Free Republic

The White House on Monday warned State Department officials that they should leave their jobs if they did not agree with President Trump’s agenda, an extraordinary effort to stamp out a wave of internal dissent against Mr. Trump’s temporary ban on entry visas for people from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Career officials at the State Department are circulating a so-called dissent cable, which says that Mr. Trump’s executive order closing the nation’s doors to more than 200 million people to weed out a handful of would-be terrorists would not make the nation safer and might instead deepen the threat. “These...

Why would the text of President Trump’s Executive Order suspending travel visas be readily available on CNN (HERE), New York Times (HERE), Wall Street Journal (HERE), but not on White House page (HERE)? I don’t think it’s accidental. The limiting Visa program was President Obama’s action, not President Trump. If you review the actual text of the executive order (copied below in full) what you will immediately notice is the order doesn’t specify ANY countries to be included in the Visa suspension (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen). President Trump is not suspending visas from countries his team...

<p>The seven nations targeted for new visitation restrictions by President Trump on Friday all have something in common: They are places he does not appear to have any business interests.</p> <p>The executive order he signed Friday bars all entry for the next 90 days by travelers from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Libya. Excluded from the lists are several majority-Muslim nations where the Trump Organization is active and which in some cases have also faced troublesome issues with terrorism.</p>

America is a nation of immigrants and should be proud of it, Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said as he criticised US President Donald Trump's decision to severely limit immigrants and refugees from certain Muslim-majority countries. "Like many of you, I'm concerned about the impact of the recent executive orders signed by President Trump," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page. "We need to keep this country safe, but we should do that by focusing on people who actually pose a threat ... We should also keep our doors open to refugees and those who need help. That's who we...

The Treadwell Plan: Simple Fixes for Immigration Security (Part 1) Dear readers, The following suggestions were composed after discussions with many highly experienced individuals with years immigration experience (both in and out of government). As I intend to reach the broadest possible audience I have tried to communicate these succinctly and without legal or technical jargon. Your responses are greatly appreciated. 1. Require biometric registration of all alien departures Remarkably, and likely unknown to many citizens, foreigners entering the U.S. are only fingerprinted upon entry. Exit records are unreliable and based on matching of biographical data to airline passenger records....

An estimated three quarters of the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States are from Latin America. The rest come from all other corners of the world, including Europe. There are an estimated 50,000 Irish citizens living and working illegally in the United States -- a tiny sliver of the undocumented population, but a considerable number for a home country of just 4.5 million people. And the victory of President-elect Donald Trump in the Nov. 8 election has raised concerns in Dublin over their future status. Trump signaled his intent to deport millions of illegal immigrants once...

GOP leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, have quietly ended an unpopular 2015 program to annually outsource another 198,000 blue-collar jobs to lower-paid foreign workers.

At least five of the Sept. 11 hijackers exploited a glaring hole in visa security to stay in the U.S. beyond their time — allowing them to board the planes and conduct their murderous attack. Fifteen years later, and despite a clear consensus on the need for improvement, that gaping hole remains. “In too many cases that’s still happening — they come in legally, but we don’t know if they’ve left, and if they haven’t left, we don’t know where they are,” said Tom Kean, former governor of New Jersey and chairman of the 9/11 Commission that looked into the...

VISA and blockchain-technology partner BTL will invite a select group of European banks to participate in a blockchain project that will see inter-bank payments made via transfers over the ledger. Hot on the heels of the likes of R3, Visa will experiment its own blockchain-based payments platform with a select group of banks who will send money over a blockchain. The proof-of-concept project will use Interbit, a cross-border blockchain remittance and settlement platform developed by industry startup BTL. Launched earlier this year, the Interbit platform is seen by Visa as the solution to “reduce cost, settlement time, credit risk, and...

Cuba is refusing to approve visa applications for members of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, according to the committee's chairman. Members were hoping to leave on Friday afternoon to examine lagging security in the country's airports, which are set to begin making flights to the U.S. this year. The lawmakers were forced to cancel when their applications were denied that morning. "We wanted to look at their airport security ... because TSA has been backchanneling to us that it's not adequate," said Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. "So I attempted to go down there to just look at them,...

A 19-year-old arrested at a Donald Trump rally said he wanted to kill the presidential candidate. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police arrested Michael Sandford on Saturday at Trump's rally at the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino. Police say Sandford started chatting with one of their officers at the event and claimed he wanted to get Trump's autograph. But instead, Sandford tried to take the officer's gun, and officers quickly took him into custody.

More than a dozen countries participating in a program that allows visitors into the U.S. without a visa are not sharing terrorists’ identities and other vital information as required by law, according to a watchdog report raising concerns on Capitol Hill about yet another major security gap.

I recieved a complete your application form in the mail today for a Barclaycard Visa credit card. Never heard of them and never applied. They want a original utility bill with address to verify my address. The letter has no phone number,no Internet site,and no street address.Just a P.O. box in Delaware. Anybody ever hear of this company or had dealings with them?

Popular Kenyan deejay, Creme De La Creme, has found himself in the thick of things in the USA. The award-winning spin doctor was a really excited chap as he geared up to his performance in Dallas, Texas, next month. He's been constantly sharing his American tour excitement with his fans on his various social media forums. Sadly, sometimes even the best laid out plans go awry, and that's the current case with DJ Creme. After all the planning he put into ensuring he would be on time for the gig, he ended up getting snagged by immigration authorities in America...

Conservative commentators are up in arms over the State Department’s decision to deny a visa to a Catholic nun who was part of an Iraqi delegation supposed to testify before Congress about Islamic State (ISIS) atrocities. The US consulate in Erbil rejected the visitor visa application of Sister Diana Momeka earlier this week, saying she was “not able to demonstrate that [her] intended activities in the United States would be consistent with the classification of the visa.” However, visas were given to all the other members of the delegation scheduled to speak in Washington about the Islamic State’s persecution of...

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced on April 7 that the H-1B cap for fiscal year 2017 was reached—meaning that in five business days, U.S. employers filed more petitions for an H-1B visa to hire a skilled foreign worker than the entire year’s allocation of visas available under current law. This means that USCIS will conduct a lottery to determine which employers will get the visas they need. Every year, U.S. employers seeking highly-skilled foreign professionals submit their applications for the pool of H-1B visas beginning on April 1 each year. U.S. businesses use the H-1B program to employ...

H-1B visas are designed to bring foreign professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found. But in recent years, global outsourcing companies have dominated the program, winning tens of thousands of visas and squeezing out many American companies, including smaller start-ups. Congress set a limit of 85,000 visas annually, and more than 10,000 companies applied in 2014. But just 20 companies received more than 32,000 visas, according to Ronil Hira, a professor at Howard University who studies visa programs and analyzed federal H-1B data. The top 20 included several large outsourcing firms...

While the US State Department’s refusal to recognize Jerusalem as being part of the State of Israel is well-known and was even the subject of a US Supreme Court case, it seems that the official US visa information and appointment services website has erased Israel completely. […] Curiously, while the website lists dozens of nations around the world, including rogue states like Iran, with their flags, there is no mention of Israel or the Israeli flag. Instead, two separate listings are made under the Middle East section: one for Jerusalem and one for Tel Aviv. Israel is, in fact, the...

Republican presidential candidates sought to outdo each other in Thursday’s debate when it came to reforming the H-1B visa, a controversial program through which Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Apple and Hewlett-Packard import skilled help from India and other countries with vast pools of low-cost tech talent on tap. GOP frontrunner Donald Trump said the H-1B hurts American-born workers and said that he would end it outright. Marco Rubio said the program needs to be better policed, while Ted Cruz simply said the U.S. needs to update its immigration laws for the 21st century. “I know the H-1B very well...

During an interview on the FOX Business Network's Mornings with Maria, Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay lashed out against the media for protecting Donald Trump. "The media won't report what's really happening on the ground... They will not investigate Donald Trump. When have you seen a story written about Donald Trump's sleazy business practices? There's plenty of stories out there about that. The media is protecting Donald Trump either because they want him to be the nominee against Hillary Clinton or they're big buddies of his. Most of the media comes from New York and they are buddies," he...