Have We Had Enough?

By Bill West

Today, there was a story in the Ontario, California Inland Valley Daily Bulletin concerning the grossly abused and mismanaged religious worker visa program administered by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CIS is the successor to the Adjudications Division of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) pre-DHS in 2003. Most of the rank-and-file CIS managers are left-over INS Adjudications Division managers. Which may explain a lot since their mind-set was (and still apparently is) to give away as many immigration benefits as possible, eligibility of the beneficiary aliens seemingly having little to do with anything.

And that is most unfortunate, since most front-line adjudications officers in CIS, as with their INS forerunners, truly want to do the right job and screen out ineligible and especially fraudulent benefit seekers. These hard-working line officers are confronted daily with an agency overwhelmed by volume and institutional focus that overwhelmingly gives the benefit of any doubt to the benefit seeking alien. That focus has developed over decades and, even after the 9/11 attacks and all the alleged changes in favor of national security, has not yet filtered into the immigration benefit granting process.

As cited in the Daily Bulletin report, and also reflected in various Congressional and internal DOJ and DHS studies, the religious worker visa program by any measure is a disaster. Nearly a third of these visa petitions are considered fraudulent. Most of those fraudulent visa petitions involve Muslim aliens from “special interest” countries that send us terrorists (though that fact is likely something that would be difficult to ferret out from PC-minded bureaucrats).

It is time immigration benefits stopped being considered a “right” to be granted simply for the asking, which for all practical purposes they have been for many years. As someone who sadly observed the evolution of this process from the late-1970s onward from the immigration law enforcement side, the real downturn began when INS stopped the face-to-face interview process with beneficiary aliens and petitioners at the District Office level and outsourced the adjudication process to “Remote Adjudication Centers” in the 1980s, having Examiners adjudicate cases based on paper only. This to process (as in “approve”) more cases in less time. Those of us on the law enforcement side of INS knew this was a recipe for massive increase in benefit fraud, and it was, but no one listened to us. The fiasco of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, the so-called “one time amnesty” that also gave us toothless employer sanctions, also created massive immigration benefit fraud from which the INS never fully recovered. Ironically, our political leadership on both sides of the aisle is now considering a huge remake of IRCA.

Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ and plenty of other radical Islamic terrorist organizations have exploited the religious worker visa program to their benefit, as have other criminal groups and individuals. They will continue to do so until there is a radical restructuring of the program or it is simply shut down. Even with that, given the massive abuse already suffered, how many nefarious operatives have already entered the US through this gaping hole in our border security?

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