Immigration Blog

Arpaio-gate Investigation Grasping at Straws

By Jessica Vaughan, October 23, 2009

The Obama administration investigation of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's immigration enforcement program is starting to look a little futile. A federal source revealed today that more than 40 percent of the 500-plus arrests made in Sheriff Joe's crime suppression operations were in fact "serious" criminals of the kind Janet Napolitano claims to want help from local law enforcement agencies in identifying. This is actually a higher proportion of "serious" offenders than in many other 287(g) jurisdictions. So why has Sheriff Joe been singled out? Read more...

House Intell Chair Cites New Threat from Narcos

By Jerry Kammer, October 22, 2009

The Mexico City newspaper El Universal trumpets the story in a double-deck headline across the top of its front page today: "U.S. Acknowledges that Narco Has Corrupted Its Border."

The source of the story, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, told the newspaper about a new threat posed by the ability of drug traffickers to corrupt Americans with their cash. Read more...

Phoenix Attorney, Napolitano Friend, Heads to USCIS

By Jerry Kammer, October 21, 2009

Longtime Phoenix immigration attorney Roxana Bacon has been appointed Chief Counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, effective today. In her new position, Bacon will have the job not only of supervising the agency's several hundred lawyers but also of helping to draft immigration reform legislation for the Obama administration. Read more...

Border Patrol Vets Express Support for Sheriff Joe

By Jessica Vaughan, October 20, 2009

A national association of veteran border patrol agents has endorsed Sheriff Joe Arpaio's efforts to help with immigration law enforcement in Maricopa County, Ariz., and criticized the Obama administration's recent efforts to "water down" immigration enforcement and the 287(g) program in particular. Read more...

'Comprehensive Immigration Reform' – Mean-Spirited and Cruel

By Ronald W. Mortensen, October 20, 2009

Here we go again. Members of Congress are gearing up to make another run at "comprehensive immigration reform" and once again they will put the interests of illegal aliens ahead of those of American citizens. Read more...

Obama Administration Weakens Immigration Enforcement

By James R. Edwards Jr., October 20, 2009

The Obama administration continues to roll back the enforcement measures that the Bush administration had stepped up following its 2007 defeat on mass amnesty. The latest softening on enforcement of the laws on the books against illegal immigration comes in strictures placed on the effective and promising 287(g) program. This program is extraordinary in force multiplication, cost-effectiveness, and real results. Read more...

Does Little Fiji Have a Migration Management Tool the U.S. Lacks? - Well, Yes

By David North, October 19, 2009

Does poverty-stricken, coup-beset Fiji -- an island nation with less than a million population -- have a technological migration management tool the United States lacks?

As a matter of fact, yes.

A New York Times page-one headline recently reminded us: "U.S. Can't Trace Foreign Visitors on Expired Visas". While we record the arrival of visa-holders, we have no way, currently, of knowing if they have actually left the country, or are still here, perhaps in violation of the terms of their entry document. Read more...

Push for Sweeping Reform Set for Early 2010

By Jerry Kammer, October 19, 2009

The word is going out from Rep. Luis Gutierrez and his business allies that they must mobilize to push comprehensive immigration reform through a narrow window of opportunity early next year.

"The room for doing this is very small," Gutierrez said Sunday on the Spanish-language Univision program, "Al Punto." "We have to do it in February or early March of next year." Read more...

Cesar Chavez vs. La Raza

By Mark Krikorian, October 16, 2009

When I wrote a few months ago about the origins of "la raza" as a racial-surpremacist concept (developed in the '20s and '30s on the idea of the biological superiority of mestizos), Janet Murguia, head of the National Council of La Raza, pointed and sputtered over at the Huffington Post. Read more...

There Ought to Be a Nobel Prize in Demography

By David North, October 14, 2009

There should be a Nobel Prize in demography to go along with those for studies in economics and other fields.

Were there one, it might encourage more attention to studies of what happens to the environment during population increases, and, more pertinently, how international immigration impacts population growth in an area of in-migration. Read more...