Popular content
A State Transformed: Immigration and the New California
| Download a pdf of this Memorandum Steven A. Camarota is the Director of Research and Karen Jensenius is a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies. Read more... |
The Bottom of the Pay Scale: Wages for H-1B Computer Programmers
| Download this Backgrounder as a pdf Executive Summary Read more... |
Is President Obama Right About Engineers?
| Download a pdf of this Memorandum. Steven Camarota is the Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies. Read more... |
 |
Homosexuals and Immigration: Developments in the United States and Abroad
| Homosexual activists, seeking acceptance in society, are pressuring governments around the world for such rights as marriage, immigration sponsorship of same-sex partners, and asylum on the grounds of persecution as members of a distinct social group. In fact, they have succeeded at securing a number of these sorts of official recognition and approval. Supporters view these new policies as societal progress. Opponents view them as postmodern societal decline. A look at the situation shows: Read more... |
Alternatives to Immigrant Labor?
| In arguing for expanded agricultural guestworker programs, lobbyists for farmers often claim that fruit and vegetable production in the United States would be impossible without large and continuing infusions of foreign labor. For instance, the California Farm Bureau Federation has argued for a guestworker program by claiming that, “Without an adequate supply of workers to fill seasonal labor-intensive tasks such as harvesting, U.S. growers will become uncompetitive, and be forced to reduce production of labor-intensive crops.” Read more... |
The Food Stamp Program Rewards Households with Illegal Aliens
| Readers, let us immerse ourselves in the convoluted language and thinking of the immigration policy world. You know, where "parole" is a good thing (you can, despite your apparent disqualifications, enter the country), and where "voluntary departure," which might sound positive actually means that you have to leave, albeit without shackles. Similarly, the double negative verdict of "cancellation of removal" is good news, because it means you can stay here (though you probably should have been thrown out). Read more... |
"Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are" Black Americans on Immigration
| Foreword On the issue of immigration, contemporary Americans, and especially African Americans, need to be guided by two lessons from history. The first, from the New Testament, says that "without vision, the people perish." The second warns that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Read more... |
The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal
| Mark Krikorian argues in this provocative book, what's different today is not the immigrants, but us. Today's immigrants are very similar to those of a century ago, but they are coming to a very different America -- one where changes in the economy, society, and government create fundamentally different incentives for newcomers. In other words, the America that our grandparents came to no longer exists. And this simple fact must become the new starting point for the explosive debate about immigration policy. Read more... |
 |
Refugee Resettlement
| Download a pdf of this backgrounder CIS Fellow Don Barnett writes frequently on asylum and refugee immigration. His most recent Backgrounder was “A New Era of Refugee Resettlement.” Mr. Barnett’s e-mail address is dabarnett@bellsouth.net. Read more... |
A Bailout for Illegal Immigrants? Lessons from the Implementation of the 1986 IRCA Amnesty
| Download a pdf of this Backgrounder David S. North is a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. By now most of us realize that the government handled the $700 billion bailout of the big banks badly. The money went out in a whoosh to the Wall Street outfits that had created the crisis, but without the needed regulatory changes to prevent its repetition. Read more... |
Cheap Labor as Cultural Exchange: The $100 Million Summer Work Travel Industry
| 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... |
Rubio’s Deceptive Amnesty Ad
| Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) appears in a new television advertisement designed to promote the immigration amnesty bill currently being debated in Congress. The minute-long advertisement calls the proposal "conservative immigration reform" and attempts to make amnesty appealing to Republican voters. Partisan politics aside, the amnesty ad is misleading on a number of counts, outlined below. Read more... |
 |
How Many Mail-Order Brides?
| pp. 7-10 in Immigration Review no. 28, Spring 1997 The INS later published a version of this entitled "The 'Mail-Order Bride' Industry and Its Impact on U.S. Immigration" "Heaven is having a Japanese wife, a Chinese cook, a British country home and an American salary. Hell, on the other hand, is having a Chinese salary, a British cook, a Japanese house and an American wife." Read more... |
America Has More Trained STEM Graduates than STEM Job Openings
| It has become quite clear that America has more high-tech college graduates than needed to fill high-tech jobs now and, importantly, the nation will keep producing many more such graduates than job openings in the future — so why the shrill calls from the industry that there is a shortage? The debate revolves around two sets of initials: STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) graduates and workers and the H-1B temporary worker program that floods our labor markets with low-cost, docile, high-tech nonimmigrant graduates, mostly working in computer-related industries. Read more... |
 |
A Plan to Address Birth Tourism
| Download a pdf of this Memorandum Malcolm Pearl is a pseudonym for a Foreign Service officer who has served abroad as a consular officer. Summary Read more... |
Is There a Shortage of Skilled Foreign Workers?
| Download a pdf of this Backgrounder David North is a CIS fellow who has studied the interaction of immigration and U.S. labor markets for more than 30 years. There have been numerous recent proposals to increase the admission of skilled workers from abroad. This paper examines some of the issues surrounding the question of skilled immigration. The findings include: Read more... |
Iran, Hezbollah Also Responsible for 9/11, Rules Federal Judge
| Federal Judge George Daniels announced in open court in New York City yesterday, in a case filed by families of 9/11 victims, that he was going to be signing an order within 24 hours stating Iran, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda are responsible for the 9/11 attacks. More specifically, the judge found that Iran has provided material support to al Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks. Much of the material witness testimony in the case comes from three Iranian defectors whose affidavits remained under seal during the course of the case. Read more... |
Multiculturalism in the U.S.: Cultural Narcissism and the Politics of Recognition
| Multiculturalism in the United States has a long silent history. The United States has, from its founding, taken in immigrants from different cultural backgrounds, many of whom were, at the time, controversial. First, it was the Germans who raised questions about whether they could or would become "real Americans." Then questions were raised about the Chinese and after them Irish and the Eastern European immigrants. Now it is Hispanic-Americans and Muslim-Americans of whom we ask those questions. Read more... |
Immigration and the American Worker
| At current levels of around one million immigrants per year, immigration makes the U.S. economy (GDP) significantly larger, with almost all of this increase in GDP accruing to the immigrants themselves as a payment for their labor services. Read more... |
 |
Americans Prefer Illegal Immigrants Head Home
| A new poll using neutral language — and avoiding the false choice of conditional legalization vs. mass deportations — finds that most Americans want illegal immigrants to return to their home counties, rather than be given legal status. Read more... |
.png) |
An Examination of Minority Voters’ Views on Immigration
| Download a pdf of this Backgrounder Steven A. Camarota is the Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies. Read more... |
The Immigrant Paradox: The Stalled Progress of Recent Immigrants’ Children
| Click here to download a pdf version of this Backgrounder David S. North is a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. The American tradition, over the years, has been that the first generation of immigrants struggles, the second generation does better, and the third generation does even better in terms of income, education, personal health, and overall achievement. There is much statistical as well as anecdotal evidence of these trends in the past. Read more... |
Amnesty by Any Means
| Download a pdf of this Memorandum Janice Kephart is the Director of National Security Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. Introduction Read more... |
Shaping Texas: The Effects of Immigration, 1970-2020
| Introduction Texas overtook New York in 1994 as the nation's second most populous state, according to the Census Bureau. This may be due to Texans, noted hospitality. But could that population growth be too much of a good thing? This paper addresses that question, and it calls on Texans to consider where the state is headed. Read more... |
Increasing the Supply of Labor Through Immigration: Measuring the Impact on Native-born Workers
| Download this Backgrounder as a pdf Read the Panel Discussion Transcript Read more... |