Who’s Up For $100K A Year H1-B Visas

Good idea? Bad idea? Good for some bad for others?

Trump imposes $100K fee on H-1B visas in new immigration action

President Donald Trump signed an executive action on Friday to impose a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas — in an effort to curb what his administration says is overuse of the program.

“We need great workers, and this pretty much ensures that that’s what’s going to happen,” Trump said from the Oval Office, where officials detailed how the measure would incentivize companies to employ American workers while still providing a pathway to hire highly skilled foreign workers in specialized fields.

The proclamation will restrict entry under the program unless accompanied by the payment.

Now, this is not something that the visa holders pay, companies pay. There is also some confusion as to whether this is per employee or for a multitude. What it is meant to do is have American companies hire Americans, rather than bring them in. The question now is “does the Executive Branch have this authority?” Quite frankly, I’d rather see a lower fee, like, say, $20K per visa holder, and restrict the visas to 3 years with no renewals. Because now they get renewed over and over again, and the holders bring their families, their parents, their cousins.

The moves mark the latest in a series of efforts from the administration to crack down on immigration and place sharp new limits on the types of foreigners allowed into the country. They threaten to significantly impact industries that depend heavily on H-1B workers.

Maybe they should be focusing on hiring Americans.

Meanwhile

More than 400 arrests made so far in Chicago area enforcement operation, top ICE official says

Immigration enforcement officials have arrested more than 400 people as part of an operation in the Chicago area that launched a little less than two weeks ago, a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said Friday.

Marcos Charles, the acting head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, gave the figures during an interview with The Associated Press. The figure, which has not been widely reported, offers an early gauge of what is shaping up as a major enforcement effort that comes after similar operations were launched in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

For all the caterwauling, protesting, agitating, none of it mattered in Sanctuary City Chicago. ICE knows who they are and where they are.

Los Federales Starting To Hit SCC

It would actually be kind of fun if ICE and the other agencies involved would just pop up here and there, not really doing anything, just freaking out the citizens, especially the illegals, in Sanctuary City Chicago

Federal immigration agents make arrests in Chicago and West Chicago with sightings in several other suburbs

Federal immigration enforcement agents made arrests in Chicago and the suburb of West Chicago on Monday, while others were spotted in west suburban Aurora, officials and two state lawmakers said.

The actions come one week after President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced it was embarking on its latest immigration enforcement surge in the Chicago region, which it dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz.”

State Sen. Karina Villa, a Democrat from West Chicago, said she saw the federal agents assembling at a West Chicago Police Department station parking lot early Monday. When she confronted them about why they were present, they dispersed, she said.

At some point, she said there were “probably over five” arrests, though she said that was not confirmed independently by federal or local law enforcement. Villa said volunteers in the community were dispatched to take video or photos of immigration enforcement activity, and the agents were wearing vests that identified them as being from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and they were in “unmarked vehicles.”

Why they were present? Well, the US Congress has tasked ICE and other federal agents to enforce federal law and detain those illegally present in the US. And, by “dispersed”, they most likely went about doing their jobs, rather than running from her.

Under Illinois’ 2017 Trust Act, signed into law by former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, local law enforcement is prohibited from working with federal authorities on immigration enforcement. Villa said West Chicago’s mayor assured her they’re “not collaborating with ICE.”

Then deny them federal funds. Local and state law enforcement are required to help detain people who have broken federal laws.

She said this all transpired as elementary and high school classes in the area were beginning for the day.

“This is a terror that they’re attempting to instill in our community,” Villa said.

Terror, huh? Well, these same people think of Mexico as their home country.

Thousands in Chicago celebrate Mexican American heritage amid immigration crackdown

The annual Mexican Independence Day parade in Little Village on Sunday brought a sea of thousands of people wearing green and red waving Mexican flags of all sizes. Dozens of brightly colored floats highlighting Mexican culture by local organizations, businesses and unions were on display, as men on horseback, marching bands and dancers streamed down 26th Street in this majority Latino neighborhood.

Yet, the streets weren’t as full as in previous years, largely owing to fears over President Donald Trump’s efforts to ramp up immigration arrests in the city.

Do they want to be Americans or Mexicans? They aren’t making a very convincing case. Do French-Americans, Scottish-Americans, and others celebrate independence for their old countries? Very, very few. They do not have massive parades (these parades happened in other Dem run cities, too). As I’ve maintained for decades, if the illegals really want to be Americans then act like it. Learn the language. Stop taking all that public assistance. Blend in. Don’t fly Mexican flags and pretend like you’re still in Mexico. This goes for the illegals from other nations.

Bummer: Reports Say There Will Be 1.6 Million Fewer “Immigrants” In The US

The phrase Politico is looking for is “illegal aliens.” Heck, they aren’t even going with something like “undocumented Americans”

1.6M fewer US immigrants expected this year amid Trump, GOP policies, CBO predicts

President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, along with those in the GOP megabill enacted this summer, will significantly reduce the number of immigrants in the United States in the coming years, Congress’ nonpartisan scorekeeper estimated Wednesday.

The Congressional Budget Office now predicts that total net immigration will be 1.6 million people smaller this year than it projected in January. Contributing to that downward trend, the Republican tax and spending package Trump signed into law in January is estimated to result in the removal of 290,000 immigrants and the voluntary exit of 30,000 others over the next five years.

What the budget office has not yet calculated is how stemming the influx of immigrants will affect the federal budget. Those estimates are expected next year.

On the upside for Trump and congressional Republicans, cooling immigration is expected to shrink federal spending. But there are negative counterweights for GOP leaders too: Namely, foregone cash from taxes.

The number seems rather low. I guess we’ll have to see how many actually get deported and how many self deport. Also, remember that the border is not being overrun with illegals and fake asylum seekers. There are very few encounters, and most are not being let in.

New USCIS ‘Special Agents’ Will Be Given the Power to Arrest, Use Deadly Force Against Immigrants

On September 5, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency established by Congress to adjudicate immigration applications, made a startling announcement. For the first time since the agency was created in 2003, the agency will create a new class of “special agents,” who will be authorized to carry firearms and arrest people for both civil and criminal immigration and non-immigration violations.

This drastic change in the agency’s mission will instill fear in applicants seeking lawful status with USCIS, further pushing individuals who do not have clear-cut eligibility into the shadows, directly impacting our safety and security. The vagueness of the new rules also creates a lot of uncertainty for U.S. citizens and American businesses sponsoring family members and foreign talent, as well as for the lawyers representing individuals with difficult cases.

If they’ve gone through the standard legal channels, there is no worry. If they are illegal/fake asylum seekers, well, just self deport. Make it easy on yourself.

And things are ramping up in Chicago

It’s worth going and reading the whole DHS thread, which highlights many of the illegals caught, all sorts of very bad people. Who Democrats want to defend.

The Philadelphia Inquirer supports immigration lawlessness

Screen capture Philadelphia Inquirer website main page, September 8, 2025 at 8:20 AM EDT.

That our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper supports illegal immigration is no surprise to regular readers and me. The main article listed tells readers how “Rapid Response” activists have been tailing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to try to intimidate ICE in its apprehension of illegal immigrants, but the subsequently listed articles are all pro-illegal immigration.

Chasing ICE: ‘Rapid-response’ activists follow agents, then stand up for immigrants during arrests

“They’re trying to do this quietly, they’re trying to do this when nobody is watching,” one immigrant-advocate said.

by Jeff Gammage | Monday, September 8, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT

When ICE agents headed out to raid the Super Gigante food market in West Norriton this summer, they didn’t travel alone.

Following behind them were cars carrying members of the Montgomery County Watch rapid-response team, immigration activists who work to find and follow the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Their goal: to record agents’ activities, to alert people to protest at the scenes of arrests, and, at times, to loudly confront the officers.

The group had discovered ICE agents and cars gathering that July morning in the parking lot outside the Plymouth Meeting Regal Cinema movie theater.

From there it was 4½ miles to the supermarket. The two groups arrived nearly simultaneously.

As ICE arrested 14 people for immigration offenses, activists yelled at and questioned the masked agents, asking if they told their children that they worked separating families.

That’s what every law enforcement officer does when he arrests someone for breaking the law. When the Philadelphia Police Department arrests a gang-banger for shooting another gang-banger, he’s separating a family.

“Show your face! Show your face!” they demanded.

We know their reasons. The newspaper’s far-left columnist Will Bunch among others has decried ICE agents wearing masks for the very simple reason: they want to publicly identify and dox them, to intimidate them from doing their jobs.

“Get back!” an ICE agent shouted as a woman in sandals and a T-shirt approached him.

“Cowards!” came the rejoinder.

The agents did not respond to the taunt.

“They’re trying to do this quietly, they’re trying to do this when nobody is watching” ― and the rapid-response team aims to ensure that doesn’t happen, said Stephanie Vincent, an organizer who was among those who went to the supermarket that morning. “The citizens are front line right now.”

The front line of what, of protecting criminals? Because that’s what these people are trying to do, trying to protect people who are in the country illegally from being removed from the country. Further down, they admit that directly:

“People are showing up and protesting, to show we support [migrants] and don’t want them taken out of the community, and asking ICE to think about what they’re doing,” said Rachel Rutter, executive director of Project Libertad, a Phoenixville-based organization that assists immigrant families. “It’s a direct response to the increase in enforcement.”

In other words, they are aiding and abetting criminals, trying to keep the illegals from being deported.

ICE noted that the agents are performing legal enforcement actions, and that while everybody has freedom of speech, if they actually interfere with ICE while making arrests, they are committing a federal crime.

There’s a lot more to the article, noting the legality of the protests, but it’s heavily slanted toward glorifying the activists. That goes right along with the newspaper’s Editorial Board’s support of illegal immigration, saying “Heavy-handed immigration enforcement efforts accomplish little beyond the upheaval and inhumane treatment of people just trying to get ahead and make a better life.” They can try to get ahead and make a better life .  .  . in Mexico or Guatemala or from wherever it is they came! That’s our law, and they are breaking the law every time they cross our borders or overstay a visa and every time they provide forged documents to obtain jobs or work for cash and not pay income of Social Security taxes.

Kick them out, and if they want to return to the United States, they can apply for legal immigration from their home countries. That’s the American way!

Abuse of the asylum claim system

My good friend William Teach noted that the illegal immigrant accused of human trafficking and a known wife beater, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, that darling of Will Bunch and the rest of the American left, has now been notified that he will be deported to Eswatini, a small nation in Africa. But even Mr Bunch would have to admit that Mr Abrego Garcia and his shysters are attempting to abuse the asylum law:

ICE tells Kilmar Abrego Garcia he’ll be deported to tiny African country

DHS mocked Abrego Garcia on social media, saying, ‘Homie is afraid of the entire western hemisphere’

by Peter Pinedo and Bill Melugin | Friday, September 5, 2025 | 7:56 PM EDT

An attorney representing the Department of Homeland Security and ICE has notified high-profile illegal immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia that he will be deported to the tiny African nation Eswatini, after the alleged gang member’s lawyers said he fears persecution in 22 other countries.

According to a removal notice shared with Fox News by ICE sources, the agency notified Abrego Garcia that in light of his claims of fear of persecution or torture in nearly two dozen other countries, “we hereby notify you that your new country of removal is Eswatini, Africa.”

“Dear Mr. Abrego Garcia,” the notice reads, “As you know, the United States seeks to remove you from the United States based on your final order of removal. Currently, you are designated to be removed to Uganda. Your attorney has informed us, however, that you fear persecution or torture in Uganda.”

There’s more at the original.

So, the alleged human trafficker fears persecution or torture in twenty-two separate countries? How, exactly, is that a reasonable fear? What reason would Uganda have to persecute Mr Abrego Garcia?

At some point, it has to be asked: have Mr Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, who are legally officers of the court, overstepped in making unsubstantiated and unreasonable claims to seek asylum? What could motivate twenty-two countries to persecute that man? And if twenty-two other countries do have reasons to persecute him, is that not evidence in itself that he’s a bad, bad guy?

One thing is certain: Mr Abrego Garcia needs to never set foot in the United States as a free man. He needs to be in prison, or at the very least, out of here!

Our defenders of democracy really don’t like it when the people take democratic choices of which they disapprove

Sometimes an author spends a lot of time, finely crafting his OpEd for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and winds up telling us exactly what he didn’t really mean to convey.

On immigration, Trump doesn’t have a copyright on cruelty

On both sides of the Atlantic, migrants are regarded as a problem at best, a danger to national security at worst, writes German journalist Adrian Schulz.

by Adrian Schulz | Tuesday, September 2, 2025 | 6:00 AM EDT

Detention camps, violent rhetoric, physical harm, deportations to third-party countries under brutal regimes — Donald Trump did not invent the playbook on callousness toward immigrants.

The European Union, winner of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, got there ahead of him.

As I read the news about the U.S. government’s continuing assault on people whose sole fault is not having the right documents to legally live in a country that is otherwise happy to exploit their labor, I also follow the German debate around the 10th anniversary of the so-called refugee crisis. In 2015, more than a million people came to Germany seeking refuge, many of them fleeing from war-torn Syria.

“(N)ot having the right documents,” huh? Yet another euphemism for being in the country illegally!

I cannot speak to European law, but “not having the right documents” is not their “sole fault” in the United States, because to work in the United States you must be a citizen or be here legally, with the appropriate documents. This means that the illegals who work have either presented forged documents, or be working for a company which has knowingly hired them without documentation, or they are, like those apprehended at Home Depots while looking for day labor, working for cash, almost always unreported, and are thus evading our income and Social Security taxes.

Those things are all felonies!

What I see is not so different. On both sides of the Atlantic, migrants are regarded as a problem at best, a danger to national security at worst. Trump has no copyright on cruelty. Europeans just put on a friendlier face.

Is there ever a ‘friendly face’ on an arresting officer? Regardless of the crime, no one likes being arrested, but that’s what doing something really radical like enforcing the law requires. Our good friends on the left were saying all along that ‘no one is above the law,’ as they prosecuted and persecuted then former President Donald Trump, trying everything they could to throw him in jail and prohibit him from running for President again. They had no problem with the prosecution and persecution of the January 6 Capitol kerfufflers and screamed blood murder when the re-inaugurated President Trump pardoned them, even though most had already served their sentences. Philadelphia District Attorney, who routinely hands out lenient plea bargains to gang bangers, even said he’d try to prosecute the pardoned kerfufflers on state charges.

But somehow, some way, no one being above the law doesn’t seem to matter to them when it comes to people living in our country illegally. Given that they are committing felonies every day they go to work, I’d say that they are far worse criminals than the kerfufflers ever were.

The decision of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel not to close the borders in 2015 is seen today by many as a cardinal sin that fundamentally changed the German political landscape, leading to the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, known as the AfD. It came in second place in the recent federal elections.

AfD was founded in 2013, just before the immigration crisis in Germany, but started growing as Germans became more and more disillusioned by the unrestrained, mostly Muslim, immigration. Germany is a democratic republic, and when author Adrian Schulz tells us that the party came in second in recent elections, he is telling us that the German people are disillusioned with the huge number of immigrants in the country.

(Frau Merkel) chose the former. Her phrase, “Wir schaffen das,” or “We can make it,” endeared her to liberals and outraged conservatives, but for a short moment, most Germans celebrated a Willkommenskultur, a culture of welcoming. People brought truckloads of stuffed animals to train stations where the refugee families arrived.

The optimism soon vanished, though. As in other European countries, the debate started to focus on radically limiting the number of asylum-seekers. The rhetoric became hostile.

“As in other European countries . . . .” Herr Schulz has admitted to us that the movement to reject unregulated Muslim immigration is growing throughout the European democracies. The editors of the Inquirer certainly loved an article decrying President Trump’s immigration policies as “callousness” and “cruelty,” but in doing so, the newspaper concomitantly told readers that we were not alone among democracies in rejecting what is, in the end, an attack on our culture, on Western civilization.

This is what the editors of the Inky, and Herr Schulz just don’t quite get. In the democracies that they claim to cherish, sometimes the people may take democratic choices they just don’t like.

The Philadelphia Inquirer harbors illegal immigrants There is plenty of dignity in obeying the law; there is none in breaking it.

As we have previously noted, The Philadelphia Inquirer is very much on the side of the illegal immigrants. The good journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading there, from the far-loeft Will Bunch to even the more moderate Daniel Pearson, the newspaper’s chief editorial writer, all want the illegals — at The First Street Journal we do not use the euphemism ‘undocumented’ — to be allowed to stay here.

But now they might have just fouled up:

‘The last thing that is protecting my dignity.’ A South Philly mother talks about life under sanctuary.

Continue reading

References

References
1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Y’all in a heap o’ trouble, boys!

As I have previously mentioned, I check Bluesky so that you don’t have to, and it was on Bluesky that I found this skeet from Ian Hansen.

Mr Hansen, who posts links to a lot of conservative sites, but has only 391 followers, tries valiantly to educate in ineducable over there, but if it weren’t for his skeet, I would never have heard of this story:

7-Year-Old Girl Repeatedly Raped, Molested by Guatemalan Father, Friend – Police

Two men from Guatemala are facing charges for prolonged sexual abuse of a 7-year-old girl in Florida, authorities say.

Continue reading

Another Philly illegal immigration sob story (Part 2)

This is my morning coffee as I write this!

There is an amusing quality to the fact that Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong has been writing a series she called “Blaxit,” about black Americans who have chosen to emigrate to various locations in Africa, is now lamenting that an illegal immigrant and previously convicted criminal has been deported to his native country.

Germantown mom wants out of Philly after ICE deported her husband to Belize

Steeliness has replaced grief in Charlene Maddox Chimilio. The 43-year-old Philly native has come to terms with the fact that the best place for her family might be outside the city she loves so much.

Continue reading