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Slaughterhouse Immigration Raid Reveals Serious Fraud Issues
Guest Column | By Michael Cutler | May 23, 2008
There is further news on the raid at a meatpacking plant in Iowa last week and the fraudulent means by which Agriprocessors obtained their employees:
Agriprocessors, you see, has two lucrative and pernicious schemes going. One scheme involves driving wages down to bare subsistence by hiring desperately poor illegal immigrants to work in its slaughterhouse - the criminal enterprise that made the news last week. The other involves fraudulently claiming that the United States has run out of native-born meat-cutters and then, with the help of American Immigration Lawyers Association member Christopher Teras, securing work visas for foreigners worth $30,000 each on the street in Guangzhou.
You can read more ofthe shocking details here.
Immigration fraud is often overlooked by politicians. I cannot think of a single candidate for the presidency who is willing to discuss immigration fraud. Indeed, there are precious few members of the United States Senate or the House of Representatives who are willing to discuss immigration fraud.
Fraud is not a difficult topic to understand. Think of fraud as being a lie put on paper to provide the individual who commits this crime with a benefit that he or she would not be entitled to if all of the relevant facts wereknown.
Many people feed at the immigration fraud trough. Among those who are benefiting the most are immigration lawyers who only make a profit when they can secure employment for aliens, thereby costing United States citizens their jobs. The guild that represents computer programmers posted a covert video made of a duplicitous lawyer who was conducting a seminar for other immigration attorneys, teaching them how to make certain that no American who applied for a posted job, as the Labor Department requires, would be qualified for the job in question. You can watch this outrageous video here.
Jack Abramoff, the infamous lobbyist who is now cooling his heels in the federal prison system got his start in the 1990s by lobbying for more H1B visas for computer programmers for a law firm that Bill Gates' dad was a partner in. There are, in fact, those in the computer industry who refer to this type of visa as the "Abramoff Visa."
But more than American jobs are at stake (although this alone should infuriate every American).
The terrorists who attacked our nation both on February 23, 1993 and again on September 11, 2001 knew that an important component of their strategy to enter and embed themselves in our country would be tocommit visa and immigration benefit fraud. In an additional terrorist attack conducted against the CIA by a citizen of Pakistan, Amir Kansi committed immigration fraud to obtain political asylum through deception. He repaid our nation's generosity by opening fire with an AK-47 outside the headquarters of the CIA on January 25,1993. He killed two employees of the CIA and wounded threeothers.
On September 1, 2006 I was called upon to testify before the House Judiciary Committee hearing that was conducted in Dubuque, Iowa. I cited thefollowing example of immigration:
...Mahmud Abouhalima, a citizen of Egypt...entered the United States on a tourist visa, overstayed his authorized period of admission and then applied for amnesty under the agricultural worker provisions of IRCA. He succeeded in obtaining resident alien status through this process. During a five year period he drove a cab and had his license suspended numerous times for violations, and ultimately demonstrated his appreciation for our nation's generosity by participating in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 that left six people dead, hundreds of people injured, and an estimated one half billion dollars damage...
My concerns about the lack of integrity within the immigration system prompted me to write a commentary for the Washington Times in June of 2007 entitled, "Immigration bill a ‘No go,'" where I stated that the "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill" that the Senate was about to vote on should have more accurately been named the "Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act of 2007." The bill would have required USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) to process the applications of some 100,000 illegal and undocumented aliens each and every day for amnesty, even though these illegal aliens had no official documentation to attest to their identities ortheir nationalities. There would be no reliable or authentic means of determining when, where or how they entered the United States. Nor could we determine if they had criminal histories or affiliations with criminal or terrorist organizations. They would have been provided with identity documents, (potentially in false names and nationalities) that would enable them to immediately obtain Social Security cards, driver's licenses and other such documents in false names and enable them to embed themselves in communities around our nation. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, in fact, saw fit to quote from portions of my commentary on three separate occasions during the floor debate conducted on the floor of the United States Senate in the days leading up to the vote last summer.
Incredibly, even though that bill and other like it were defeated by members of the Senate, the United States Senate is, even now, attempting to ram a new amnesty program for an estimated 3 million illegal alien agricultural workers and their families through the Senate by attaching this insane measure to the appropriations bill for our military operations in Iraq.
President Clinton is famously remembered for questioning the meaning of the word "is." I believe that the Senators who are seeking to ram this wrong-headed bill down the throats of their colleagues in the Senate, and consequently of the American people are having a problem understanding the definition of the word "NO!"
As you read the outrageous report (linked at the beginning of this article) on the fraud committed by those connected to the raid of the slaughterhouse in Iowa, I want you to understand that this corrupt and dysfunctional system is supposed to protect our jobs and our nation's security.
If you find this story makes it difficult for you to sleep tonight, you are not alone. This madness often keeps me awake at night as well.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michael Cutler is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a well-respected authority on immigration and border security issues.
Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.
12 Comments | Post a Comment
I define comfort as self-acceptance. When we finally learn that self-care begins and ends with ourselves, we no longer demand sustenance and happiness from others.
<<<<<<Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic>>>>>>>
Or interfere with the football game, American Idol.
They will accept, even defend, anything as long as someone couches it in terms of a political party.
This situation should surprise no one, except those who have been swallowing the lies put out by both parties about immigration - especially illegal immigration.
When they mention agricultural workers, they are not talking just about field hands. Many agricultural workers are well education people doing wellpaying white collar work. They brought with them well educated spouses that were able to get very good jobs by virtue of being bilingual. We don’t demand people speak English, instead we pass over citizens to hire other country’s citizens who speak another language. ?????
Also, how many of the children of these ‘agricultural’ workers are getting jobs and college slots based on ‘minority’ status?
What the real reason for increased, unnecessary, unwise, and sometimes illegal immigration is certainly greed. I’m thinking it is something much more sinister - the dilution of the idea of America and even the understanding of anything about this country.
When they get to vote, the ideals, the needs, what is best for, this country will not be the primary thought.
Such laws do rightly resemble the spider’s cob-webs: because they take hold of little flies and gnats which fall into them, but the rich and mighty will break and run through them at will.
A man always has two reasons for doing anything - a good reason and the real reason.
I’ve known countless people who were reservoirs of learning yet never had a thought.
Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and the angels know of us.
May 27 at 10:41 am | #1 | Link
Immigration fraud isn’t overlooked by politicians, it is perpetrated and protected by politicians.
No one is mentioning illegal immigration in the race now, the media has silenced everyone who dared mention it. That was the plan.
There has been a collusion between the media and our government to pretend illegal immigration didn’t exist for decades. When the media did print a story, it was always some touchy-feely story about some illegal child who is on the honor roll, or Jose, who works 26 hours a day to feed his family, etc., etc.
Never do we hear of the tremendous cost to other working families in terms of increased healthcare costs, property taxes, auto insurance, and those are just the surface things. Think of the increased strain on our infrastructure, our air and water quality, our education system.
You cannot add 20-30 million people into a country illegally in 20-25 years, people who by and large do not pay payroll tax, are allowed to ignore so many of our laws, and not cause chaos.