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Immigrant Application System Not Working After $190 Million Expenditure
Guest Column | By Mike Cutler | January 8, 2007
United States citizenship does not only represent the highest honor our nation can bestow upon an alien, it also represents the veritable “keys to the kingdom”.
“The Homeland Security Department Inspector General report, released late last month, stated that CIS’ current business transformation effort duplicates parts of previous attempts by the agency’s chief information office to update IT systems. The agency also has repeatedly developed plans to test elements of the transformation program, but has failed to fully implement any of them, the auditors stated.”
So reports Government Executive Magazine. This once again makes it clear that the infrastructure USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) relies upon to adjudicate applications for a wide variety of immigration benefits is not working effectively. Even with the astounding expenditure of $190 million to modernize its efforts to computerize fifty-five million immigration files, it has not been done properly.
It is important to understand that these files are absolutely essential to the processing of applications for immigration benefits. They are also critical to the effective enforcement of the immigration laws by the special agents of ICE, the inspectors of CBP, the agents of the Border Patrol, the deportation officers of DNR and the district counsels. These counsels act as the administrative equivalent of prosecutors who seek the removal of deportable aliens when such aliens are found to be present in the United States in violation of a wide array of statutes under the Immigration and Nationality Act. This is the body of law that governs the admission of aliens into the United States and their right to remain in the United States and seek various benefits.
This past year, according to Government Executive Magazine, USCIS managed to reduce its backlog of applications for immigration benefits by some 70% percent. Before you break out the champagne to toast the success of USCIS, a critical agency that is a component of the DHS, I would also remind you that according to a report issued by the GAO this past March 10, fraud in the benefits program, for which USCIS bears total responsibility, is a huge problem with serious national security implications. You can read the press release that was issued by the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., on March 10, 2006 at:
http://judiciary.house.gov/media/pdfs/gaoimmbenefitsrelease31006.pdf
His press release also contains a link to the GAO report that provides ample proof of the abysmal situation at USCIS.
Additionally, as I’ve reported before, this past year some 30,000 applications for United States citizenship were processed in 2005 without the relating immigration files being reviewed, because they had been lost! United States citizenship does not only represent the highest honor our nation can bestow upon an alien, it also represents the veritable “keys to the kingdom”. With the exception of becoming the President of the United States, a naturalized citizen may hold any other elected office in the United States or may hold any cabinet position (Henry Kissinger, for example, the former Secretary of State, was a naturalized United States citizen). Yet this process, with its obvious national security implications, was so flawed that even after the disastrous “Citizenship USA” of the previous administration under which hundreds of thousands of aliens were naturalized and because of the pressure applied to the former INS to move the applications, it was ultimately determined that thousands of criminal aliens who should have been deported, were instead naturalized!
Our government and especially our “leaders” refuse to learn the lessons of history and we continue to repeat mistakes again and again. The 911 Commission found that the terrorists who wrought such devastation on our nation and on the many victims of their attacks exploited vulnerabilities in the immigration system to enter the United States and then to embed themselves in our nation as they prepared to attack us. Yet USCIS shamelessly boasts about the reduction of the huge backlog of applications while many reports of investigations conducted by various oversight agencies continually report on the inept and incompetent way in which USCIS reduces such backlogs in the conduction its work.
The easiest way to move the files at the former INS, and I am certain at USCIS, is to approve applications for benefits. When an application for a benefit is denied, the paperwork is generally more involved because the alien has the right to appeal an adverse decision. When an application for a benefit is approved, the alien walks away with the benefit he/she was seeking and that is the end of the process. When the goal is to reduce the backlog, the easiest way to make that happen is to rubber-stamp the applications. Could you imagine a bank that would issue thousands of mortgages without reviewing the applications for the mortgages? Could you imagine the president of a bank or a loan company instructing his employees to approve as many applications as possible with little regard to adverse information that might be contained in the applications? Yet at USCIS, the focus is on clearing the backlogs even though the GAO has warned about high fraud rates.
As more aliens are able to acquire benefits through the filing of fraud-laden applications, the grapevine on the street encourages still more aliens to become emboldened to file similar applications, further increasing the backlog and pressure on the system to approve more applications, with little effort being made to screen the applications for fraud. The vicious circle continues at an ever-increasing pace, further endangering our national security at the same time. With all of these problems plaguing USCIS, the administration and members of both Houses of Congress are calling for a guest worker amnesty program to be administered by the beleaguered USCIS!
Why bother implementing a guest worker amnesty program? Why don’t we just end the charade and declare anyone born on the planet be a United States citizen? Then the special agents of ICE and the members of the Border Patrol could become like the agents portrayed by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in the Science Fiction movie, “Men in Black.” Those government employees could then focus purely on searching for extraterrestrial aliens who arrive in flying saucers. This would seem to be the direction that the President and so-called leaders in the Senate such as Kennedy, McCain and Reid and Specter want to force our nation to take.
Our nation is at war. Nearly each day the news reports on the death of more of our valiant soldiers killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many more return home grievously wounded. When we board airliners in the United States, we are subjected a so thorough an inspection that we need to arrive 2 hours before flight time to make certain that we will make the flight. Many of our traditions and expectations of privacy have evaporated, all in the name of our supposed “War on Terror.” Yet our borders remain unsecured and the immigration system, even after the expenditure of huge sums of taxpayer money remains largely inept in dysfunctional. How much more evidence do our “leaders” need to understand that a guest worker amnesty program would be precisely the wrong thing to do at the worst possible time in the history of our nation?
When President Harry S. Truman occupied the Oval Office, he placed a plaque on his desk that read, “The buck stops here!” Perhaps the current resident of the White House and other “leaders” on Capitol Hill should place a different plaque on their desks. This one would read, “Don’t confuse me with the facts!”
Lead, follow or get out of the way!
The original article can be found at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/
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.
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