In addition to the prominent immigration policy decision-makers – the president, the chairs of the congressional committees and the presidential appointees in the Executive Branch – there are many other sets of less obvious policy players, located deep in the federal bureaucracy.

Today I learned of a group whose leanings were known to me, but for whom I had no name. They are the quietly Open Borders officials within the State Department, termed the "Black Dragons" in a recent article. Read more »

I was disappointed with Reihan Salam's Forbes column on "what we can and can't do to raise wages": Read more »

President Obama is due to meet today with the two senators who have been trying to plot a legislative course to an immigration reform bill, and the National Council of La Raza is impatient for clear signs of movement.

"If the meeting is just to 'hear more,' it's not going to cut it," Clarissa Martinez of La Raza said in Huffington Post. Martinez wants a clear sign of movement from Obama's meeting with Sens. Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham. Read more »

The Social Security Administration, along with the Department of Homeland Security, operates the E-Verify screening program to identify potential illegal alien workers.

But, according to the SSA's own Inspector General, in a recent report the SSA, as a large employer, did not fully use the E-Verify system to screen it own employees.

The federal government encourages all employers to use the system, and insists on it for some of its contractors, but apparently the HR types in SSA did not get the message. Read more »

Today's New York Times carries a story about a private-for-profit language school in Florida that "was a front for the sale of fraudulent applications for student visas."

A total of 80 people, including the managers of the Florida Language Institute in Miami, were arrested, the Times reported.

According to ICE, the agency in charge of the arrests, the students "rarely, if ever, attended classes". Read more »

Sources inside and outside ICE are reporting that the agency leadership intends to install an embattled ex-police chief known for his obstruction of immigration law enforcement as its liaison to the local law enforcement community. Former Houston police chief Harold Hurtt is reportedly the top candidate to lead the agency’s Office of State and Local Coordination. Read more »

President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders are working hard to line up enough votes and plot a path to get their version of health reform across the goal line. Though immigration hasn't been raised as much as other bubbling controversies like abortion, this issue remains alive. Read more »

We at CIS are often highly critical of the government, but a Justice Department publication just appeared that is worthy of high praise.

The praise is for the publication itself, the FY 2009 Statistical Year Book of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), not necessarily for the program being discussed. The 129-page report is online as a pdf here. Read more »

Last month, as Mexican President Felipe Calderon hosted a meeting where Latin American and Caribbean leaders agreed to form a new regional organization that will include Cuba while excluding the United States and Canada, the initiative received little attention in the U.S. Read more »

It's bad enough that people can buy their way into the United States, as described in a previous blog.

But if a bill (S. 3029) introduced by Senator John Kerry (D-MA) passes the price will be reduced to $100,000. The price was once was $1 million, then it fell to $500,000.

And the $100,000 does not even have to be your money. Read more »

Last month this blog criticized Univision for profiteering from commercials for narcocorridos, which have been described as "stories of bandits and outlaws updated to the age of drug cartels and AK-47s, and known to some, because of their grim authenticity and bad reputation, as 'the rap of modern Mexico.'"

So now it's good to send kudos to Univision for its commitment to a new campaign that aims to reduce the dropout rate among Latino students. A principal focus will be to encourage parents to appreciate the long-term value of an education and to insist that their children stay in school. Too often, organizers say parents encourage their children to drop out in order to help with short-term financial problems. Read more »

The New York Times writes about a family from Germany which has received asylum in the U.S. because homeschooling is prohibited in their country. This is yet another example of misuse of asylum, as we see our domestic culture wars bleed over into asylum policy; first it was feminists and homosexual-rights campaigners, then disabilities-rights activists, and now homeschoolers. Read more »

California Democratic Congressman Xavier Becerra on Sunday spoke of the connection between President Obama’s efforts to reform medical care and Obama's commitment to reforming immigration law. Becerra sees the two as complementary. Read more »

What happens when an obscure USCIS appellate body handles disputes about visas for religious workers?

In my review of the 62 decisions made in 2009 made by the Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) the answer appears to be – carefully and narrowly.

Bearing in mind the definitions I am using discussed below, it looks like 32 of the decisions went against the churches and/or religious workers, and 30 were more or less in their favor. Read more »

We often read about how the nation's high-tech corporations say they use the H-1B program to bring the world's best and brightest to the U.S.

But is that how they really use the program? Only some of them do, according to Prof. Ron Hira of the Rochester Institute of Technology; the rest use it as a handy source of relatively low-cost talent. Read more »

An evaluation of the E-Verify program conducted about two years ago has just been released. (The 338-page pdf is here.) It estimates, among other things, that about half of illegal aliens who were screened between April and June 2008 managed to foil the system and get approved for employment, and opponents of immigration enforcement are tickled pink. Read more »

Sometimes it is hard to tell the significance of a government document just by reading it.

Sometimes the true impact becomes clear only when the activists speak out. A case in point: the recent USCIS announcement regarding employer-employee relationships in the H-1B program. Read more »

The Department of Homeland Security recently released the latest figures on E-Verify use by state, specifically the number of employers, worksites, and queries so far this fiscal year (since October 1, 2009), as of February 20, 2010. Read more »

The White House unveiled its latest health reform scheme Monday, but the materials make no mention of whether it would cover or bar illegal aliens under various health programs or require enrollees' eligibility verification based on citizenship or immigrant status. Read more »

In a recent blog, "Our 89-Year-Old, Self-Created Booby Trap in Immigration Policy," I pointed out how huge backlogs of approved visas for would-be immigrants have always caused additional pressure to expand immigration.

The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (the Barbara Jordan Commission), some 13 years ago, noted an even more significant problem regarding these backlogs, particularly in the siblings, nieces, and nephews program: Read more »

The February issue of the British-based magazine Aviation Security International features an in-depth article laying out in detail the 9/11 Commission recommendations that, if implemented, could have directly affected the success of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab's boarding of Flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day. Read more »

From a Mexican friend of a friend, who titles the video below Trafficking Drugs in Bottles of Water and notes how clever this method of transporting drugs is. Everyone carries water, especially those crossing the southwest from Mexico. How easy, convenient, and terribly unsuspicious. Read more »

Four score and nine years ago our forefathers did something doubly stupid.

Not only was the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 clearly racist with its country-of-origin quotas, it also introduced a structural defect into our immigration system that has haunted us ever since. Read more »

The British Government is going to introduce a little behavior-modification into their citizenship (naturalization) screening process.

The London Telegraph reports that the art of queuing – which the Brits are so good at – will become part of their citizenship tests. Read more »

There's new proof that the Obama administration is soft on immigration enforcement. Fewer illegal aliens were detained in the final three months of 2009. The drop in detentions shows that the new administration is willing to let illegal immigration slide for aliens who don't have a rap sheet. Easing off of those detentions means ICE has returned to "catch and release" for the vast majority of illegal entrants. The bottom line: Fewer illegal aliens overall are being placed in detention, and that's a bad thing. Read more »

The Obama Administration has taken one step forward, and another step back, in two released regulations about nonimmigrant workers. Read more »

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will be in Mexico City February 16-18 for talks on airline security, according to a DHS press release.

While she's there will she raise the issue of interior repatriation of the illegal aliens caught at the U.S./ Mexico border? Probably not, and that's a shame. (The word immigration is not mentioned in the press release.) Read more »

On February 4, a federal appeals court ruled that a Rhode Island state trooper had acted reasonably when questioning foreign nationals he encountered on a traffic stop, and in contacting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) upon discovering that they were illegal aliens en route to work. Read more »

In 2008, 53 percent of all households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) with one or more children under age 18 used at least one welfare program, compared to 36 percent for native households with children. Immigrant use of welfare tends to be much higher than natives for food assistance programs and Medicaid. Use of cash and housing programs tends to be very similar to natives. A large share of the welfare used by immigrants is received on behalf of their U.S.-born children. But even households with children comprised entirely of immigrants still have a welfare use rate of 47 percent. Read more »

Linda Chavez and I have had our disagreements, so take this for what it's worth, but a paragraph in her column today was deeply disturbing, all the more so for its casualness. In listing lessons she learned from weathering the snow storms, she wrote: Read more »