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Exclusive: U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services Refuses to Learn At Our Peril

Author: Mike Cutler
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: December 6, 2006


It is difficult to accept that incompetence too egregious to believe is what is “protecting” America from its enemies. What is worse, as FSM Contributing Editor Mike Cutler demonstrates, is that the government agency responsible for protecting us from illegal aliens who would do us harm (USCIS) refuses to learn from its many mistakes. Heaven help us!



U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services Refuses to Learn At Our Peril
Mike Cutler


Every time you take a look at a component of the immigration system, you are likely to find incompetence. As I have so often stated, immigration is more than the Mexican border, notwithstanding the fact that the Mexican border does, indeed, represent an area of extreme vulnerability to our country. While open borders advocates, including all too many politicians, attempt to blur the distinction between legal immigration and illegal immigration, the laws of our nation draw a very clear distinction between them.

When an alien is permitted to obtain an immigration benefit such as resident alien status or especially, United States citizenship, we are turning over the "keys to the kingdom" to that alien. United States citizenship represents the "Platinum Card" for a wide variety of issues. An alien who naturalizes may hold any job for which he or she is qualified with one exception: to become the President of our nation. Many of our nation's political leaders are, in fact, naturalized United States citizens. This is as it should be. When an alien becomes a citizen, under the eyes of the law, he is no longer an alien but becomes a full participant in our nation. Naturalized citizens are eligible to hold jobs that require high-level security clearances. A naturalized citizen can also gain employment as a federal agent. This is why the process by which our nation confers United States citizenship upon aliens is so vitally important and has profound implications to national security.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has lost track of 111,000 files in 14 of the agency's busiest district offices and processed as many as 30,000 aliens may have become naturalized United States citizens even though the officials who bestowed citizenship to them were not able to review the immigration file that might have contained derogatory information about them. In fact, the immigration file contains all relevant information that pertains to the alien. It shows how, when and where he entered the United States and traces, however skillfully, applications he may have filed for various benefits. It also records whether he committed any violations of immigration law that may well have an impact on his application for residency or citizenship.

I recall that when I was an immigration inspector in the early 1970's the inspectors were often given "standby" work when there were no passengers arriving at that busy airport. This standby work often involved the adjudication of applications for a variety of immigration benefits such as the issuance of replacement Alien Registration Cards commonly referred to as "Green Cards," as well as deciding on whether an alien should be permitted to change schools as a student in the United States, or be granted additional time to remain in the United States. Initially the so-called "Green Cards" were relatively crude documents that used a special laminating process to make it more difficult to counterfeit the document or change the photograph that appeared on that critical document. The Green Card is a critical document. It provides prima fascia evidence of the identity of its bearer and evidence that he or she is a resident alien. While United States citizens returning to the United States from outside the Western Hemisphere are required to present a valid passport to immigration inspectors upon their return to the United States to establish that they are United States citizens, resident aliens merely needed to provide their Green Cards to prove that they are, in fact, resident aliens. Clearly this document is of great significance.

Eventually the former INS changed the cards and the way that they were produced. Additional safeguards were added to the document to make them more secure. This was a prudent measure, but incredibly, the process by which applications to replace the cards became the area of greatest vulnerability. Applications for replacement cards were being adjudicated without the alien's immigration file!

There were times that, when I was a special agent of INS, I would review an alien's immigration file and see that there were a number of applications for replacement cards that were ultimately consolidated into the file. What was disturbing was that on a number of occasions, the copies of the photos that had been placed on these replacement cards were clearly of different people! Not requiring the files certainly speeded up the process of replacing these critical immigration documents, improving “customer service” but the casualty of this was the integrity of the system itself! Now it would seem that the naturalization of aliens suffers similar integrity issues. Of course the government would probably tell you that we are dealing with fewer than 4% of the applications for citizenship being involved in this outrageous shortcut, however, we are talking about as many as 30,000 people! Remember how much damage was done by just 19 terrorists on September 11, 2001.

In the 1990's, the former INS created a program known as Citizenship USA (CUSA) which was designed to clear up the backlogs of applications for United States citizenship. This program was a fiasco in which thousands of aliens who had criminal histories were naturalized. They placed the emphasis on speed over quality, much the same way that USCIS does today. An investigation of that disastrous program was conducted by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice because of the great concerns raised by that inept program. You can read an overview of the findings of the investigation at the link below:

http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/0007/introduction.htm

Fraud committed in conjunction with applications for resident alien status as well as United States citizenship is a widespread problem as well, and it may be more difficult to screen such applications for fraud; but making certain that no applications for United States citizenship or other immigration benefits be processed without the immigration file is a simple enough matter to address. This is a matter of common sense but, unfortunately, it provides yet another example of how USCIS is driven by chasing the backlog of applications for immigration benefits. There are a list of reasons why a guest worker amnesty problem would be disastrous for our nation, but given the inability of USCIS to take even basic measures to insure the integrity of the processes for which they bear responsibility is at the top of a long list of reasons why this ill-conceived program should never be implemented.

It is a known fact that the terrorists who attacked our nation and other terrorists who came to our nation intent on wreaking havoc on the United States and its citizens became adept at "gaming" the system and exploiting vulnerabilities in the immigration system in order to either enter the United States or to embed themselves in our country. These are the findings of the 911 Commission. Yet, clearly the executives at USCIS still refuse to make the integrity of the immigration system their priority.

It is amazing that our government refuses to learn from its mistakes. My dad used to tell me that there were no mistakes in life, only lessons - provided that we learned from those things that went wrong and changed our way of doing things, taking those lessons into account. Not to learn from your mistakes was to him, and to me, simply inexcusable.

Lead, follow or get out of the way!