buffet.jpgCongress has spread a table laden with reheated immigration delicacies, while still engaging in the usual posturing, pretend friendships and verbal fisticuffs. 

In a spirit of convivial bipartisanship, the House on September 13 passed by a vote of 402-3 legislation the Senate had approved in August, S.3245 (“A bill to extend by 3 years the

The Democratic Convention in Charlotte ended last week. The media has now turned to measuring and marveling at President Obama’s post-convention bounce despite weak Labor Department data revealing persistent joblessness.

The inevitable comparisons of the two parties’ convention performances give the edge to the Democrats’ oratory, production values, crowd enthusiasm and diversity.  On immigration policy, the Dems

Labor Day, the quaintly traditional start of the Presidential election season, arrived this year with the memory still fresh of self-mortification Republican style — the projection of Second Amendment rights squarely into their collective feet.

Rather than enjoying a customary post-convention bump in the polls, GOP candidate Mitt Romney received “easily the worst rating

Invasion of Normandy.jpg[Blogger’s note:  Tomorrow, August 15, 2012, is perhaps as momentous to DREAMers as D-Day, June 6, 1944, was to The Greatest Generation.   The invasion of Normandy marked the end of World War II in Europe and the fall of a tyrannical Nazi regime that made mincemeat of the rule of law.

Though the comparison may seem

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

mad-men_l.jpgWith the dog days of an election year producing little more than frothy pundits regurgitating banal analyses of the day’s non-events, and seeing no near-term prospect of comprehensive immigration reform, I temporarily turned aside my wonkish ways.

While publishing two posts by guest authors, I time-shifted back to the supposedly halcyon years of my youth

notebook with seashells.jpg[Bloggers note:  Today’s guest column is co-authored by two shining stars in the immigration firmament, Roxana Bacon and Esther Olavarria, who offer four innovative proposals for immigration reform conceived by their law students at the University of Miami Law School. The post is longer than usual but well worth your time.  

The melding

woman behind fence

[Blogger’s Note:  This week’s guest column is by Jennifer Oltarsh, an immigration lawyer practicing in Manhattan. She writes about how the tendency of Congress and the Obama Administration to require the incarceration of low-level immigration law violators without providing individualized determinations of whether a detainee will be released from custody has led to massive increases in the

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

2 wild guys.jpgThe federal government regularly auctions airwaves and drilling leases.  Should it also auction humans?  This is the startling question posed recently at a May 15, 2012 Hamilton Project conference in a paper, a slide presentation and the transcript of remarks offered by Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at the University of California (Davis).