As early as last January, Rep. Lamar Smith, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, outlined plans to hold hearings to investigate the Obama Administration’s policies on immigration-related worksite enforcement and propose a bill that would require employers to enroll in E-Verify, the Federal online screening tool that purports to verify work eligibility.
True to his
The sage of the current age, Wikipedia, defines the term “nonmaleficence” — from the Latin primum non nocere — as a principle of medical ethics, one that in my view is equally applicable to the immigration sphere. The princple holds that “given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or
The U.S. Supreme Court freed a herd of immigration “elephants [hiding] in a mousehole” on May 26. That’s when five Justices used a four-word exception to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) — an act which, among its extensive provisions, banned the employment of foreign citizens whom the employer knows lack work permission —
I’m no fan of the U.S. Department of State’s policies and actions in the immigration space. State’s approach, as manifested by the behavior of U.S. consular officers and the apparatchiks within the Visa Office at the Bureau of Consular Affairs, too often comes off as a mix of treacly haughtiness and callous indifference.
These Ugly American attributes
President Obama has put on a good show lately about the need for the populace to rise up and pressure the GOP to enact comprehensive immigration reform. He urges citizens to begin “a national conversation on immigration reform that builds a bipartisan consensus to fix our broken immigration system so it works for America’s 21st century economy.” With
Our government leaders often ignore elementary rules of ecology and economics when trying to grapple with America’s immigration problems.
Ecology teaches that a system cannot thrive or long function if inputs far outnumber outputs. When rainwater enters the Mississippi in a volume that exceeds the river’s carrying capacity, levees are breached, adjacent lands are flooded
A trip abroad, as I took recently for a speaking gig, often allows intellectual curiosity to gallivant more freely. It also provides opportunities to question accepted truths or cause germinating notions to blossom into convincing arguments, especially if serendipity or divine providence creates chance meetings with strangers. These thoughts crystallized after my return as
On the first day of the second quarter of 2011, I fell for a joke. As the Urban Dictionary (definition #2) would word it, I was “punk’d“! I didn’t merely fall for just any immigration-related ersatz news item (like the passage of the CIRAF bill reported by my colleagues in ABIL), I breathlessly embraced as the
Few observers predicted the profundity of global political changes in the first quarter of 2011.
The Middle East, still the source of most of the world’s energy, has witnessed civilian protestors toppling despots and prompting autocrats to invite foreign-state and mercenary armies to quell peaceful demonstrations and slaughter citizens. Libya’s never-predictable Muammar el-Qaddafi, having nearly routed indigenous rebels centered around
Ever since studying Constitutional Law years ago, I’ve never really resolved in my mind the tension between federal supremacy and states rights. Most days, I see the need for national uniformity of law and lean toward federal power. At other times, I appreciate the benefit of sensitivity to local conditions and the wisdom of allowing the states to
