Immigration Blog

President Trump is expected to set the FY 2018 refugee ceiling at 45,000. That would be the lowest refugee ceiling since Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980, which standardized resettlement services for all refugees admitted to the United States.

On September 8, 2017, I reported on an August 30, 2017, decision issued by Chief U.S. District Judge Orlando L. Garcia of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, San Antonio Division, in City of El Cenizo v. State of Texas. In that order, Judge Garcia considered motions filed by a number of localities in Texas seeking preliminary injunctions of Texas Senate Bill 4 (SB4), which attempts to place limits on sanctuary jurisdictions.

As FY 2017 is coming to an end, President Trump's is expected to announce the FY 2018 refugee admissions ceiling. The presidential determination could be as low as 40,000 following the Department of Homeland Security recent recommendation. (The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the White House has settled on a ceiling of 45,000.)

An executive of the termination-threatened American College of Commerce and Technology in Falls Church, Va., pled guilty to visa fraud earlier this year. The student body is 93 percent on F-1 foreign-student visas.

Currently we have about 165,000 temporary foreign agricultural workers a year, mostly from Mexico, working on the nation's farms under the long-established H-2A program. These are nonimmigrant workers who are not on a path to permanent resident alien (green card) status.

The Department of Homeland Security released a report this month entitled "Efforts by DHS to Estimate Southwest Border Security between Ports of Entry". This is in accordance with the Consolidated Appropriations Act (2017), which requires DHS to publish statistics on enforcement measures on the border with Mexico.

In light of the renewed debate over the fiscal impact of refugees, and given the importance of English skills to getting ahead in the United States, it may be useful to explore the intersection of literacy and refugee status in more detail.

In June, I wrote about the possible consequences of California's Senate Bill 54 (SB 54). On Saturday, September 16, 2017, that bill passed the California Senate, and has been sent to Governor Jerry Brown for his signature.

So Nancy Pelosi has said at a press briefing that the parents of so-called "Dreamers" "did a great thing" when they had their children smuggled to the United States. You know, the same Nancy Pelosi who is the minority leader in the House of Representatives and one-time speaker of the House, who was third in line to the presidency.

The start of my recent piece at National Review Online: 

The New York Times has posted an unfinished report by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that examines the fiscal impact of post-1980 refugees. Its preliminary finding is that refugees who have arrived since 1980 created a net fiscal benefit of $63 billion (taxes paid minus costs created) over the 10 years from 2005 to 2014.