The Immigration Bailout

By Marinka Peschmann,
Special to Canada Free Press
Thursday, January 15, 2009


There is another crisis on the verge of catching fire in America and the bailout has already begun.

It is the bailout to fix the costly fallout created by decades of failed immigration policies that taxpayers have been funding and will continue to fund to mop up the mess.

Last November, a fraction of the bailout went to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a $2.6 billion a-year agency. The USCIS received $500 million over five years to modernize its case management system. This agency tasked to protect America’s national security while balancing the nation’s economic needs, and humanitarian desires, intends to modernize by transferring paper applications to electronic filings. This move by the Bush Administration was a last minute rescue because the failure to modernize this perilously dysfunctional bureaucracy produced 20-year backlogs that cost hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to store in the interim.

According to the Washington Post: “Government investigators have reported that the [USCIS’] pre-computer-age paper filing system incurs $100 million a year in archiving, storage, retrieval and shipping costs; has led to the loss or misplacement of more than 100,000 files; and has contributed to backlogs and delays for millions of cases.â€