Free Republic

A surge of Mexican nationals seeking asylum has led Canada to bring back visa requirements that were lifted nearly eight years ago. Immigration Minister Marc Miller said on Thursday that more than half of the asylum applications to the country are either abandoned or rejected. Ottawa removed the requirements in 2016 to improve relations with Mexico. Since then, an influx of immigrants has put strain on the government of Quebec and pushed it to a "breaking point".Asylum claims from Mexican nationals to Canada rose from 260 to 23,995 between 2016 and 2023, an increase of more than 9,000%, according to...

India has stopped issuing visas to Canadian citizens amid an escalating row over the killing of a Sikh separatist on Canadian soil. India said the temporary move was due to "security threats" disrupting work at its missions in Canada. Tensions flared this week after Prime Minister said India may have been behind the 18 June killing. But Mr Trudeau said on Thursday he was not looking to provoke India with the allegation. India has angrily rejected the allegation, calling it "absurd". Speaking to reporters in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Mr Trudeau said: "There is...

Next year, Americans will be required to obtain travel authorization to enter 30 countries, ending visa-free travel in Europe for U.S. citizens. The European Union announced this week a new security program that would mandate U.S. passport holders to obtain visas before traveling to any of the visa-required countries, including Spain, France and Greece. Here is everything Americans need to know. Application process Before you secure your flights to your European destination, visit the European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS). The earlier you apply and are approved for the visa, the sooner it will arrive, providing peace of mind....

More than two decades after Islamic terrorists exploited the U.S. government’s inefficient system for tracking foreigners who overstay visas, the problem is only getting worse with a startling 853,955 visa overstays in fiscal year 2022. A new report issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tries to downplay the severity of the situation by shining a light on the positive, that the overstay rate is a mere 3.67% compared to 96.33% of over 23 million nonimmigrants that departed the country on time in accordance with the terms of their admission. The reality is that the latest available overstay figure...

Curtis Sliwa voices concern about the memory of the September 11 fleeing Americans: "You better wake up because in some cave in south Yemen, in Afghanistan, there's a group of men honoring their jihadists .. they intend on dong it again. America beware. We put this out of sight, out of mind but they never forget and they always prepare and they are ready to come at us again."

Mark Keam, a long-serving Democratic member of the House of Delegates from northern Virginia, has resigned his seat, a move that will set up a special election to fill the vacancy in the blue-leaning district. An attorney who was first elected to his Fairfax County-based seat in 2009, Keam said in an interview Tuesday that he had stepped down to take a job in the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Keam said he will serve as a deputy assistant secretary running the National Travel and Tourism Office, which is focused on bringing foreign travelers to the...

The GOP’s newest legislator, Rep. Mayra Flores (R-TX), is defending her Thursday vote to help get green cards to the adult children of the Fortune 500’s foreign contract workers and managers, who take jobs and career opportunities from Americans. “Amnesty was not passed last week!” Flores said in a July 17 tweet. “An amendment in the NDAA bill gave legally documented children of LEGAL VISA workers the ability to remain in the United States with their parents. Stop the misinformation and stay focused on taking back the house this November!!”

President Joe Biden and members of Congress reauthorized a little-known program that peddles United States visas, and eventually naturalized American citizenship, to China’s wealthy real estate investors. Lawmakers in the House and Senate passed a government funding bill late last week, later signed by Biden, that renews the EB-5 visa program where wealthy foreign nationals can claim to invest at least $800,000 in U.S. development projects and receive green cards for themselves and their family members with eventual pathways to citizenship.

*SIV - Special Immigrant Visa Amid ongoing evacuation efforts in Afghanistan, Tim Kennedy – a Green Beret, Special Forces sniper, and Army Ranger – spoke with Fox News about his experience in Kabul after rescuing more than 8,900 individuals and discussed the "horrors of people getting to the airport." "We had a very clear mission in who we were trying to identify and get out and American citizens were number one," said Kennedy, who spent three days in the country assisting with evacuation missions and working to "identify high value targets of the Taliban that needed to be rescued." SNIP...

Afghanis face 14-step U.S. visa process as Taliban streams into Kabul. And illegals at the border? Come on in The bigger irony, though, is that as these bona fide refugees are gummed up in visa paperwork, the southern border is seeing a surge of people with no serious asylum cases into the country, no questions asked. . Some 50,000 of them have been let in without a court date, a paperwork nicety most ignore anyway. Others have been admitted with full-blown COVID, despite Title 42, which would normally force them back. . None of them have ever done a thing...

Jihadist hate for Jews allegedly inspired 24-year-old Egyptian Khaled Awad on July 1 to viciously stab Boston area Rabbi Shlomo Noginski outside a Jewish day school. Suffolk County authorities were planning to charge the Egyptian chemical engineering student with domestic terrorism-related hate crimes, and the father-of-12 rabbi is recovering from his eight stab wounds. But this latest attack should not yet fade from public view without note that it squarely underscores a Biden administration move less than a week later that almost surely will condemn more Americans to Rabbi Noginski’s fate. Fox News disclosed that the Egyptian was in the...

Biden funds program to block foreign religious leaders who oppose LGBTHuman rights advocates who speak out for the natural family could be blocked in the same way certain Russian oligarchs are blocked from entering the United States.The document directs “all U.S. government departments and agencies engaged abroad to ensure that U.S. diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons around the world.” Of most concern to human rights advocates around the world is the provision of $10 million in the upcoming fiscal year to fund the “Global Equality Fund”...

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Purpose. One of the fundamental purposes of our Government is to ensure the safety of our citizens. Consistent with the purpose of creating peaceful and prosperous communities, Federal law ensures immigration benefits may be granted only to those individuals who will follow the laws that govern all United States citizens. Accordingly, section 212(a)(3) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3), renders inadmissible aliens who have engaged or who are...

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has slammed Joe Biden's pick to run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), arguing that he was caught "selling citizenship" to Chinese elites.Sen. Cotton ripped into Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, for naming Alejandro Mayorkas as his choice to head DHS.

A federal appeals court in California on Thursday ruled to lift a ban on President Donald Trump’s proclamation that blocks immigrants from entering the United States if they lack health insurance or the means to pay for hospital bills. In a Dec. 31 opinion (pdf), the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said that Trump acted within his authority when, in October 2019, he signed the Proclamation on the Suspension of Entry of Immigrants Who Will Financially Burden the United States Healthcare System. The ruling reverses a federal court decision to block the implementation of the president’s...

RJ Hauman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which had requested Trump extend the halt on foreign visa workers to the U.S., said the order continues to be critical in a labor market where 17.8 million Americans are jobless today. “While the unemployment rate has fallen, too many Americans are still looking for work and the economic outlook remains bleak,” Hauman said. “If this proclamation was allowed to lapse, then companies could easily return to exploiting cheap foreign labor,” Hauman continued. “If President-elect Biden quickly rescinds, the country should take note — he doesn’t stand with American workers.”...

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he has imposed visa restrictions on Chinese officials and others who use "coercive tactics" on people seen as working against Chinese Communist Party interests. Pompeo said in a statement on Friday that the party's United Front Work Department "frequently intimidates members of academia, businesses, civil society groups, and Chinese diaspora communities, including members of ethnic and religious minority communities" who speak out against human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Tibet, and elsewhere in China. Pompeo said tactics by the United Front include the release of personal details online of their...

The Trump administration is set to publish additional immigration reforms on Tuesday aimed at making it more difficult for skilled foreign workers to acquire visas. The changes are the latest effort by the Trump administration in recent months to crack down on the use of visas as part of its broader attempt to limit the flow of foreign workers. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is expected to publish regulations targeting H-1B visas that are granted to skilled workers and are common in the tech industry. Recipients can typically stay in the United States for multiple years. The rules, which...

When President Trump announced that he was going to issue an Executive Order in April to reduce the influx of new immigrants and guestworkers during the COVID-19 crisis, he asserted that his goal was to protect the interests of American workers at a time of soaring unemployment, and to ensure that as the economy reopens, laid-off American workers would be first in line to reclaim lost jobs. It didn’t quite work out that way. Bowing to intense pressure from business interests, the Executive Order signed by the president left most immigration and guestworker programs intact, and resulted in only minimal...

WASHINGTON—President Trump is expected to sign an order later Monday temporarily barring new immigrants on a slate of employment-based visas, including the H-1B for high-skilled workers, from coming to the U.S. amid the coronavirus pandemic. Administration officials say the move will safeguard jobs for unemployed Americans.