04 Oct 2010

MSNBC: General Colin Powell on Immigration and Politics


A leading voice of moderate Republicans, former Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, spoke on MSNBC's Meet the Press on September 19th, giving his views on a wide range of topics, including immigration. (See Meet the Press transcript for 12.Sep.2010, MSNBC.) Powell described himself as...

01 Oct 2010

DREAM Act On Hold, For Now

As we noted last week (See Immigration Reform on the Installment Plan?, MurthyBlog, 22.Sep.2010), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was hoping to reinvigorate the Democratic political base by forcing a vote on a piece of pro-immigrant legislation - the DREAM Act - by attaching...

30 Sep 2010

Take Our Jobs – Please!

Take Our Jobs. It sounds a bit like a punchline from an old Vegas lounge act, and ever since comedian Stephen Colbert got involved, one might be forgiven for assuming it is little more than that; but Colbert is out to make a serious point....

29 Sep 2010

USCIS: New Filing Fees Take Effect November 23rd

Back in June, we called attention to a new fee proposal then being floated by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), noting that the fee changes - mostly increases - were needed to plug a $200 million hole in the agency's budget. (See NYT Editorial:...

28 Sep 2010

Fact-Checking the Immigration Reform Debate: Federal Benefits

To be brutally frank, our national discussions on immigration reform are often more of a shouting match than a debate; a "debate" implies orderly, methodical, reasoned argument, bearing little resemblance to the angry free-for-alls into which our public forums all too often degenerate when immigration...

23 Sep 2010

NYT Op-Ed: A Self-Defeating Immigration Policy

Everyone seems to agree that U.S. immigration policy is badly in need of repair, but there is substantially less concurrence about what is broken and how to fix it. As a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece points out, the problem of illegal immigration gets...

22 Sep 2010

Immigration Reform on the Installment Plan?


In the days before credit cards, many people bought big-ticket items "on time," paying the needful in installments until the debt was paid in full. There are signs that we may be going back to the future, as it were, with our immigration policy. Having...

20 Sep 2010

Illegal Immigration: Up or Down?

The Pew Hispanic Center recently released a demographic study showing that the annual influx of undocumented immigrants "was nearly two-thirds smaller in the March 2007 to March 2009 period than it had been from March 2000 to March 2005." (See U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows are...