Immigration Reform + "Benefits" = Failure

By Bill West

The various immigration reform proposals being considered by Congress that contain provisions for "guest workers" or any other form of legalization/amnesty by any other name, and it really is that no matter how the politicians try to sugar-coat the semantics, if only viewed from the nuts and bolts perspective of how to make all that work very quickly results in the objective answer of, "it won't."

The Washington Times today reported how a suspected Iraqi spy, born in Iraq and presumably a naturalized US citizen, was employed by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau (CIS) as an asylum adjudicator who infiltrated that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency in spite of internal security controls. This infiltration raises significant concerns about the employee vetting process within CIS. Combine this with recent GAO and other studies that have shown CIS incapable of effectively handling its existing benefit processing workload, and Americans have good reason to doubt that immigration benefits are properly being administered and processed under these "normal" circumstances. And these are matters that can directly bear on national security and the GWOT.

If any of the currently proposed immigration reform benefit programs become law, literally millions of illegal aliens will become eligible to apply for some form of legalized immigration benefit under the new law. The existing CIS structure that is so poorly performing now will be expected to deal with this massive new mission. Even with an infusion of whatever new money Congress may toss into the mix for some additional manpower, enough new adjudicators will never be added in time to effectively deal with the overwhelming workload.

Senior CIS officials now claim, not unexpectedly since they are towing a political line, the agency can handle any new benefit program under immigration reform. How? They say by hiring contractors to do much of the adjudicative work. Considering the existing background vetting system for DHS failed to detect a suspected Iraqi spy, and similarly failed to detect a now convicted illegal alien felon who became an armed Border Patrol Agent in the Customs and Border Protection agency of DHS (and, these are but two examples of a woefully inadequate background screening system), are we to really believe private contract adjudicators who are once and twice removed from real Federal employment will be properly screened and trained?

This was all tried during the 1986 legalization under the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). It failed miserably. INS was overwhelmed by the onslaught of legalization applicants, many fraudulent, and hired temporary contractors to assist in the processing. The fraud spread like wildfire and was virtually never prosecuted. The system essentially collapsed, and that was dealing with something on the order of three million illegals. Now we have an estimated four times that number. Apart from all the political and emotional considerations in the immigration reform debate, the devil really is in the details about how to make it all work.

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