Arrests of naturalized Chinese more proof of DHS problems

By Michael Cutler

This is the second time in the last couple of months that we have seen a news story about naturalized United States citizens who have spied on our country. The linked article reports on a spy ring that consisted of at least two naturalized United States citizens who apparently ran the spy ring, and at least two aliens who were involved in espionage and had secured resident alien status. Once again I am concerned as to whether the naturalized citizens were able to become a United States citizens because of flaws in the naturalization process that is supposed to uncover aliens who are, for one reason or another, unfit or ineligible to naturalized. For example, many aliens were naturalized through the program known as Citizenship USA which was created by the Clinton administration to naturalize as many citizens as possible and was terribly flawed. According to the GAO thousands of criminal aliens were naturalized. Many of these criminal aliens not only should not have been naturalized, they should have been deported from the United States. Please do not misunderstand what I am saying. Many of those aliens who were naturalized did, indeed, meet all of the requirement for becoming United States citizens. The problem is that we all know that there is an inverse relationship between quantity vs quality. In order to achieve greater speed from the same number of employees, quality has to suffer. In this case, this can lead to aliens being improperly being accorded the highest privilege our country can bestow on an alien, United States citizenship.

It is entirely possible that Chi Mak and his wife, Rebecca Laiwah Chiu, the leaders of the ring and naturalized citizens were properly naturalized and that no amount of reasonable scrutiny could have uncovered their duplicitous conduct. However, I am concerned that because USCIS is under great pressure to clear up the daunting backlog of applications for immigration benefits, it is possible that the system by which applications for United States citizenship are currently processed missed potential warning signs. The Department of Homeland Security is making much of its efforts to ferret out illegal aliens who work at sensitive venues such as military bases, nuclear power plants, airports and chemical factories. These efforts are not as effective as they would have us believe they are, if we are not carefully screening applicants for resident alien status and especially applicants for United States citizenship.

I have been told that at present USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) is hiring temporary employees to adjudicate applications for United States citizenship. When I began working for the former INS in 1971 our government took naturalization very seriously. The adjudicators who examined these applications for citizenship were attorneys who had worked for the INS for many years and truly understood the intricacies of the laws and regulations that pertained to naturalization. Each applicant was required to furnish two witnesses to attest to the good moral character of the applicant. The requirement of requiring witnesses was dropped and then adjudicators who had no law degrees were permitted to adjudicate these applications. During the Reagan administration special agents were pressed into service to adjudicate these applications and a number of my colleagues were, in fact assigned to this project to help clear the backlog. A few of these agents told me that they had seen boxes of arrest records that were never placed in the files of aliens applying for citizenship. When some of these agents asked about this, they were told to go back to their respective squads.

Today USCIS is hiring temporary adjudicators who are being given, from what I have been told, less than three weeks of training to enable them to carry out this critical assignment! There was a comedian who used to tell jokes about comparisons between the former Soviet Union and the United States and then proclaim, "What a country!" What a country indeed! I wonder if some of these temporary adjudicators will ever get confused and wind up asking an alien seeking naturalization if he wants fries with the naturalization certificate? This is not the way that we should be adjudicating applications for naturalization or even for resident alien status. And now, our "leaders" are talking about "Immigration Reform." As I have pointed out in the past, this is not what you might, at first glance think it is. Certainly the immigration system is broken. If a chain is as strong as its weakest link, where immigration is concerned there are only weak links and nonexistent links (and I am not just talking about how our borders are secured)! To the politicians, however, immigration reform is a cover term for a "Guest Worker Program" which is actually another way of saying "Amnesty." We need to make certain that the entire immigration system is up to speed and effective before we even think about dumping millions of applications into a dysfunctional and highly overburdened bureaucracy that at present has a backlog of some 5 million pending applications. Make no mistake, many of our most loyal citizens are naturalized citizens, I just want our nation to make certain that there is real integrity to the processes by which we adjudicate applications for various immigration benefits for aliens especially United States citizenship.

We can endeavor to make our borders impervious to illegal aliens, but if we furnish aliens with resident alien status or even worse, United States citizenship to which they would not be entitled if all material facts were known, then we are, in effect putting a secure door on our house with a strong lock and then hanging the key to that lock on the doorknob! All components of the immigration system need to be effectively dealt with. It won't be cheap, but in this dangerous era we must do no less.

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