Illegal Immigration: Interior Enforcement, Part 2

For Part 1 of this series, click here.

Fraud Investigations:

What is immigration fraud? In broad terms, it’s lying on an application with the goal of securing a benefit to which the applicant would not be entitled if the official responsible for processing the application knew all the relevant information at the time.

Fraud investigations fall into two basic categories, fraud schemes and fraud documents. In turn, fraud schemes can be divided into visa fraud and immigration benefit fraud.

For the purposes of immigration, such application might involve an application for a visa that would permit an alien to seek entry into the United States either temporarily on a nonimmigrant visa, such as a tourist visa, student visa or business visa, to name just a few of the visas that are available, or on an immigrant visa that provides the alien with a green card and thus accords that alien lawful immigrant status.

An example of a fraud scheme is the United States citizen or lawful permanent resident alien who marries an alien to provide that alien with resident alien (immigrant status) for money or other benefit. In such marriages, the couple does not really live together as a true couple but gets married as part of a n arranged ´business deal.¡ When an investigation discloses that this is the case in a particular marriage,¡ the citizen or immigrant spouse should be prosecuted for entering into a criminal conspiracy to violate our nation’s immigration laws as should the alien spouse who sought to use this fraud scheme to acquire a green card. The alien who was seeking to acquire resident alien status through fraud should then be taken before an immigration judge to seek his removal (deportation) from the United States.

There are other such fraud schemes that involve the concealment of material facts so as to enable aliens to enter our country and/or embed themselves in our country. Often terrorists are charged with visa fraud because it is often far easier to show that an alien succeeded in entering our country by committing fraud than it is to prove that an alien is a terrorist.

Fraud documents include identity theft, the alteration of legitimate identity documents and the creation of counterfeit identity or supporting documents such as Social Security cards, birth certificates and other such documents.

There are abundant examples of about how easily aliens can and have gamed the immigration benefits program. Among them have been criminals and terrorists. The solution is not to ignore the problem but rather to develop the resources to conduct the necessary investigations and law enforcement activities that would bring real integrity to the program that provides millions of aliens with the keys to the kingdom in a truly perilous era.

The adjudicators at USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) are rewarded for moving the applications that are stacked on their desks as they try to keep up with the ever increasing number of applications filed by ever more aliens who have become emboldened to file applications for a variety of immigration benefits including applications for residency and United States citizenship based on fraud. These bureaucrats must feel like Lucy and Ethel in that hilarious episode of “I Love Lucy” when Lucy and her friend got jobs at the candy factory and they attempt to wrap morsels of bonbons hurtling at them at ever increasing speed on a conveyor belt moving at warp speed.

The solution is not to rush the process and compromise integrity, but to go after those who would commit fraud and convince those who would apply for applications that there is a serious price to be paid for attempting to defraud our government!  This would, undoubtedly cause a sharp reduction in the number of new applications filed.  This would cut waiting times for those who file legitimate applications and simultaneously making it easier for the adjudicators to screen out the fraud and create a bureaucracy that would have far greater integrity.

In this way everyone but the bad guys would win.

This is called deterrence and must be applied to the immigration benefits program that has such serious national security implications!

This can only be achieved by hiring a large number of special agents for ICE and providing them with the training and the resources to create an immigration bureaucracy that has real integrity.

Parts 3 and 4 of this series will be posted on July 8 and 9, respectively.