Illegal Immigration: Interior Enforcement, Part 1

President Obama’s substitution of the word “immigrants” for “aliens” in his immigration speech last week reveals that he has no intention of enforcing our immigration laws. The president spoke of how immigrants have helped to build our nation. He ran through a list of important figures such as Andrew Carnegie and Albert Einstein, but of course failed to note that both men were lawfully admitted into the United States.

The use of the word “immigrants” to describe illegal aliens is deceptive. The term “alien” is not a pejorative but it is actually an descriptive legal term with specific meaning. For the record, the Immigration and Nationality Act, the body of laws that govern the entry and presence of aliens in our country, defines an alien as any “person who is not a citizen or national of the United States.”

I defy you to tell me wherein lies the insult in that definition.

The point is that the difference between an immigrant and an illegal alien is comparable to the difference between a houseguest and a burglar.

Obama also noted that the backlog of applications for immigration benefits has been reduced, so it is now time for Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

Here is the issue: The backlog of applications has been reduced by providing all sorts of incentives to the adjudicators at USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) to process as many applications for all sorts of immigration benefits including the conferring of lawful immigrant status and even United States citizenship as quickly as possible. As all of us know, there is an inverse relationship between speed and accuracy. The faster you do a job, the less attention you can pay to the details.

It is also important to know that if an adjudications officer seeks to deny an application for an immigration benefit, s/he must fill out a lengthy report and justify the denial while approval requires the adjudicator simply to stamp the application with an approval stamp and move onto the next application! If your goal is to simply clear the backlog there is a clear incentive to approve every application that is handed to an adjudicator whose evaluations, awards and bonuses depend on meeting or exceeding productivity goals!

This threatens national security.

Various reports issued by the GAO (Government Accountability Office) and various Inspectors Generals that have pegged the fraud rate in some aspects of the immigration benefits program as high as 90%!

A study of the tactics used by terrorists have shown that visa fraud are often used by terrorists in order to enter the United States and/or embed themselves in our country. Of 94 terrorists who were identified as operating in our country in the decade before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 59 of those terrorists used immigration fraud to either enter the United States and/or embed themselves in our country (hide in plain sight).

Fraud was also a huge problem with the massive immigration amnesty program of 1986. In fact, it was through fraud in that fatally flawed program that some of the terrorists who carried out the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 were able to embed themselves in the United States before that attacks was carried out.

Yet the administration is still utterly ignoring immigration fraud!

Consider a 2008 GAO report: “IMMIGRATION BENEFITS:  Actions Needed to Address Vulnerabilities in Process for Granting Permanent Residency” You can review that report at: www.gao.gov/new.items/d0955.pdf

As an INS special agent I was called upon to participate in every form of investigative effort I have enumerated below and my colleagues and I scored some really huge successes in combatting not just illegal immigration – a worthwhile goal, in and of itself, but we contributed significantly to combatting terrorism, narcotics trafficking and crimes involving transnational gangs and criminal organizations.

For Part 2 of this series, click here.