By Jerry Kammer, CIS.org

When PBS asks someone like Jon Meacham — contributing editor to Time magazine, former editor of Newsweek, television pundit, and author of a Pulitzer-prize winning biography of Andrew Jackson — to write an essay on immigration, the result is likely to be a measure of elite media thinking on the topic.

And so it was with Meacham’s commentary at the end of last Friday’s “Need to Know” program. It was a call to welcome the world. It was also devoid of any recognition of how unconstrained immigration policy has become since passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

Ostensibly, Meacham’s essay was an argument for more immigrant visas for high-skilled foreigners educated in the United States. But most of his message — and all of the accompanying visual imagery — was a homily about the backlash against the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century.

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By Janice Kephart, CIS.org

On Wednesday, May 9, House appropriators mark up their FY 2013 Subcommittee Draft Homeland Security Appropriations bill. The budget refuses the Obama administration requests to lower funding for enforcement activity on and inside the border, and denies a reorganization that would have destroyed the independence of arguably the most important border program that checks biometrics at the border to assure that people are who they say they are.

Here are the breakdowns:

Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
Total appropriations requested – $10,344,641,000
Total appropriations recommended – $10,164,401,000

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (CBP)
ICE total appropriations requested – $5,332,192,000
ICE total appropriations recommended – $5,473,787,000

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By Jan Ting, CIS.org

The Obama administration’s challenge to the Arizona immigration statute SB1070 is not about its popularity, or whether the statute is wise or unwise policy. Legislatures are permitted to enact laws thought unpopular or unwise by others. And as Chief Justice Roberts observed, and the administration’s lawyer agreed, the challenge is also not in any way about civil rights or racial profiling.

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By Jon Feere, CIS.org

A high-immigration group called the National Foundation for American Policy has released a new report on the alleged costs of ending the current application of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. The Center for Immigration Studies has published a number of reports on birthright citizenship and it is clear that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has ever mandated that children born to illegal and temporary aliens must be considered U.S. citizens under the Constitution. Rather, the permissive policy is the result of agency policymaking. At least one influential jurist, Circuit Judge Richard Posner, feels that the policy could be ended through a simple act of Congress. This debate, as well as the history of the Citizenship Clause is detailed in our report, “Birthright Citizenship in the United States: A Global Comparison”.

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By Jerry Kammer, CIS.org

The Department of Homeland Security has just released statistics on the 1,062,040 legal residents admitted to the United States during 2011. Once again, Mexico is by far the leading recipient of green cards, with 143,446. The list bellow shows the other countries in the top 20, which together received 63.2 percent of the green card total.

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By Jessica Vaughan, CIS.org

“Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world” is the insipid platitude that begins an article flatly asserting that “Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter.” What does one have to do with the other? Nothing that is immediately obvious.

If speaking another language is desirable on the basis of living in a globalized world, then becoming smarter is an added benefit. If becoming smarter is the real benefit, that would appear to be its own reward whether the world is globalized or not. But perhaps the author meant to say that learning a second language makes you smarter, which then makes you better able to compete and prosper in a globalized world. Or whatever.

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By Jessica Vaughan, CIS.org

The Obama administration’s half-hearted and spotty record of immigration enforcement at the workplace creates a big vacuum for state and local lawmakers to jump into. E-Verify mandates are a great start. State employer auditing programs are another effective tool, either in lieu of an E-Verify mandate or to enhance compliance with E-Verify and other requirements. Statistics from such initiatives in South Carolina demonstrate the value of employer auditing at the state and local level.

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By Jon Feere, CIS.org

Ten states have joined California in filing an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court objecting to what they allege are unconstitutional provisions of Arizona’s S.B. 1070, the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act”. The 10 other states are New York, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

Among other things, California et al. argue that Arizona’s law has “interstate effects”, namely that it would drive illegal immigrants out of Arizona and into other states. As explained in the brief:

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Ronald W. Mortensen, CIS.org

After suffering legislative reverses in 2008 and 2010 when bills passed that mandated the use of E-Verify, Utah’s large, pro-illegal alien establishment has reasserted its political power.

Although Utah is considered to be the reddest of the red states because it consistently elects Republicans, that does not mean that it is conservative nor does it mean that its moral compass is working.

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By Mark Krikorian, CIS.org

The Washington Post’s editorial writers ought to read their own newspaper. Monday’s lead editorial bemoaned the fact that having illegal aliens go to the “back of the line” is deceptive since there is no “line” for them:

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A briefing by Mark Durie*

Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist and pastor of an Anglican church. He has published many articles and books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom. A graduate of the Australian National University and the Australian College of Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992. On January 18, he spoke to the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia.

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By Stephen Steinlight, CIS.org

It’s axiomatic that the nation’s leading pollsters, in what amounts to a tacit conspiracy, have for years falsified their reports about the deep disquiet an overwhelming majority of the American people feel about our broken immigration system. This near-universal disinformation has played a key role in the effort on the part of the political and fiscal elite to prevent immigration from emerging as a major national political issue. With the exceptions of Zogby and Rasmussen, their carefully engineered push polls have permitted pro-amnesty presidents, politicians, pundits, clergy, activists, etc. to peddle the lie they enjoy popular support.

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by Daniel Pipes*

Between 1967 and 1993, just a few hundred Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza won the right to live in Israel by marrying Israeli Arabs (who constitute nearly one-fifth of Israel’s population) and acquiring Israeli citizenship. Then the Oslo Accords offered a little-noted family-reunification provision that turned this trickle into a river: 137,000 residents of the Palestinian Authority (PA) moved to Israel in 1994-2002, some of them engaged in either sham or polygamous marriages.

Israel has two major reasons to fear this uncontrolled immigration. First, it presents a security danger. Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet security service, noted in 2005 that of 225 Israeli Arabs involved in terror against Israel, 25 of them, or 11 percent, had legally entered Israel through the family unification provision. They went on to kill 19 Israelis and wound 83; most notoriously, Shadi Tubasi suicide-bombed Haifa’s Matza Restaurant in 2002 on behalf of Hamas, killing 15.

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For those self-loathing Westerners seeking to destroy the great democracies in which they live: The times, they are ‘a changing. Go peddle your self-destructive policies somewhere else (like the outhouse). Now here’s some good, old common sense from France’s Interior Minister Claude Gueant, a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government:

… “We reject … cloistered lives lived along ethnic and religious grounds, those that live by their own laws,” Gueant told reporters. “The foreigners that we welcome here must integrate themselves. It is up to them to adapt to us, not the other way around.” …

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By Stephen Steinlight, CIS.org

His eyes fixed on November 6, President Obama is desperately trying to stop hemorrhaging political support in a Hispanic community outraged by the success of his administration’s data-based deportation policy and whose vote is potentially critical in several swing states he won by a razor’s edge in 2008. It has sent some 400,000 illegal aliens home a year for a total of about a million during his time in office. A frenetic effort is now on to shift gears and show results well before the election.

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