Featured Blog
Immigration policy, like a river, requires stewardship
by Jeremy Beck
Water and immigration levels are important measures of the health and sustainability of our nation. Both must be managed with care.
Featured News
House approves FY2024 DHS Spending Bill
The House of Representatives approved a spending bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the 2024 fiscal year. The Republican-led effort included a number of provisions to strengthen immigration enforcement, including defunding the Biden Administration's use of the CBP One app to allow illegal migrants to apply for parole and defunding other efforts by the administration to weaken interior enforcement and expand its parole authority. In a piece of good news, a harmful provision that would have drastically expanded H-2 visas was reverted back to last year's provision that only allows the DHS Secretary, in consultation with the Department of Labor, roughly double the number of H-2B visas for the fiscal year.
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New Regulations Demonstrate H2 Visas Need Real Reform
Both the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) have noticed new regulations designed to protect foreign workers from the explosion of exploitation within the labor market. While the attempts to stop the exploitation should be applauded, the new regulations are properly understood as mere Band-Aids on deep wounds.
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Latest numbers add urgency to the effort to attach border reforms to government funding
The 304,000 encounters is the equivalent of a Newark, NJ or Saint Paul, MN attempting to enter illegally every month - and that does not count so-called "gottaways" who evade detection. As Congress determines how to fund the government's implementation of immigration policy, the need to reform border strategy has become more apparent and urgent.
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Government Says Asylum Fraud is "Endemic" and Reason System is "Broken"
Immigration Attorney Julia Greenberg was convicted of defrauding the asylum system late last year and is approaching her sentencing date soon. Along with an organization called “Russian America,” Greenberg coached clients to lie under oath and fabricated false stories for their asylum applications. The asylum fraud is not just happening at the border, but it is going on nationwide.
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Fareed Zakaria Proves Late is Better Than Never
Fareed Zakaria, one of the scions of DC punditry, has finally faced the facts that current Biden policies on immigration are completely wrong. More remarkably, he has taken that indubitable reality to its logical conclusion–Zakaria calls for closing the border to asylum applicants while the system attempts to absorb the millions already in the pipeline.
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DHS Extends Temporary Protected Status to Cover Nearly 500k Aliens
Milton Friedman once wrote “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” While evidence of this truism abounds, one of the greatest examples is Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The Biden Administration just announced a massive expansion of TPS for Venezuela that the government estimates extends protection from removal and employment authorization documents (EADs) to 472,000 additional aliens present in the country.
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Border Crisis Threatens Cities' Resilience
Much has been made of how surge in illegal immigration into cities as far from the border as Chicago and New York threaten the fiscal resilience of the receiving cities (Mayor Adams says the migrant crisis will "destroy New York City"), and the impact on resilience doesn't end there.
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Rejecting the Bipartisan Agreements of Columnists
Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have recently published pieces where one conservative columnist and one liberal columnist get together and talk about issues to see if they can find some common ground. You'll never be able to guess what they could all agree on!
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The Legal/Illegal Distinction is One Without a Difference
When it comes to debates over immigration, one of the common errors is distinguishing between aliens who enter legally as opposed to illegally. Often, we are told that legal immigration is beneficial, but illegal immigration is harmful. A recent Washington Times article highlights an extreme example of this by calling for admission of a million H-1B aliens while deporting the illegal alien population.
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Mass immigration threatens all versions of the American Dream
What is, and where is, the American Dream for you?
Is it Rural? Urban? Suburban? I offer that it doesn't matter. "Better, richer, and happier" can happen in all three so long as we preserve our ability to choose which lifestyle we want. Many economic and social factors can affect our lifestyle choices. But how often does one consider the additional effects of immigration-driven population growth on limiting choice?
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Requiem for a Dream: DACA Goes Down While DHS was Sleeping
Southern District of Texas District Court Judge Hanen finally ruled against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program after years of legal back-and-forth. The short (by judicial standards) 40-page opinion is a bit anticlimactic, largely because the Federal government put up very little fight. In fact, if you examine the history of DACA closely, it never seemed like the Democrats who created it cared all that much.