Those of you who are dedicated readers are undoubtedly familiar with the work of David North, a fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies and long-time policy analyst who has conducted numerous studies which meticulously delineate the fundamental problems that lie at the heart of post-1965 national immigration policy. Many of you may remember his eloquent overview of American immigration law delivered before the Penn Club last year, which provided concrete examples of how an attempt to diversify immigration pools had, paradoxically, led to the institution of a system that overwhelmingly favored primarily Latin American immigration. 

The Center for Immigration Studies has once again provided us with an invaluable resource by conducting a multi-part interview of Mr. North, which you can view in its entirety on its website. It is a must-see for anyone interested in understanding why our federal immigration policy is so misguided, and how it got that way. 

With the resignation of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, it’s instructive to take a brief look over the Obama administration’s  labor policy priorities these past four years. Although the prime objectives of organized labor, such as the enactment of card check legislation, never saw the light of day during President Obama’s first term, labor unions did achieve some significant administrative victories. What’s more, the battle over labor regulations and law-both executive and legislative-was a focal point of national political discussion leading up to the 2012 presidential election.

What did not attract as much notice, unfortunately, was the systemic dismantling of immigration enforcement, especially during the last two years of Barack Obama’s first term, which arguably will have a significant impact upon the American economy in the years ahead. Even though I continue to believe that the negative consequences of mass immigration-especially of the largely unskilled sort we’ve seen since the 1965 Immigration Act-can’t be reduced to mere economic concerns, the cumulative cost of this wave includes a significant economic impact.

In addition to taxing already overburdened social welfare programs-to say nothing of the public education, criminal justice and health care distribution systems-the hundreds of thousands of low skilled immigrants we accept every year often displace the most economically insecure Americans, including some of the President’s most reliable political supporters.

Barack Obama’s immigration and labor policies seem designed to exacerbate the latter problem, a view confirmed by looking at recent job gains, which seem to have accrued solely to the benefit of immigrant workers. The tenure of Secretary Solis dovetailed nicely with this agenda, which included international agreements protecting the labor rights of illegal aliens from Latin American nations. While ensuring that workers are paid a wage rate consonant with the laws of the land is an admirable stance, one wonders why this administration did not deem it worthy of its ambition to deport these  workers, who-like their employers-are breaking the law.

It’s not as if these individuals are unknown to federal immigration officials. After all, Solis visited illegal day laborers in this very borough in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. However, holding illegal aliens accountable for their actions seems to be inimical to the political needs of the President and his political machine, which has expanded the vast administrative amnesty that has existed for the past two years to encompass everyone he or Janet Napolitano deems to be non-threatening, including virtually everyone who can feign interest in being a student and those who’ve committed multiple misdemeanors, i.e. criminals.

Like the highly politicized distribution of economic stimulus funds, this administration’s labor and immigration policies are not designed with the interests of Americans in mind so much as the best results for itself and its political and financial benefactors. Although Hilda Solis set a pretty low bar to clear, if past is prologue don’t expect her successor to be much of an improvement.

With a little under a month remaining until Election Day, the Obama campaign has transitioned into full-blown hispandering mode. This week’s symbolically potent, yet empty, exercise in  gestural politics entailed President Obama designating the home of former California labor leader Cesar Chavez a national monument. The ostensible purpose of this decision is to rally support among one of his party’s most reliable voting blocs, i.e. Hispanic Americans. Because even though they still decisively support the President’s reelection, that support does not always translate into votes, as other analysts have trenchantly observed.

What makes Obama’s trip to California so fascinating though is not the seemingly transparent play for votes among an ethno-linguistic group already inclined to vote for his reelection, but the figure he chooses to honor in pursuit of this goal. It should be remembered that as head of the United Farm Workers, Cesar Chavez was militant in his efforts to increase the wage scale of California’s poorly-paid and exploited agricultural workers. And despite the fact that his legacy has been appropriated by radical open borders socialist Dolores Huerta-a co-founder of the UFW-Chavez was most militant in his actions against illegal aliens and the guest-workers from Mexico large growers relied upon in order to depress wages.

While today he is looked upon simply as a totemic figure for the left, to be utilized for whatever cause du jour-including comprehensive immigration reform-requires his unique biography, Cesar-or, as our President prefers to call him, (SEE-ZER)-Chavez began his labor activism in response to the federal government’s bracero program. His opinion regarding mass immigration-at least with regard to the agricultural sector-was the polar opposite of the contemporary Democratic Party. His views on illegal immigration were identical to that of today’s Minutemen, and expressed in a much more militant manner, it should be noted.

One of the chief reasons that farmworkers in California achieved parity with skilled workers in the manufacturing sector was precisely because of Chavez’s political efforts at restricting the inflow of unskilled, foreign workers to the state. Unsurprisingly, the steep decline in wages for this same cohort of workers-and the one that’s followed-tracked with the opening of our borders, including successive amnesties and manipulation of existing work visa programs by large agri-businesses. Agricultural concerns which still don’t believe there are enough foreign-born farmworkers in this country, despite the evidence that mechanization and innovation has actually improved farming techniques in the state of California.

You would learn none of this, however, if you relied upon the dominant media narrative for information about Cesar Chavez’s career, or gathered a fragmentary picture of  his life from vacuous, politically expedient gestures like this new national monument, or the christening of a warship in his name. However, my point isn’t that the mainstream media selectively omits certain facts and/or opinions when it suits their political purposes-which is something most of you already know-or that leftist, open borders advocates are willing to hijack the legacy of an iconic figure in order to see their ideological beliefs into law.

I raise this issue because it speaks to a gaping hole in this nation’s historical memory. The fact that craven politicians-of every stripe-will lie with impunity in order to advance their agendas is nothing new. However, the notion that they can so easily manipulate the public in an age where access to information is quite literally at the fingertips of each and every American, should be profoundly disturbing to anyone who values our republican form of government.

If the philosophy of such an historic figure-who was alive less than two decades ago-can be willfully distorted-despite the abundance of evidence clearly establishing his views on this subject-in pursuit of a tendentious agenda, then what hope is there for engaging in an honest, open debate during this most contentious of presidential elections? If the American public is not able to differentiate fact from fiction, then what hope is there that it will make an informed decision as our country casts its ballots this November? As the great Spanish philosopher, poet, and novelist George Santayana once wrote, those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

The issue of immigration-or even the mention of immigration enforcement-has been wholly neglected by the presumptive nominees of this country’s two major political parties. Even as prominent politicians find new ways in which to exploit ethnic divisions for the sake of political expediency, the perverse incentives of America’s federal immigration policies remain unaddressed. While Democrats seek to harvest what they expect to be a political windfall from Hispanic voters, Republicans pander, or hispander as some deem it, to what they view as an ascendent voting bloc, even going so far as introducing a bill eerily similar to one the GOP staked its reputation opposing during the final hours of a Democrat-controlled Congress.

That’s why the speech delivered by David North-seen above-at the Penn Club last month-the final one in this year’s lecture series sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies-was such a welcome relief, especially for those of us who are looking for reliable, empirical data which illuminates the dimensions of the problem we’re facing. A former Labor Department official, Mr. North is currently an expert on legal migration patterns and processes for CIS. In that capacity he’s demonstrated just how immigration reforms enacted by Congress, from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, to the mass amnesty of 1986 known as Simpson-Mazzoli, to the Immigration Act of 1990-which introduced the horrifying concept of the Visa Lottery-have irreparably altered the demographic future of the United States.

Although long on statistical analysis and number crunching, North’s speech was anything but dull, especially to those interested in how the mechanics of American immigration dovetail with the politics, which often seem inscrutable to people not immersed in this field. One of the most trenchant observations made during the course of his speech was an explanation of how the patterns of legal immigration have changed over the past several decades. Just over half of legal immigrants today get green cards as a result of Adjustment of Status, i.e. they are already in the United States when they become permanent legal residents. This marks a sea change in immigration policy, yet one that is barely scrutinized by the mainstream media, which seems intent upon intentionally misrepresenting the issues at stake, if they examine those issues at all. A good place to start is with the Immigration Yearbook, a compilation of statistical data examining foreign nationals who became legal residents, were newly naturalized, or applied for asylum during the previous fiscal year.

Although the data collected by the Department of Homeland Security is not comprehensive-the lack of any program monitoring the arrival and departure of non-citizens being one of its more glaring deficiencies-it is the most accurate portrayal of foreign nationals living in this country who are not part of the vast population of illegal aliens. One of the key insights you glean when looking at the population of legal immigrants in the United States is that most of them hail from a handful of nations. In fact, the top 10 feeder countries from which this country’s foreign-born population is drawn account for an exceptionally large percentage of America’s immigrant population, Mexico alone being the native country of close to thirty percent of immigrants. The reason for this is the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the National Origins Formula which had governed American immigration policy since the 1920s, replacing it with a system of family reunification that has dramatically altered both the composition and size of America’s immigrant population.

Although Mr. North condemned the pre-’65 quota system-which included a blanket prohibition of Asian immigration-he did praise the Dillingham Commission, which devised the proscriptive formula, for devoting resources to answering questions that even today remain unexamined by the ostensible stewards of our federal government. Even so, North criticized the model which replaced our pre-existing immigration system-which had held legal immigration to a few hundred thousand people per year-for its agnosticism towards skills and reliance upon family reunification, independent of merit. He suggested that adopting skills-based preferences, a la Canada or the United Kingdom, would be a step in the direction of redressing the glaring deficiencies of our current immigration system.

However, there are flaws with adopting such a policy, beginning with the obvious reservation opponents would raise. Namely, that supporters of unfettered immigration would never consent to a corresponding restriction of unskilled immigration, a point illustrated in an article by Mark Krikorian during the last major congressional debate over amnesty legislation. Moreover, the notion that immigrants are required to fill job openings in STEM fields, although a popular one among open borders dogmatists, is belied by the facts.

Perhaps the greatest objection to adopting the system of either Canada or Australia though, is the realization that embracing foreign nationals who are technically skilled or highly educated does nothing to address the cultural consequences of immigration. One need only look at the wave of honor killings in Canada-or the United States-in order to grasp the essential truth that simply coming from an upwardly mobile, well educated demographic cohort does not necessarily mean that you are an assimilable or desirable immigrant. The retrograde customs and mores of a minority of some immigrant groups that might otherwise seem like attractive additions to the beautiful mosaic that is the United States are but one reason to look askance at anyone promising a panacea based upon a points-based system.

Even so, most people would agree that, all things being equal, seeking out immigrants on the basis of what they can contribute to the United States-rather than what we can give them-would be an improvement upon our current immigration policy. Although 68 year-old Peruvian retirees might very well be laudable individuals, the idea of resting a rapidly decaying welfare state upon their shoulders is utterly foolish. That’s why David North’s lecture was so instructive. It shed light upon just why and how our immigration policy had failed, and gave us some ideas for  how these problems might be rectified in the future.

If we ever do attempt to address this issue in a serious manner, I’m certain that it will be because of the work of people such as Mr. North and organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies.

Tomorrow night David North, of the Center for Immigration Studies, will deliver the last in a series of lectures sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies and hosted by the Penn Club. With any luck I’ll be able to cover his talk, whose subject is the extremely important-and all but ignored-subject of legal immigration. You can view my thoughts-or react with your own-by following my Twitter account and replying @OddLane.

I look forward to the conversation.

This month’s Rattle brings us a host of stories that the mainstream media didn’t cover sufficiently-preferring instead to shower accolades upon the man responsible for abandoning immigration enforcement in the name of political opportunism. We’ll cover everything from the latest spate of violent crimes committed by illegal aliens to Barack Obama’s continued roll out of administrative amnesty, which now includes directives to ignore both interior enforcement and border security.

But first, we’ll examine this administration’s ongoing obstruction of Congress’s investigation into the ever-broadening gun-walking scandals. Courtesy of Sipsey Street Irregulars-whose coverage of Fast and Furious is non pareil-we learn that the White House is blocking testimony from Kevin O’Reilly, a former staff member of the National Security Council who wants to speak with the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. This administration’s invocation of executive privilege is just the latest example of obstruction of justice  relating to Fast and Furious.

It should be recalled that last July the acting head of the ATF told Congress that his agency was paying FBI agents to ignore the law in pursuit of this administration’s bizarre and opaque political goals. Immigration control, not gun control, is a solution that Barack Obama’s Justice Department dismisses out of hand. We can only hope that, as Katie Pavlich reports in Town Hall, Chairman Darrell Issa pursues this investigation to its conclusion, which hopefully will result in a more than a few stiff prison sentences. Speaking of Katie Pavlich, she has a fantastic new book about Fast and Furious entitled-appropriately-Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal, which I urge you all to read.

Obfuscation and evasion are hallmarks of this administration, especially as it pertains to immigration and border security, as an insightful commentary from Michael Cutler published by Fox News Latino illustrates. The former INS agent and current immigration watchdog points out that Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security is effectively “cooking the books” by relying solely upon  documented arrests-a misleading statistic-in order to pretend that this administration is cracking down upon illegal entry into the United States. FAIR’s Legislative Update further dissects this policy, which is drawing increasing scrutiny from Congress-particularly Chairman Darrell Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz- notwithstanding what Tom Tancredo accurately describes as a bipartisan conspiracy to hobble border security and immigration enforcement. By not logging and tracking the number of illegal border crossers who were not detained, Customs and Border Protection is painting a rosy picture of a much more dire situation.

The deceit of this administration extends beyond the CBP and encompasses virtually every aspect of immigration enforcement, both at the border and inside of the United States. Even though ICE is touting the Cross Check raids it initiated earlier this month-intended to apprehend ostensibly violent criminals, absconders and  fugitives from justice-this is merely a political expedient designed for election year consumption. The truth is that Barack Obama’s administrative amnesty proceeds apace, with four cities ordered to halt deportations, according to the Dan Stein Report. Remarkably, the Executive Office for Immigration Review has closed San Francisco’s immigration court and plans to completely halt its proceedings for the entire summer. Jim Kouri reports on yet another component of Barack Obama’s administrative amnesty, the decision to suspend deportations of illegal aliens with “families,” inside of the United States.

And while illegal aliens are not being deported, they will be able to enjoy state-of-the-art detention facilities, including some new amenities such as beach volleyball and cable TV. Lamar Smith excoriates this administration for its skewed priorities in a must-read op-ed published in The Hill. Although this new detention manual  might seem farcical, it’s far from a laughing matter. As Jim Kouri points out in his Examiner column, the Department of Homeland Security has taken virtually no action against foreigners who overstay their visas. This negligence persists over a decade after the September 11th massacres, which were committed by a cadre of jihadists whose visa applications are symptomatic of our country’s dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy. This is not merely an hypothetical problem, even after the destruction of the World Trade Center, as the case of illegal alien Amine El Khalifi demonstrates. The fact that this indifference to the lives of American citizens continues unabated, despite repeated pressure exerted by the GAO serves to illustrate this administration’s fundamental lack of accountability.

Even as it lags behind in locating and detaining criminal aliens, the administration of Barack Obama has deigned to grant Temporary Protected Status to thousands of Syrians living in the United States. As we’ve pointed out in the past, Temporary Protected Status is anything but temporary. In fact, it is merely another expedient used to grant de facto amnesty to a group of illegal aliens who can prove “hardship” circumstances, most of which persist indefinitely-making their stay in the United States permanent. This is even more disturbing when juxtaposed against the State Department’s recent decision to bar inspection of a visiting Egyptian delegation consisting of Muslim Brotherhood officials. Of course, Egypt isn’t the only country where the Ikwhan has a strong foothold.

The problem is that Barack Obama’s ostensible opposition, i.e. congressional Republicans, are doing virtually nothing to investigate the egregious overreach of his administration on immigration matters. Quite the contrary, some are hard at work developing proposals that would only worsen the situation, such as DREAM Lite, in hopes of  cultivating the ever-elusive Hispanic vote. Republican leaders in the states are not faring much better in this regard, as the difficult struggle in New Hampshire to prevent illegal aliens from capitalizing upon in-state tuition benefits demonstrates.

In an update to a story that we’ve covered recently, the North Carolina General Assembly held another hearing on illegal immigration and potential enforcement mechanisms. Unfortunately, according to NC Listen, it was dominated by illegal aliens and their supporters in the legislature, including some of the very people who had disrupted a previous hearing about these problems. Heading further south, we learn that the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act has been killed in the Mississippi State Senate. Apparently, Judiciary Chairman Hob Bryan has caved knuckled under to the Mississippi Poultry Association and its desire for cheap labor, notwithstanding the harm such a decision may inflict on innocent Mississippians. Its neighbor to the East, Alabama, has revisited HB 56, the landmark legislation that targeted illegal aliens living in that state. Rep. Micky Hammon has decided to alter some of the provisions that have been enjoined by a federal court, but maintains that he and his fellow Republicans will not repeal the law, which is welcome news.

In not so good news, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle has decided to defy Immigration and Customs Enforcement and refuse detainer requests for criminal aliens housed in her county’s jails. Saul Chavez is one beneficiary of Preckwinkle’s benevolence, having fled the country upon being released from jail after killing William McCann. The carnage our government’s policies wreak is not limited to the odd vehicular manslaughter though, as the massacre at Oikos University in California makes clear to any impartial observer. Limits to Growth has an insightful story about mass-murderer One L. Goh which explains the circumstances surrounding his rampage which the main stream media willfully ignores. Oikos was apparently more concerned with harvesting tuition payments by foreign students-often with loans backed by American taxpayers-than ensuring the safety of its student body. It brings to mind  9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose entrance to the United States was facilitated by a campus administration eager to recruit students from the Middle East, heedless of the potentially deadly repercussions.

The fact that there are visa mills exploiting the F-1 Visa program should come as no surprise to people who are aware of the extensive fraud and exploitation present in the legal immigration system. Just as in Canada-which recently charged attorney Sandra Zaher with inventing false refugee claims-the United States is plagued by immigration fraud so pervasive that the conviction of Earl Seth David, aka Rabbi Avraham David, head of a New York law firm, headlines an ICE press release. The irony of an agency headed by John Morton-who’s tasked with expediting illegal immigration-spotlighting the conviction of someone for immigration fraud is apparently lost on this administration.

In another prime example of abuse, a lawsuit by two former employees of Larsen & Toubro InfoTech Limited Inc alleges systemic fraud at the India-based IT firm for which they once worked. Joining an earlier class action filed against the firm, this suit asserts that the plaintiff was forced to not only forge documents related to H-1B visas-a program rampant with corruption and fraud-but told not to report the crime to outside authorities. Read the sickening story for yourself, if you feel you have the requisite stomach. The baffling purposes of the H1-B visa program weren’t illuminated by a recent decision by Judge Gregory Frost, who ordered suppressed almost all information related to the case of  Geza Rakoczi, who is described thusly,

…a young alien man with a mysterious legal status, probably an illegal alien, who has a bachelor’s degree from a marginal educational institution, a private one that accepts all applicants, and his employer, a mortgage finance company in trouble in two different states.

Putting the lie to the idea that these visas are reserved for “highly-skilled” immigrants. More often than not they are merely convenient bodies used to replace the more demanding, highly-compensated Americans who they’ve made redundant. If you don’t believe me, just ask the wife of unemployed semiconducter engineer Darin Wedel, who is still waiting to hear back from President Obama. But do not fear, the virtual border fence is back on track,which I suppose is small comfort to the thousands of hard-working Americans like Mr. Wedel.  However, India is not the only nation to take advantage of the nebulous, easily exploitable H1-B visa program. As Phyllis Schlafly  points out, the Islamist Gulen movement in Turkey has used these same visas in order to indoctrinate Muslim students in American charter schools. The dangers posed by the Gulen movement have been explored ad nauseam in other forums, but it should be noted that even if you ascribe the most benign of intentions to the Gullenists, the idea that fundamentalist Muslim teachers are somehow highly skilled workers is implausible on its face.  Focusing on yet another rising Asian power, the New American has an interesting story about the PRC’s use of the EB-5 immigrant investor visa program in the state of Idaho which is well worth reading.

Returning to more timely issues, we discovered this past week that it’s not all that difficult to register to vote using a fabricated identity, or even assuming the persona of the current Attorney General  of the United States. Thanks to James O’Keefe we’ve discovered how simple it is to game the system, although officials at the increasingly misnamed Justice Department don’t seem to agree. Of course, acknowledging that vote fraud exists would require the Obama administration to prosecute those responsible for it, which wouldn’t bode well for the electoral prospects of Barack Obama’s party. From New York to Florida, from Indiana to Arizona, stealing elections has become quite commonplace, even as the White House-and its complaisant cronies in the media-scoff at the notion. Some Democrats, though, readily admit that trying to manipulate the outcome of elections is a routine practice, and a few even have the integrity to support measures that would rectify this betrayal of democracy.

In an ironic twist, labor unions-which were some of the most vehement supporters of President Obama’s Stimulus plan-are now complaining about some of the jobs stemming from stimulus projects going to Korean workers. I suppose the lesson is to be careful what you wish for, especially if it is over 700 billion dollars worth of taxpayer-financed boondoggles.

In more border violence, two illegal immigrants were murdered just northwest of Tucson on Thursday by two camouflaged gunman, echoing an attack that occurred  near the same city in 2007. This sort of bloodshed is rare but not unheard of in Arizona, especially in the Tucson sector, where over forty percent of this nation’s  illegal aliens come through. It is yet another reason why the constitutionality of SB 1070 must be upheld by the Supreme Court, in spite of the hostility of open borders dogmatists such as the misleadingly named Democrats in the House of Representatives.

Our final story is related to our relationship to the state as individuals, and how that relationship is changing as a result of our government’s decades-long recalibration of this country’s demographics. Courtesy of the Pew Hispanic Center, we now know that over seventy percent of Latinos want the government to provide more services to Americans, not less. Limits to Growth has a fascinating summary of the survey’s other findings, which include a belief among Hispanics that they should learn English in order to succeed in the United States, but not in order to integrate into the broader society. The findings about faith in government are worth exploring though, because they reinforce something that our side has been saying for a very long time. Namely, that Hispanic voters’ support for Democrats and generally left wing political candidates has very little to do with the GOP’s position on immigration, but a lot to do with their endorsement of redistributive economic policies.

The findings of the Pew Hispanic Center demonstrate that the cause and effect most often cited in declining Republican Party affiliation among Hispanics-embodied by the specious narrative about Pete Wilson and the waning fortunes of the California GOP-is reversed. Hispanics do not support the Democratic Party because it advocates open borders, the Democratic Party supports open borders because it enhances its ability to win future elections. In effect, what is happening is that the political elite is electing a new people. This dynamic needs to be remembered whenever we hear mealy-mouthed Republicans exhorting us to abandon any attempt to impose reason upon an anachronistic immigration system that is designed to thwart the wishes of the vast majority of the American public.

It’s going to be a long, tumultuous election year.

Today I’d like to share with you a great blog entry posted to the Center for Immigration Studies website, written by David North. It deals with the protracted legal battle between the counsel to legendary rock musician John Lennon and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Although most accounts of the Lennon deportation question usually focus on the alleged misuse of administrative resources by the Nixon administration-a theme that would seem to fit into a larger narrative arc focusing on abuse of power by President Nixon and some of his political factotums-or the broader issue of domestic opposition to the Vietnam War, the actual legal battle had much more to do with the attorneys for Lennon exploiting a little-used aspect of American immigration law in order to keep their client in the United States indefinitely. 

North explains the relevance of this law, then known as a non-priority classification but now called Deferred Departure, to the current discussion about what to do with aliens who are awaiting deportation. Particularly, those whom pro-amnesty activists seek to keep in this country-and eventually grant full legal status-through administrative mechanisms such as that used to protect Mr. Lennon in his own successful battle with the INS.

This story is especially pertinent in light of this administration’s mixed messages regarding the feasibility of an amnesty that bypasses normal legislative channels. That’s why the North posting is not only worth reading as an historical refresher course on immigration law, but as a reminder that the tools uncovered years ago can be used in the future in an attempt to thwart the intended purpose of our immigration system.

The United States Congress is once again at work trying to provide amnesty for hundreds of thousands of aliens living in the United States. The current crop of potential Powerball winners happen to come from Pakistan, and would benefit from the extension of Temporary Protected Status.

The Daily Mail has the full story, but the gist is that two liberal Texas representatives known for their generosity towards immigrants are attempting to convince Congress that these Pakistanis deserve to stay here indefinitely because of natural disasters that have wreaked havoc on the hinterlands of their native country.

For a detailed description of what Temporary Protected Status entails, I suggest you look over the relevant web-page of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement. However, the Cliff’s Notes version amounts to this: Basically, immigrants who come from a country that’s currently undergoing protracted civil strife, environmental disaster, or another widespread calamity that prevents them from returning home and reestablishing their roots, are given the opportunity to remain in this country legally. 

TPS has also been granted to people from other nations that have fallen on hard times, the most recent example being Haiti. Unfortunately, there are many problems with TPS designations, among them the possibility for fraud, but also the ineluctable fact that TPS acts as a de facto amnesty for hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals who will, in all likelihood, never return to their homelands. Despite what open borders advocates might lead you to believe, Temporary Protected Status is a get out of deportation free card for almost all of its recipients.

If you don’t believe me, then you might be interested in what happened to previous waves of TPS immigrants. The Center for Immigration Studies has an interesting backgrounder detailing the less than temporary nature of their stays in the United States.

These Pakistanis will never return to Pakistan if Rep. Green and Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee have their way, but good luck getting either one of these esteemed representatives to admit as much on the public record.

We have some new ones, courtesy of some recent appointments by President Obama. The Executive Office of Immigration Review-and for those of you who aren’t aware of just what this agency does, you can peruse a brief description on the Department of Justice’s website which explains its functions-now has an acting director named Juan P. Osuna.

There’s a short analysis of the implications of this appointment, and the one to the office vacated by Mr. Osuna, by David North of the Center for Immigration Studies. Well worth checking out, in my estimation.

From the Center for Immigration Studies, we learn of a case where dozens of Chinese nationals attempted to illegally enter the United States via the circuitous route of traveling through Belize, an idyllic former British colony in Central America.

 If nothing else, this story demonstrates that snakeheads will do anything to turn a profit, and that their customer base is always willing to fork over extra cash in return for the opportunity to come to the United States. The writer of this pieces gives you some good insight into the mechanics of illegal immigration from non-Mexican sources, which is why I suggest you read this story in its entirety. The notion that the only people attempting to enter the United States from our southern border are beleaguered economic migrants from impoverished Mexican states needs to be put to rest.