David North

The New Yorker has finally noticed the EB-5 program and its most prominent scandal, that of the Jay Peak ski resort in northern Vermont. But the article’s focus is on Bill Stenger, the jailed if lesser villain in the piece (because he was willing to talk to the writer), rather than on the obvious dangers of the underlying program.

Some well-connected people in some states are starting to see the usefulness of what Oklahoma, alone, has adopted: a state fee on international transfers of money by individuals, or remittances. More on the state-by-state activities in a subsequent posting.

The special election on New York’s Long Island next Tuesday (February 13) caused by the expulsion of now ex-Rep. George Santos (R), a child of immigrants, is between a double immigrant (R) and the son of an immigrant (D).

Biden’s State of the Union remarks, consisting of a string of wild assertions, focused on one overriding priority: the escalation of war with Russia.

We get conflicting messages from the courts on this issue. On March 22, a federal district court judge in the District of Columbia said such voting, as adopted by the D.C. City Council, was appropriate, while last month a New York State Appeals Court ruled in the opposite direction. Earlier, the Vermont Supreme Court, in January, ruled that state’s two largest cities could allow aliens to vote, but only in local elections.

The annual give-away of about 100,000 new H-1B lottery slots has just ended, with the question being: How many have applied this time around under the new rules?

One of the legal ways that non-migrants can make money from the migration business is to lend money (for bonds) to illegal aliens in trouble with the law. The bonds are designed to make sure that an alien involved shows up at scheduled court hearings and meets other requirements.

The commentary below appeared in the October 9, 1995 issue of the International Workers Bulletin, the US predecessor of the World Socialist Web Site. It was written in response to the not-guilty verdict returned by the jury in the O. J. Simpson double-murder trial, and the subsequent claims that this result was in some sense a blow dealt to a racist justice system. Similar comments have now been made in the wake of Simpson’s death, at the age of 76. He outlived his two victims, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, by nearly 30 years.

In March 2022, Congress revised the then-suspended EB-5 immigrant investor program in several ways; one was to create a series of carrots that would (hopefully) cause alien investors to put their money into particularly useful segments of the American economy.

Twenty-five years ago, on April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, near Denver, killed 12 fellow students and one teacher, and wounded 24 others (21 by gunfire), before committing suicide. The pair, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, entered the school building armed with rifles, shotguns and handguns. They had also built 99 improvised explosive devices and carried four knives. Their original plan, never realized, involved the deaths of hundreds or more people.