US Immigration News

The Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, was campaigning for re-election in California over the weekend. In his address to the California GOP convention, he said that the United States should encourage highly skilled foreigners to immigrate to the United States. This policy should be balanced with discouraging persons attempting to enter illegally and wi

This week the United States began issuing passports embedded with 'smart chips;' small memory chips that can be read with computer scanners that have information about the person who holds the passport encrypted on them. The initial version will have mostly data that is already on the passports, such as name, identification number and photograph.

Immigrants living in U.S. households increased by 16%, to a current total of 35.7 million foreign-born residents in the United States. The dramatic increase is from 2000 to 2005, with many newcomers moving to states that traditionally have not had many immigrants.

After seven years of negotiations, the United States Justice Department and a union representing 218 immigration judges signed their first collective-bargaining agreement in mid August.

Leaders of the union, the National Association of Immigration Judges, said the contract would improve communication between Justice headquarters and the judges, who serve in 53 cities and detention centers across the country, by guaranteeing quarterly meetings to discuss security, workload and other issues.

It has been strongly argued by some interests that the millions of foreigners who have entered the United States over the last decade took jobs from American workers. However, a study released last week by the Pew Hispanic Center found that there was no evidence to support that claim for the country as a whole.

The last two of eleven exchange students to the United States who failed to show up at a Montana college program were apprehended Sunday in Richmond, Virginia on 13 August 2006. The eleven were part of a group of 17 Egyptians who had obtained J-1 student visas to attend a month-long program at Montana State University in Bozeman,