General Phil Breedlove, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe and head of the U.S. European Command, said Russia and Syria are indiscriminately bombing Syrian civilians to drive the refugee crisis and “weaponize migration.”He said that weapons such as barrel bombs, widely used by the Assad regime against Sunni civilian population, have no military value, and are used solely to terrorize those living in rebel-held territories. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the destruction formed part of a deliberate strategy by Russia and the Assad regime to “get them on the road” and “make them a problem for someone else.”

Since its inception in 1990, the H-1B guest worker program that allows employers to bring in high-skilled foreign workers on six-year visas has been steeped in controversy. Critics accuse it of depressing wages and outsourcing American jobs, while advocates call it an essential source of the best and brightest talent. The H-1B program is an important program that serves as a bridge to permanent immigration for talented foreign workers. It should be used to recruit truly specialized workers from abroad when the labor conditions are tight and a qualified American can’t be found. But no American worker should ever be displaced by an H-1B worker – that was never the program’s intent – and this practice should be ended.

Swiss voters, in a Saturday referendum, rejected a proposal by a nationalist party automatically to deport foreigners who commit even low-level offenses such as traffic violations. Public opinion indicated a tight vote, but the measure was easily defeated by a margin of 58.9 percent to 41.1 percent. EU leaders welcomed the referendum result.

Donald Trump’s pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border – and make Mexico pay for it – has elicited pointed criticism from two former Mexican presidents, Felipe Calderon and Vicente Fox. Even if the border wall is never built, leading politicians and academics in Mexico worry that Trump’s comments will lead to harsher U.S. border policy and disrupt the process of growing economic and political ties between the two countries, a process which began two decades ago with the NAFTA agreement.

Migration is overall not a source of terrorism, according to new research. In fact the study indicates that more migration could create a decrease in the number of terrorist attacks. However, the research suggests some terror attacks can be linked to migration from terror-prone states.

NATO has deployed its fleet to the Aegean Sea in an effort to end the flow of refugees crossing from Turkey in order to enter the EU zone. The deployment, announced yesterday, will involve warships, rather than coast guard boars, meet refugee boats outside Greece’s territorial waters.

Since DHS secretary Janet Napolitano in 2011 cancelled the failed SBInet program, CBP’s Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition (OTIA) has awarded defense contractors approximately $186,000,000 to replace it. Mark Borkowski’s Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition (OTIA) has created problems which directly impacting safety and productivity of Border Patrol agents: The needlessly delayed Integrated Fixed Towers (IFT) project has once again placed Border Patrol agents in harm’s way because the men and women who risk their lives patrolling the line still do not possess sophisticated surveillance technology to fight the drug cartels, human traffickers, and potential terrorists crossing our international borders.

DHS has told five countries – France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Greece – that they have until Monday, 1 February, to fix a security flaw – DHS described it as a “crucial loopholes”— in their passport stems. If they fail to do so, they will be removed from the Visa Waiver program. The move will affect millions of European citizens.

In a just-released report, the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) finds that the U.S. undocumented population has fallen below eleven million for the first time since 2004. The report also offers evidence that the Mexican-born undocumented population continues to decline, falling by more than 600,000 since 2010. The study further describes trends in the undocumented population over the past few years for selected countries of origin and states of residence.