A fierce battle between two open borders groups is among the little-noted bits of recent immigration news covered in this posting.
Now, we are aware that in Iraq (Tikrit, for example) the U.S. is fighting alongside Iran-backed Shia militias, while we and our allies (the Saudis) are bombing and droning other Iran-supported Shia militias in Yemen.
Similarly, in the U.S. immigration field two quite disparate entities, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Roman Catholic Church, routinely work side by side to open our borders and to discourage enforcement of our immigration laws. Recently, however, there's been a falling out. As Fox News reported:
The American Civil Liberties Union has launched a lawsuit against the federal government to force Catholic groups that take taxpayer dollars to provide birth control and abortions for illegal immigrants. "We have heard reports that Catholic bishops are prohibiting Catholic charities from allowing teens in their care to access critical services like contraception and abortion, even if the teenager has been raped on her journey to the United States or in a detention facility," said ACLU staff attorney Brigitte Amiri.
The funds to the Catholics are used to pay for housing the illegals from Central America who have been flooding into South Texas. I, for one, am pulling for the ACLU this time. While many of my colleagues here at CIS differ with me over abortion, we do not sue each other.
Speaking of lawsuits, all of us at CIS are cheering another court case brought by one of our bloggers, John Miano, against the feds for letting some H-4 nonimmigrants (spouses of H-1B tech workers) work legally despite the lack of congressional action on this issue. He is joined in the current action by the Washington-based Immigration Reform Law Institute, as noted here.
Miano filed a somewhat similar action in 2014 against the government for the citizen job loss caused by the H-1B program and won a preliminary, favorable ruling, as we reported earlier.
Congress has been dealing with trafficking and trade recently, with the first sounding like an immigration matter, and the second one not; but the reverse is true. Despite the T visas (for trafficking victims), that bill does not seem to have any migration consequences. (I used the search mechanism on the text of the bill for the words "visa" and "petition" and came up empty).
On the other hand, buried in the trade bill are threats of massive giveaways of congressional authority over what is called euphemistically "trade in services," which involves guestworker admissions. Remember what NAFTA did to our immigration system? One shudders.
Speaking of bad news — and recalling the days when every newspaper's city room had one or more sob sister, usually writing about abused women — I have become something of a sob brother, with male citizens who have been conned into bad marriages by attractive alien women writing to me about their plight. In these cases the women have accused the men of various kinds of abuse to get an abused wife's visa through a grubby process I have previously described.
Since I am one of the few people writing about this subject, I get sad and sometimes desperate emails and can do little to help except to say "get yourself a truly aggressive, junk-yard-dog of a lawyer."
My advice would have been, earlier in the case: "If you are a dumpy 55-year-old U.S.-citizen accountant working in Queens, and she's a stunning 30-year-old alien from, say, the Emirates, and she says she adores you and the two of you must get married, watch out! The attraction is probably a green card, not your fine mind."
But they never call or write at that point in time, it is always later. All of them have told me, incidentally, that USCIS will not even listen to their side of the story.
I am grateful to reader Janet Thomas for calling the ACLU story to my attention.