EB-5 program, was raided by the FBI, which hauled away a Mercedes SUV and a "Texas-sized pick-up truck" belonging to the conspirators, according to a local reporter. Both apparently had been purchased with siphoned-off EB-5 funds, invested by wealthy Mexican nationals wanting to flee that country. The McAllen Monitor called it a "Ponzi Scheme" because new EB-5 investments were used to pay off other, earlier investors. Read more... |
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Alleged Murderer Is an Illegal Alien, but Washington Post Won't Say So
| As so often is the case, the murder suspect on the front page of today's Washington Post is an illegal alien, but the paper does not report it. It was a particularly brutal, senseless murder of a good samaritan by an illegal from Guatemala, a now 27-year-old man. Julio Miguel Blanco Garcia was in a suburban Virginia shopping center with his one-year-old daughter; he asked a woman, apparently a stranger to him, to drive him to the hospital. She agreed; she made a wrong turn and this caused Garcia, apparently crazed by drugs, to think she was about to turn him in to the police. He then repeatedly stabbed her with a knife, as he told police investigators. Read more... |
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A New Immigration Policy Maker — John Sandweg, Acting Head of ICE
| John Sandweg, 38, an Arizona lawyer and Napolitano insider, was recently named acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, following the resignation of John Morton whose extensive use of prosecutorial discretion led to heavy criticism. Sandweg's record would suggest that he will not seek to turn around the Morton legacy at the unit that handles interior enforcement of the immigration law and the department's detention operations. Read more... |
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Mark Zuckerberg's Clever Response to Steve King
| Sure, Mark Zuckerberg is advancing his own economic interests with an ad campaign that expresses concern only for fairness and the national interest. Sure, he would rather hire young foreign computer experts than similarly skilled Americans over 30. But give him some credit. The organization he founded to advocate for Gang of Eight-style immigration reform, FWD.us, is a lot more effective at messaging than Republican Iowa Rep. Steve King. Read more... |
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Here's a Switch — Australia Hires Other Nations to Take Its Boat People
| Woodrow Wilson spoke of the American states as "Laboratories for Democracy". The general idea was that other entities could watch as one or more American states tried out innovative governmental techniques and programs. Such experimentation is going on all the time in the immigration field, but it is done by other nations. Some of it is admirable, some of it is scary, and some of it is somewhere in between. Read more... |
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An Unspoken Truth: It's the Immigration Enforcement System that Is Broken
| The immigration policy of an moderate, democratic, relatively wealthy country like the United States that is the preferred destination of tens of millions of potential immigrants and the actual destination of over a million new legal immigrants every year is likely to be complex and therefore difficult. Underlying all the issues and vocal debates about American immigration law are two fundamental facts: Read more... |
Immigration and the Chesapeake, and Environmentalists' Failure to Acknowledge the Connection
| The Chesapeake Bay has been the center of Tom Horton's long and remarkable career as a journalist and author. Last week he wrote a compelling essay for the Baltimore Sun on the relationship between the health of the bay and the immigration reform bill that passed the Senate in June. Read more... |
Dual Citizenship and American National Identity
| Download pdf version Table of Contents Introduction So What? Some Basic Questions About Dual Citizenship The Domestic Context of Dual Citizenship Dual Citizenship and the Integration of Immigrants Dual Citizenship and Conflict: The War of 1812 Redux? Read more... |
Reforming Dual Citizenship in the United States
| Download pdf version Read the Panel Discussion Transcript Overview Read more... |