Immigration Blog

White House Immigration Chief Tried to Undermine Enforcement in '86 Amnesty

By Jon Feere, May 9, 2013

History shows us that for the most part, advocates of "comprehensive" immigration bills are only after the legalization portion and will do everything in their power to undermine the enforcement provisions as soon as the bill becomes law. A report published only a few years after passage of the 1986's Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) proves this. The amnesty had only started to roll out, and yet the National Council of La Raza produced a report calling for an end to workplace enforcement – the central enforcement provision of IRCA.

The author of the La Raza report was Cecilia Munoz, currently the Obama administration's chief immigration advisor. (Munoz was recently profiled in the New York Times.) Read more...

Let Us Now Praise Ethan Bronner of the New York Times

By Jerry Kammer, May 8, 2013

After writing criticisms of the New York Times's coverage of immigration in which I expressed dismay at the paper's seeming disinterest in the negative effects that foreign workers can have on U.S. workers, I want to express my admiration for Monday's story out of Georgia by Times reporter Ethan Bronner, "Workers Claim Race Bias as Farms Rely on Immigrants". Read more...

V Visa: Very Many More Admitted Very Quickly

By Jessica Vaughan, May 8, 2013

In addition to the instant amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens and their families and huge new guestworker programs, the Schumer-Rubio bill will change the rules to allow more than 1.4 million family visa applicants to bypass the current waiting list and be admitted immediately and begin working, even before they are approved for a green card. This little-noticed re-write of the V visa rules will also admit another 2.9 million immigrant visa hopefuls to enter the country as temporary visitors. Read more...

The Immigration System at Work: A Good (i.e., Terrible) Case History

By David North, May 8, 2013

While doing some research on the massive misuse of affidavits in the agricultural worker part of the IRCA amnesty – scores, perhaps hundreds of thousands of fraudulent applicants got legalized this way – I stumbled on this example of our immigration system at work.

Below is the cover page of the decision on this case made by the Office of Administrative Appeals (AAO), a unit within USCIS, which, in turn, if you believe the document, is within the "U.SiDepartmen! ef Homeland Seeuriry". Read more...

Excerpts from Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", Part 2

By Jerry Kammer, May 8, 2013

Read Part 1

More on the liberal/conservative divide that is explored in Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. Today we present the second of two sets of excerpts from the book, which The Guardian called "a compelling study of the morality of those on the left and right [that] reaches some surprising conclusions." Read more...

Four Nuggets from the Senate Homeland Security Committee Hearing

By Jerry Kammer, May 7, 2013

The U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing today to examine the Gang of Eight's immigration reform bill, which is titled "The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act". It featured several interesting exchanges between individual senators and DHS witnesses, including Border Patrol chief Michael Fisher and Anne Richards, an auditor in the DHS Inspector General's office. Read more...

Here Comes the Judge

By James R. Edwards Jr., May 7, 2013

The federal judge hearing the ICE agents' case against President Obama's de facto amnesty through executive fiat is proceeding at the very same time the U.S. Senate is considering a massive amnesty bill that includes the DREAM amnesty for those who claim to have come to the country as young children.

It's also interesting that so far the judge has ruled in the agents' favor — and against the administration. A final ruling is expected soon. Read more...

Fact-Checking the Zuckerberg-Rubio Ad

By Jerry Kammer, May 7, 2013

Maybe you've seen the television spot called "Marco Rubio on Conservative Immigration Reform".

It begins with the Florida Republican saying, "Anyone who thinks that what we have now in immigration is not a problem is fooling themselves. What we have in place today is de facto amnesty." Then comes the on-screen message: "A Conservative Plan", as a narrator reads statements from articles or commentary about the Gang of Eight bill that have been published or aired by various media outlets. Read more...

Schumer-Rubio Bill: Employer Strategies and the National Interest

By Ronald W. Mortensen, May 7, 2013

While most of the focus has been on the multiple amnesties and other benefits that S. 744 bestows on illegal aliens, only scant attention has been paid to the strategy and tactics that powerful business interests will use to get a business-friendly amnesty bill passed that is not necessarily in the interest of the citizens or the nation.

S.744 is very similar in many respects to Utah's amnesty bill (HB116), which was passed in 2011 and has been touted as a model for the nation. Read more...

White House Immigration Czarina

By Mark Krikorian, May 6, 2013

The Times ran a piece over the weekend profiling Cecilia Munoz, who is technically director of the White House Domestic Policy Council but in effect is chief of the administration's immigration-policy operation. A former top lobbyist for La Raza (for which activity she won a MacArthur genius grant), she's been gamely telling her former colleagues in the open-borders pressure groups that maintaining the appearance of immigration enforcement is necessary to get an amnesty through Congress. Specifically, she’s had to defend the administration decision to keep deportations at the congressionally mandated level of 400,000 per year (though they've cooked the books to reach that number). The point of that strategy (other than, you know, complying with the law) was to be able to point to "record levels" of deportations as proof that the enforcement-first demand has already been satisfied and that any further objections to amnesty were in bad faith. Read more...