September 2005

In today’s 24/7, Twenty-First Century world, with on-demand services often only mouse clicks away, our nation’s employment-based immigration laws are reverting to Puritan times. How so? Remember the infamous Blue Laws of the colonial era, when government officials decreed that the economy must shut down every Sunday, the Sabbath, for a day of rest. Fast forward now to 2005, and let’s look at America’s modern-day immigration blue laws, which take the “business-must-rest” concept to an absurdly blue (melancholic) low point.

As the State Department has announced , the waiting time for virtually all categories of employment-based immigrant visas (the coveted “Green Card”) will “retrogress” (move back in time) on October 1. In practical effect, this means that individuals who have already patiently waited for years in the legal-immigration queue – especially those born in China, India, the Philippines and Mexico – must wait much, much longer still.
Continue Reading Immigration Blue Laws: Never on Sunday, Monday or Any Other Day for the Next Several Years.

In its latest newsletter , the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) – a unit of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security – suggests that migrants crossing the border illegally from Mexico into the scorching Arizona deserts are driven to do so by “emotions” and “machismo”:

“Intellectually, those considering jumping the U.S.-Mexican border realize how hot it is in the southwest during mid-summer. But somehow their emotions, their machismo, win out and they make a run for it, only to be faced with the desperate realization of just how hot the desert summer is: Deathly hot.

“When much of the U.S. was under heat advisories this summer for temperatures in the high 90s, the southwestern deserts were baking under temperatures consistently reaching 120 degrees. No shade, no pools, no air conditioning, just 120 life-sapping degrees. “

Continue Reading The U.S. Must Repudiate Life-Threatening Psycho-Babble and Instead Enact Reality-Based Immigration Laws

Planning to work, engage in business or research, tour or study in the United States? Thinking about entering the country from one of the land borders in Arizona, New York or Washington State? Well if you are, then you will be enrolled in a new Homeland Security Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) pilot program at the land ports of Nogales East (Deconcini) and Nogales West (Mariposa) in Arizona; Alexandria Bay (Thousand Islands) in New York; and Pacific Highway and Peace Arch in Washington State.
Continue Reading RFID and the Immigration Surveillance Society: New DHS U.S. Visit Pilot Program to Use RFID Tagging to Track I-94 Admission Documents for all Nonimmigrants