April 24, 2006

As Guest Worker Amnesty Looms—Remember The GAO Fraud Report!

[Also by Juan Mann: 03/27/06 - Do Reconquistas Already Run Federal Immigration Bureaucracy?]

Another illegal alien amnesty looms on the political horizon. But as long as the Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) division administers it, an immigration benefit fraud free-for-all will certainly result.

Why do I make such harsh judgment?

Look no further than the staggeringly comprehensive Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in March—IMMIGRATION BENEFITS: Additional Controls and Sanctions Strategy Could Enhance DHS’s Ability to Control Benefit Fraud (GAO-06-259) [PDF].

The Treason Lobby and its handmaidens in the Senate of the United States would rather have this report seized and burned than allow it to ever see the light of day in the mainstream media, which hasn’t reported it at all.

But here at VDARE.com, the GAO report is still right on the front burner.

So to review, here’s what the GAO wrote about the agency that will be charged with passing out millions of uninvited “guest worker” cards sometime in the future, if the Treason Lobby carries the day.

The GAO’s confidence level with CIS’ fraud-detection ability is not high.

The GAO wrote:

“USCIS does not have a mechanism to help ensure that adjudicators have access to information related to detecting fraud they may need to carry out their responsibilities. Information regarding fraud trends can be provided in various forms including e-mails, intranet Web pages, and bulletin board notices.” [page 32]

“USCIS headquarters operations management told us that the adjudications operations is a ‘high pressure’ production environment and that they are seeking to increase production, but it was not their intention that this [this what? . . . read: application granting free-for-all] should come at the expense of making incorrect adjudications decisions.” [page 6]

“[A]djudicators we interviewed reported that communication from management did not clearly communicate to them the importance of fraud control; rather it emphasized meeting production goals, designed to reduce the backlog of applications almost exclusively.” [page 5-6]

“Adjudicators we spoke with said that communications from management emphasized meeting production backlog goals almost exclusively. They said that management’s focused attention on reducing the backlog placed additional pressure on them to process applications faster, thereby increasing the risk of making incorrect decisions, including approving potentially fraudulent applications.” [page 30]

So now that another month has passed since the release of the March 2006 report, it’s safe to say that things are probably all still status quo at CIS.

Let’s face facts: the institutionalized pro-illegal alien customer service elements of the federal immigration bureaucracy aren’t going to go away (or be “fixed”) anytime soon.

If ever.

The very existence of several GAO reports exposing CIS as a “customer-friendly” sham is something that should have been shouted from the rooftops . . . rather than flushed down the mainstream media’s memory hole.

Maybe someone in the U.S. Senate will finally read the GAO report [ PDF] before it’s too late, and save our country from yet another amnesty fraud free-for-all.

But, as Bryanna Bevens wrote when the GAO report was released March 15:

Shoulda, coulda, woulda…the bottom line is: a guest worker program can’t be done.

Juan Mann [email him] is an attorney and the proprietor of DeportAliens.com. He writes a weekly column for VDARE.com and contributes to Michelle Malkin’s Immigration BLOG.