Thread: Immigration: The Crisis Continues

Immigration: The Crisis Continues
Michael Cutler

There is a major crisis within the immigration bureaucracy that not a single presidential candidate has addressed or is willing to address, although the issue of immigration benefit fraud is a key issue where national security is concerned.

Focus on the impossible situation that our nation is in today, more than six years after the attacks of September 11, 2001. According a recent Washington Post article, some 6 million applications for various immigration benefits are processed each year by USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). There are about 4,500 adjudications officers at that beleaguered agency making critical decisions regarding who will receive resident alien status or United States citizenship.

The adjudicators are simply unable to deal with the flood of applications that inundate them every day, but they are evaluated by how quickly they process the applications. Having spent one year as an adjudications officer in the mid 1970s (when that position was known as an "examiner"), I can tell you that the easiest way to move the applications rapidly is to approve them! I am certain that the adjudicators are reluctant to do anything to slow the process and so they are probably working at warp speed to approve as many applications as possible. Unfortunately, this means that there are very few referrals to the fraud unit – and of those, the WaPo article notes, only about 1% are investigated.

What does this mean? An alien who attempts to play the system is virtually assured he will get away with immigration fraud.

One of the reasons for the huge backlog of applications for immigration benefits is the fact that as more aliens succeed in their attempts at immigration fraud, they tell their friends, which leads to more aliens filing fraud-laden applications – and thus a vicious cycle ensues.

Remember Nada Prouty? A native of Lebanon, she committed immigration fraud and then parlayed her newly-acquired United States citizenship into a position with the FBI as a special agent. She was then able to gain access to computer databases in order to determine progress being made by our government in the investigation of Hezbollah. What makes this situation even more disturbing is that her brother-in-law is a fugitive wanted for tax evasion and for allegedly skimming millions of dollars in profits from a chain of restaurants in Detroit, Michigan – money he allegedly forwarded to Hezbollah to fund their terrorist activities. Ms. Prouty should never have been naturalized, as she admitted into entering into a fraudulent marriage to gain naturalization. Had the adjudicators at USCIS been diligent at their jobs, her plan of deceit would have been uncovered and she never would have been in the position to spy on the FBI and subsequently the CIA.

Despite the pledge made by Emilio Gonzalez, director of USCIS, Emilio Gonzalez, to focus on terrorists and large organizations, more aliens such as Nada Prouty will breeze through the system because she managed to keep a low profile. She wasn’t the first, and she certainly won’t be the last.

These areas of vulnerability have been thoroughly documented in a succession of GAO and OIG reports warning our nation's leaders about the serious risk that immigration benefit fraud represents to our nation. These reports have consistently painted a picture of rampant fraud with virtually nothing being done to address this national security crisis.

Consider the report that the GAO issued about immigration fraud on March 10, 2006 at the behest of Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner who, at the time of the release of the report, was the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Consider again consider the findings of another GAO report about the purported loss of some 111,000 files relating to aliens seeking a wide variety of immigration benefits, including some 30,000 who sought to become naturalized United States citizens. This report was written as a result of an investigation into the abysmal situation at USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) and was requested by Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Sue Collins of Maine.

In a study that was done in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it was determined that of 94 terrorists who were identified as having operated in the United States in the decade preceding 9/11, 59 of them used immigration benefit fraud to enter the United States and/or embed themselves here.

Robert Mueller, the Director of the FBI, has testified before Congress about his concerns regarding so-called "sleeper agents." George Tenet, the former head of the CIA, has made similar statements. A sleeper agent is an alien who, in one way or another, manages to enter our country (preferably securing lawful immigration status) and then maintain a low profile. To a sleeper agent, United States citizenship is the "platinum card." Unfortunately, it seems as though these “platinum cardsâ€

I read a post today in Dreamland that illustrates immigration fraud. It's infuriating that they are so brazen and so proud of their criminal exploits.

From Dreamland:

it still is unbelievable till this day.
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im not lying, this is totally the truth.. i kid you not!

so basically along time ago, my uncle came here to America, didn't apply for a green card, just a tourist visa. he applied for an SSN, but it was "not valid for employment". then he realized that it was spelled wrong. so he went to the SSA building, to tell them that it was wrong, a month later he got a new SSN card. but this time, it didn't say, "not valid for employment". so he tried to get a job. and he actually got one lol. my uncle is the type of person that tries to find loopholes in the gov't system and he actually did on this one. he could of gotten me a CA state Id. but his friend at the DMV, retired =(..but anyways needless to say, he stayed here and eventually became a car dealer at Toyota and Infiniti (Carson and Long Beach area) lol

http://www.dreamact.info/forum/showthread.php?t=6857