La Shawn Barber: The trouble with U.S. immigration policy
La Shawn Barber, The Examiner
Jul 25, 2006 5:00 AM (3 days ago)
Current rank: # 838 of 6,385 articles

WASHINGTON - The incongruity between President George Bush’s “war on terror” rhetoric and his administration’s lax immigration enforcement is maddening. How can a country that fails to maintain control over its borders fight an effective war against terrorism? If people are illegally entering the U.S. by the millions to “work,” it follows that people are illegally entering the U.S. to terrorize.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, Congress decided the country needed more bloated government agencies. Our legislators created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and split Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) into two departments: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
USCIS processes all applications for immigration status and documents, including employment authorization, asylum, permanent residency and U.S. citizenship. Would it surprise you to know the process is littered with loopholes and is wide open to exploitation by terrorists and foreign governments?
Michael J. Maxwell, former director of USCIS’s Office of Security and Investigations, testified before the House Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation earlier this year about fraud and corruption at USCIS. He told of his warning senior officials about exploitable weaknesses in the system and how these officials failed or refused to fix the problems. He accused them of ignoring national security threats and misleading Congress.
Tasked with overseeing USCIS employees, especially those who approved immigration applications —adjudicators — Maxwell was determined to weed out corruption and fraud. What he uncovered was extremely disturbing.
Adjudicators are to ensure that an applicant isn’t a terrorist or a criminal. They access law enforcement and intelligence databases through the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS). Records obtained through TECS fall into four categories or levels. To access national security records and terrorist watch-lists, employees must have at least Level 3 clearance. Employees with access to such sensitive information also must undergo full background checks.
Maxwell said that despite an agreement to require full background checks for new USCIS employees and “legacy” personnel at the former INS, USCIS leadership decided not to spend funds to meet the requirement. Consequently, about 43 percent of the adjudicators didn’t have the necessary clearance to access terrorist-related records. For all they knew, they were granting U.S. citizenship to members of al-Qaida. Maxwell estimates that these employees processed over 645,000 applications in fiscal year 2005.
One former employee’s background was highly suspicious. Despite being turned down for employment by other federal agencies, an Iraq-born U.S. citizen with connections to terrorist-harboring nations was able to get a job at USCIS processing asylum applications. The man denied traveling to countries like Iran, Syria, and Jordan while working at USCIS, although a polygraph showed he may have been being deceptive. While at
USCIS, the man approved 180 applications. During an investigation into the man’s work product, Maxwell found that 24 applications returned “national security hits.”
Between August 2004 and October 2005, Maxwell’s department received 2,771 complaints against employees. Approximately 20 percent alleged criminal activity, and some raise national security red flags. For all the USCIS knows, there may be other employees like the Iraq-born man with access to sensitive information.
Maxwell testified about USCIS’s policy on applicant background checks. If an employee learns that an applicant is the target of an ongoing investigation by agencies like the FBI or CIA, he must contact those agencies to find out why and wait for an answer. According to USCIS’s official instructions, if an employee hasn’t received a response within 40 days, he may assume the results of the request are negative and continue processing the application. Maxwell added that some employees had been told to ignore potential national security concerns because doing the necessary investigative work slows down processing times.
In this age of terrorism, where a group of Muslim terrorists has already used our shoddy immigration enforcement against us to murder thousands of Americans, USCIS is more concerned about backlog elimination than keeping out those who threaten our national security. USCIS was created for this purpose, but Maxwell’s testimony uncloaks a bureaucracy whose policies run counter to that purpose.
This column touches only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Download Maxwell’s testimony and read it for yourselves: http://wwwc.house.gov/international_rel ... 040606.pdf.
As we debate the foolishness of failing to secure our borders and how best to protect them, we do so in vain if the government does nothing to enforce the law and everything to make infiltration easier for terrorists.
La Shawn Barber is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at www.lashawnbarber.com. This is the third of a three-part series on immigration.
http://www.examiner.com/a-191298~La_Sha ... licy.html#