Immigration Benefits?Will They Ever Learn?

By Bill West

On October 3, the Washington Times ran a report about allegations that some adjudication officers working in the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS) agency, the immigration benefit agency under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that took over the immigration benefit adjudication responsibility from the now defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), have improperly granted immigration benefits, including naturalized US citizenship, to foreign nationals in return for bribes and other favors, including sexual favors. The Washington Times article stated there are some 2500 outstanding allegations under investigation, and some include CIS employees who are �being influenced by foreign governments.� CT Blog expert Mike Cutler has also just posted on this topic.

The information for the Washington Times report came from closed Congressional hearings held last week wherein a Government internal affairs investigator briefed Congressional sources. While allegations of misconduct are just that, and are not proof of wrongdoing, this information still remains highly disturbing. The old INS was perennially plagued with very serious problems in its benefits granting division. It was for many years under-resourced and overwhelmed with workload. For years, backlog reduction was the priority over quality adjudication, notwithstanding the bureaucratic rhetoric.

The creation of DHS and the separation of immigration law enforcement from immigration benefits processing was supposed to fix all that. 9/11 was the catalyst to finally get Congress and the Administration to act on immigration agency structural reforms that were needed for a very long time. Unfortunately, much was done in haste in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and CIS has been and continues to be staffed and managed by the leftover immigration benefits managers of the old INS. The management mindset of quantity over quality, notwithstanding the bureaucratic rhetoric, appears to have also carried over.

In the particularly sensitive arena of naturalization, arguably the most significant immigration benefit that can be bestowed on an alien and perhaps one of the most significant benefits of all the US Government can grant to anyone, the process itself has devolved into something akin to an assembly line paper shuffle. On September 17, I wrote an article in the CT Blog about CIS fast-tracking the naturalization backlog by hiring quickly trained short-term-hire temporary Adjudicators. Now we have the Washington Times report concerning the thousands of pending allegations of misconduct against CIS adjudicators. Can any of this bode well for building confidence in the system supposedly structured for identifying those aliens not entitled to receive immigration benefits, especially the most coveted benefit of US citizenship?

And this at a time when both the Administration and key members of Congress are pushing variations of immigration �reform� that call for some form of legalization and guest worker programs. Just who do the politicians think will adjudicate all those hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of new applications under their proposed programs? It would be the CIS�the very agency demonstrating it is no better than the old dysfunctional INS at properly performing these functions at anything close to a �normal� level. If any legalization programs pass, they will be a guaranteed monumental disaster leading to overwhelming fraud, a reflection of the 1986 legalization program but many times larger.

Is all of this hopeless? Can this be fixed? I don�t know. But, I can tell you, as incredible as it may seem, that once upon a time the system actually worked reasonably well. When I first entered service as a rookie Special Agent (Criminal Investigator) with the INS in 1978, the agency only had around 600 agents nationwide. The entire agency only had a couple thousand employees and that included the Border Patrol�compared to over 20,000 when the agency was merged into DHS in 2003. But, in spite of a lot fewer personnel, we had a system that functioned better. Naturalization Examiners were attorneys who were skilled interviewers who knew the immigration and nationality law. Naturalization applicants were required to bring two witnesses with them to their interviews to attest, under oath, to the applicant�s Good Moral Character. If the Examiners had any suspicions about the applicant or their support witnesses, they referred the matter to the Investigations Division for inquiry. The issue of acquiring US citizenship was something considered very serious.

Basically, these naturalization cases for the Investigations Division were background investigations on the naturalization applicants. Most such cases were routine and resulted in a favorable finding for the applicant. However, on occasion, we found an applicant was not a good guy. By interviewing friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, local cops and others who knew them�doing old-fashioned gumshoe detective work�we sometimes learned an applicant abused their spouse or kids, habitually used drugs, had a criminal record they didn�t report that didn�t show up on the checks, was married to someone else and didn�t claim it, and, every now and then, that they were members of terrorist or subversive groups in their home countries. Those were the cases that resulted in denials and sometimes-larger investigations and prosecutions and deportations ensued. And, it happened on a regular basis because the system was geared toward a quality adjudicative process and not a �crank �em out� reduce the backlog process.

Surely the workload has increased substantially over the years, but so have the resources. Perhaps more resources are necessary, and the Congress and the Administration should look at that. But, how much of this is reflective of management, or more properly mismanagement? Study after study and audit after audit always seem to say the same thing in this regard�that our immigration agencies are sorely mismanaged at the senior levels. Who is listening? You can bet al-Qaeda is.

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