Thread: The 24-Hour Window for Screening of Amnesty Applicants: Is t

Spring 2009, Vol 50, Number 1


The 24-Hour Window for Screening of Amnesty Applicants: Is the U.S. Congress Serious About This Suggestion?

By Mike Cutler, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow

There are many compelling reasons why I am adamantly opposed to any amnesty program, but the number one reason is its potential impact on national security and the safety of our nation and its citizens. The program is the equivalent of a homeowner handing out keys to the front door of his home to virtually anyone who walks by.

The locksmith that is charged with making keys to our nation and distributing them to aliens is the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) and the Office of Inspector General (OIG) have issued a slew of excruciatingly detailed reports showing ineptitude and malfeasance on an unimaginable scale that have overwhelmed USCIS.

Any amnesty program would mean that millions of new applications would be dumped on USCIS desks. Evaluating them is a task the agency isn't up to now and won't be in the foreseeable future.

Because of this terrible problem, Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR), as amnesty is known, would be administered by an agency already operating without a shred of integrity. Our government could not prevent criminals and terrorists from receiving official identity documents or screen out people who are not who they say they are. This program would ultimately provide such aliens with resident alien status and then United States citizenship.

Criminals and terrorists use multiple false identities to conceal who they are, their actions and their movements. They use changes in identity the way chameleons use changes in coloration, in order to hide in plain sight among their intended victims.

All of the terrorists who attacked our nation on September 11, 2001, were admitted into our country and were able to game various systems within the United States in order to acquire identity documents and achieve the anonymity that they desired. They managed to disguise their intentions completely while they prepared to viciously attack our nation and obliterate the lives of thousands of people whom they had never met or had any personal reason to hate.

Those terrorists walked through America’s front door. The State Department, even now, is providing such people with visas, providing them with a key.

We also know that other terrorists who have operated in the U.S. found it easy to enter our country and then to achieve their nefarious objectives. Of the 94 terrorists who have been identified as operating in our country in the decade leading up to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 59 have been determined to have employed immigration fraud to either enter our country and/or embed themselves here. A number of them, in fact, took advantage of the disastrous amnesty of 1986 (IRCA) to achieve their goals.

Any criminal or terrorist who would be provided with the “keys to America’s front doorâ€

They have already dumped 80,000 new asylum applications a year with the REAL ID stealth amnesty. I wonder how many of them are terrorists slipping through our overworked USCIS?