Republicans now have their own CIR measure, introduced last week by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT). According to the Salt Lake City Examiner, the Hatch bill would clamp down on border security and illegal immigration, and impose strict new limits on immigrant eligibility for social safety...
As the 111th Congress draws to a close, with Democrats hoping to keep their expected losses to a manageable level, some members are trying to make a last stand for the causes they hold dear, before the new - likely far more conservative - 112th...
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...
Last spring, after the collapse of the Schumer-Graham attempt to forge a bipartisan CIR bill, Senators Reid, Schumer, and Menendez announced that they had their own plan to overhaul the nation's immigration laws. Over the summer, as it appeared increasingly unlikely that CIR would ever...
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...
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....
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:...
Attorney Sheela Murthy, founder of the Murthy Law Firm, and a prominent philanthropist in the United States and in India, was featured in the July edition of SmartCEO Magazine, a leading business publication in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. The article summarized the lessons of a recent...
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...
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...
