Much digital ink has already been spilled reporting on the phantom tide of undocumented migrants supposedly breaching our Southern border.  This article will address a different, but very-real immigration flood, and suggest ways U.S. employers, noncitizens, and their lawyers ought be emboldened to add to the deluge.

Ironically, it is about a dry subject –

Raj 2.JPGOver the 4th of July weekend, I devoured a fascinating book and, in the course of it, learned a new synonym for “bureaucracy”  — “cutcherry” — taken from Hindi and apparently originating with the British East-India Company’s bureau office in what is now Chennai.

The book, The Professor and the Madman ~

lawyer with section of law.jpg“U.S. immigration law is like stratified rock, revealing layer on layer of Congressional accretions laid down over many years, with the superstructure upended in tectonic shifts triggered by the baffling and contradictory interpretations of multiple agencies and courts.” 

Nothing of substance has changed since I offered that post last August, save for a groundbreaking election that

[Blogger’s note: 

Dear Readers: I promise that this post is indeed about immigration and the quadrennial election on Tuesday.   Please read to the end, beyond the meandering yet relevant introduction, to see the connection.]

Davidfosterwallace.jpgJust over four years ago, David Foster Wallace, a gifted, troubled writer of wide acclaim, took his life. Fans of his writing, myself

Thumbnail image for electric warning sign.jpgImmigration has been dubbed the third rail of American politics, along with Social Security, Medicare, gun control, and a variety of other hot-button issues.  To me, it’s more like a downed power line snaking low across the ground and electrocuting whomever fails to give it respectful attention. As the eyes of the nation turn

boy_looking_up_and_scratches_his_head.jpg[A] riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”  ~ Winston Churchill

The most quotable of British Prime Ministers could well have been talking about the American immigration system rather than describing Russia in 1939.  U.S. immigration law is like stratified rock, revealing layer on layer of Congressional accretions laid down over many years

The portents were plentiful, reaching back 30 years. Yet none but a clairvoyant could have predicted the aftermath on June 15, 1982 when the Supreme Court in Plyler v. Doe provided undocumented children with a guarantee of education through high school. Three decades to the day, a mixed-race president (whose Kenyan father was hounded out of the

President Obama had a macho moment this week when he suggested, rhetorically, a poll of ghosts. “Ask Osama Bin Laden” and the “22 out of 30 top al-Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field,” he proposed, “whether I engage in appeasement.”  The storied bugaboo of foreign-policy appeasement, best typified by the flaccidity of British Prime