Immigration Blog

Three years ago, we suggested that a good way to cope with increasing migration from Central America would be to build a sturdy fence along a little-used railway across the waist of Mexico, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

I was recently on a chain e-mail with a number of immigration experts who had diverse points of view, discussing whether there really was a "crisis" at the border. One of those experts opined that it is actually a humanitarian tragedy, driven by aliens seeking to apply for legal protections under our laws. This raises the question of how many valid claims there are among the hundreds of thousands of aliens who have sought asylum through the credible-fear process.

I and others at the Center have, in the past, criticized the Obama administration's so-called immigration "enforcement priorities" policies, which were laid out in a November 2014 memo from then-Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. As it related to crimes, those priorities were focused on "convictions", and not charges. A recent case out of Georgia underscores the flaws in those policies, and suggests that they continue to shape the immigration debate.

The question for both DHS and ICE is simple: Why aren't you complying with the president's directive and making the bandwidth needed to sign on more state and local partners to the 287(g) program?

RÖSZKE, Hungary – In September 2015, migrants here hurled rocks, set fires, and violently stormed a new chain-link fence that had just gone up on Hungary's southern border with Serbia, tops and bottoms lined by looping rolls of razor wire on the Serbian side.

"I believe it's time to establish a national goal of reaching 4 percent economic growth," Donald Trump declared in a speech two months before he won the 2016 election. He still references 4 percent regularly, but getting there by increasing productivity seems almost impossible.

It turns out that I had simply followed USCIS' written instructions, naively expecting that it would search for, say, Princeton University and Harvard University, by typing in those terms. Not always.

USCIS had its heart in the right place when it published a new data mining system for the H-1B program — but it shipped what appears to be a beta version, which is chock full of holes.