Thread: View on guest workers changes

http://washtimes.com/national/20060308-122906-8041r.htm

View on guest workers changes
By Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published March 8, 2006

The director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said yesterday that the agency is now ready to run a guest-worker program, just five months after he told a Senate hearing that the agency was not prepared.
Emilio Gonzalez said the agency can handle whatever program Congress sets up, in part because much of the workload would be outsourced to contractors.
"We have the tools, we have the personnel, and I believe we have the structure to adequately handle a guest-worker program if and when we get one," he said. "Obviously, we'll need some additional tools and some resources, but we're ready."
In October, at his confirmation hearing, Mr. Gonzalez told the Senate Judiciary Committee that USCIS wasn't ready because "the systems that exist right now wouldn't be able to handle it."
Mr. Gonzalez said that "a lot of things have happened" in those months. He was sworn in as director early in January and said he has begun a reorganization that will leave a "leaner, more effective" staff. He also said technology upgrades were in the works.
As for the workload -- a concern for many in Congress, given an existing backlog of immigration-benefit applications -- he said outsourcing to contractors will help.
"We do that now, so this would be nothing new; it would just have to be done on a larger scale," he said.
USCIS is the arm of the immigration service charged with granting immigration benefits such as permanent residence or citizenship.
Speaking with reporters at a morning briefing at the agency's headquarters, Mr. Gonzalez disputed a draft Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, which The Washington Times obtained and reported on Monday, that said USCIS has no systematic way to detect fraud or to learn from other agencies' experiences.
"Oh, but we do," Mr. Gonzalez said. "I'm not going to sit here [and] get into a contest whether GAO says we can or can't. Like anything else, can we do better? Sure. But understand, we work with the tools we have. We identify egregious cases of fraud, and we take corrective action."
The GAO said USCIS doesn't have a handle on the size and scope of fraud, and Mr. Gonzalez said he doesn't know how extensive the problem is nor could he say how many times the USCIS has pursued administrative or criminal penalties for fraud. But he said fraud is not overwhelming the agency.
"That there's fraud out there -- I assume there is. Is this something that's rampant and we don't have a handle on? I think that's probably going a bit too far," he said.
"When we identify fraud, we take actions, we work with our colleagues at the Department of Homeland Security. I'm not sure I could give you a total number of fraud cases out of a total number we adjudicate, but this is a huge agency. I mean, we do 135,000 background checks a day," he said.
USCIS has come under fire from many in Congress.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, sent a letter in February listing problems such as adjudicators' lacking access to the right databases and having to make decisions without being able to see derogatory information that another law-enforcement agency has.
He said managers at USCIS show a "lack of concern for security and nearly exclusive focus on processing as many benefit applications as possible."
But Mr. Gonzalez said yesterday that he has told employees to err on the side of national security.
"The minute I walked through these doors here, I let it be known -- under my watch, it's all about security," he said.
He said the lack of proper access "hasn't affected our ability to do proper adjudications" because other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security can obtain and share the information.
Mr. Gonzalez also said the agency will not reward adjudicators for speedily disposing of cases.
The Times in November reported that adjudicators in the Houston USCIS office earned time off by churning out cases quickly. According to a memo provided by Rep. John Culberson, Texas Republican, completing an average of six cases a day over a given quarter earned an employee an extra day off, and averaging 10 cases per day for the quarter earned an employee a week off.
"That's not how I do business," Mr. Gonzalez said. "I want to get the job done, and I want to get the job done well."
He also said that under his tenure, advancement has not been based on speed of adjudications.
"Not since I've been here," he said.

The Department of Homeland Security frequently proclaims it's doing everything possible to protect us and this country from a terrorist attack. It turns out, however, the truth is somewhat different.

The Department of Homeland Security itself is anything but secure. It turns out private guards at the department's headquarters in Washington now say they don't have enough training, nor equipment to provide security to headquarters.

At one point, guards emptied an envelope containing suspicious white powder into the air outside the building. The company that provides those guards, Wackenhut Services, is, by the way, owned by a firm based in Great Britain.

Feeling reassured now?

Still ahead here, charges of bribes, green card giveaways and fraud inside the U.S. immigration bureaucracy. Ready for a guest worker program? We'll have a preview of an explosive new report here next. And how the agency responsible for investigating foreign transactions has consistently violated U.S. law.

DOBBS: A shocking new government report is expected to charge the Bush administration with gross mismanagement of this country's immigration system. The report says the Bush administration's so- called temporary guest worker program has no chance of succeeding because of widespread fraud within our nation's immigration bureaucracy.

CASEY WIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT : The Bush administration's top homeland security official is again promoting the temporary worker program opponents say is a thinly-disguised illegal alien amnesty.

MICHAEL CHERTOFF, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: If we don't do some kind of a temporary worker program, I think it's going to be impossible to address the challenge of what could be eight to 11 million illegal migrants who are currently in this country.

WIAN: That estimate is probably low, and even so, the agency that would be in charge of a guest worker program is already overwhelmed and plagued by fraud. What's more, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service is not expected to be up to the task for at least five years. Those are just some the findings of a Government Accountability Office draft report now in the hands of two congressional committees and the Department of Homeland Security.

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley recently gave colleagues a preview, saying, "You'd all be shocked if you learned about the internal fraud and abuse at CIS. Officials are being bribed. Visas are being given away. Green cards are being sold."

The year-long study found CIS denied 19,000 applications for citizenship or immigration benefits due to fraud last year. Many of the other 800,000 rejected applications were also likely frauds but denied for other easier to prove reasons. Fraudulent applications are rarely prosecuted.

ROSEMARY JENKS, NUMBERSUSA: If your application is denied based on fraud and you're not prosecuted, then there is nothing that bars you from continuing to apply again and again and again until you get what you're looking for. In the 1986 amnesty, we gave a green card to at least one of the terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center in 1993. And here we are, we're set to do it again.

WIAN: More than 5,000 applicants for immigration benefits are identified as potential national security threats each year. The Bush administration last month asked Congress for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars for the citizenship and immigration service this year to begin implementing its temporary worker program.

DOBBS: The anti-fraud effort, of course, the fraud on the part of those applying for visas and even citizenship in this country. But at the same time, Casey, you're reporting that the institution, the bureaucracy itself, has corruption within it, at least according to Senator Grassley.

WIAN: And Senator Grassley was very clear about that in a hearing on Thursday that received very little attention. The overwhelming fact from this report is that the Citizenship and Immigration Service has absolutely no idea how widespread the fraud is because so many of these applications are denied for other reasons.

DOBBS: None of this even goes to the issue of compatibility of computer systems and databases that are absolutely critical to following the flow of those entering this country.

WIAN: Actually, there is a mention of the computer systems, and that's -- they're five years away of getting computer systems up and running that would detect fraud across the different homeland security agencies.

Senator Chuck Grassley will be talking about his efforts to uncover fraud inside our immigration bureaucracy on Wednesday.

TUCKER: The latest poll by Quinnipiac University found that 88 percent of those asked think illegal immigration is a serious problem. Put another way, 94 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of Democrats see illegal immigration as a serious issue .

: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/ ... dt.01.html