Our relationship with Venezuela has really gotten out of hand. For awhile I admit that I found the back-and-forth between American conservatives and the Venezuelan government kind of amusing. Pat Robertson would encourage the assassination of Chavez, Chavez would get his picture taken with Castro, and I would sit back and laugh. [...]

This new immigration compromise bill is quite the monstrous piece of legislation. I’ve been trying to get a good grasp on it for awhile now, and I still have no idea what all of its provisions are, or if it will be on balance a good or bad thing. My gut reaction is [...]

There are roughly 2000 working hours in a year (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year), at least for most white-collar employees. There are roughly 215 immigration judges employed by the Justice Department to handle asylum cases. Those judges are asked to handle roughly 350,000 asylum seekers each [...]

The biggest mistake we can make, with regards to immigration, is to underestimate the complexity of the American economy.
Pro-immigration forces like to say that immigrants are doing jobs that Americans refuse to do. At face value, that makes sense. Most Americans would shun the idea of becoming migrant farm workers. After all, [...]

I just saw a report on CNN International which showed how President Hugo Chavez has gotten many people, especially among his urban-poor base, convinced that the United States plans to invade Venezuela soon. He has promised that he will burn Venezuela’s oil fields if that happens. He’s publicly stated that he is training [...]

President Bush says that we need to secure our borders. He has proposed added 6000 new border patrol agents (increasing the total border patrol force by 50%) and supplementing the border patrol with national guard units until the new agents can be fully trained. He wants to put cameras, fences, and unmanned vehicles [...]

Things I “learned” by watching parts of the Minutemen rally in Washington, DC today:

Lean on Me is a movie about a black principal who is trying to restore self-respect and dignity to a failing, inner-city school named Eastside High. One of the ways the principal, played by Morgan Freeman, goes about this task is to insist that all students learn the school song, and be able to [...]

What does it mean to “be American”?
Throughout American history, that has been perhaps the most important political and social question we have faced. And we’ve never had a good answer to it.
When this country was founded, “being American” meant that you were ancestrally English and Protestant, and that you lived somewhere between the Hudson [...]

Wow! 350,000-500,000 people protesting peacefully on the streets of Dallas for immigration reform. So peacefully, that the police were even complimentary.
Dallas isn’t the type of place where people take to the streets in large numbers. I’ve never heard of such a thing. But to do so in such a peaceful way [...]