Immigration Blog

If the Trump administration is really interested in preserving good jobs for U.S. residents (citizens and green card holders), it should push its contractors to avoid hiring H-1Bs. And the Department of Homeland Security should lead the way.

This thought struck me as I was reading another one of those articles about how DHS is buying technology (belatedly) that would allow us to keep track of arriving and departing aliens. That's a task that Fiji — little Fiji — accomplished more than 30 years ago, a subject to which I will return.

It's been nearly six months since Donald Trump took office, and some families with illegal aliens get food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) while identical all-citizen families of the same size and with the same income do not receive them.

Currently a rich alien can get a family-sized bunch of conditional green cards for $500,000 in the Immigrant Investor (EB-5) program; Homeland Security has suggested raising the minimum (set a quarter of a century ago) to $1.35 million.

Both our Department of State, and the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, had golden opportunities to make an impact on their own nations' immigration problems last week in Washington, and both wasted them. Trump's State Department presumably wants to decrease illegal immigration; Modi's government wants to increase Indian migration to the States. For a few minutes, it looked like the Department of State had done the right thing with the oft-abused K visa (for fiancées of citizens); it initially declared that the six-nation travel ban should cover aliens (largely women) arriving with this visa, and then, a few minutes later, State decided that the fiancées fell into the category of those "who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship" here.

One of the Center's Board members, Jan Ting, recently penned an interesting blog concerning the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which, despite its reputation for doggedness where citizens' tax filings are concerned, appears to be more than willing to permit certain aliens to get away with violating the law.

In my June 29, 2017 post, I detailed how the Trump administration was preparing to begin implementation, in accordance with limitations in a June 26, 2017, Supreme Court decision, of Executive Order 13780, "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry

The storyline behind the bribery conviction is what captured my interest. Among other things, Williams was accused of helping an alien, Mohammad N. Ali (who also pleaded guilty to bribing Williams), skirt problems with federal immigration officials during his entries into the United States after travel abroad. Apparently, in order to ensure that this scheme worked, Williams went so far as to enlist police officials to assist in the process.

It may sound oxymoronic, perhaps contrarian, but I have come to appreciate in a new light — through schadenfreude — the executive overreach that took place during Barack Obama's eight years of office.

The reason is because even though the current president has had much of his get-tough immigration agenda at least temporarily blocked through a bevy of litigation and decisions by activist courts nationwide, it's been a somewhat different story on the executive action front: What one president has done, another can pretty much undo, given the will and desire.

Foreign students seeking a master's degree in the U.S. should beware of inferior colleges. Students risk wasting substantial amounts of money if they sign up with universities that can provide only second-rate or third-rate access to the U.S. labor market. Different kinds of master's degrees, from different colleges, provide the alien graduate varying leverage in the U.S. job market, a distinction that the lesser colleges never discuss.

On June 8, Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), who was recently selected as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, introduced H.R. 2826, the "Refugee Program Integrity Restoration Act of 2017", along with co-sponsors Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas). The bill has not yet been favorably reported out, although it has been considered by the Committee on the Judiciary at least twice — most recently on June 28.