Posted on 11/09/2001 6:12:16 AM PST by uscit
Illegal Aliens Routinely Go Unchecked
Gary Bokelmann, NewsMax.comEditor's note: This is the conclusion of a three-part series. See part one, Immigration Crackdown 'Is Clearly Inadequate,' and part two, Should Military Guard U.S. Borders?
Friday, Nov. 9, 2001
Exactly one week after Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a major crackdown on illegal immigration, a study by his own Inspector General’s Office reports that the Immigration and Naturalization Service is unable to locate millions of foreign citizens who have overstayed their visas.
The complete failure to track those who violate their visas comes in spite of a $31 million computer system designed to do just that.
Moreover, it comes only seven days after the highly publicized "crackdown” on illegal immigration and the formation of the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force – neither of which will improve U.S. security by any significant measure, according to critics.
"The steps announced [last] week do very little to deal with illegal immigrants who are already here,” noted Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan immigration research organization. "This task force supposedly is working on finding terrorists already in the United States, as well as keeping out those who aren’t here yet – but I thought that was the FBI’s job.”
Congress to INS: Back Off
The inspector general’s report, sent to Ashcroft on Tuesday, estimated that those who do not leave the country after their visas expire represent about 40 percent of the illegal aliens in the U.S. Just a week earlier, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that population to be around 8 million.
To Krikorian and other critics, those numbers are clear evidence of an immigration system that has failed utterly – and that won’t be fixed through the measures announced thus far.
"The only people we deport now are people who are in jail – immigrants who have committed crimes and have therefore become deportable,” Krikorian said. "But if you’re just a regular illegal alien, standing on the corner waiting for a contractor to pick up you up, or going to a minimum-wage job somewhere, your chances of being deported by the INS are close to zero. In fact, I’d say they are zero.”
Worse, he charged, is the fact that "Congress has, in effect, mandated that policy. They haven’t changed the law. If you’re illegal alien, you’re not allowed to hold a job, and all this. But anytime the INS has actually tried to enforce the law, the Congress has very publicly and very stridently berated the INS and punished it. And so the INS got the message.”
As evidence, he points to Operation Vanguard, launched by the INS as a pilot program in Nebraska in 1999. The program focused on the meatpacking industry, where the hiring of illegal aliens had been an open secret for many years.
Rather than conducting highly disruptive raids on meatpacking plants, Operation Vanguard took what Krikorian called a "kinder and gentler approach.”
"They didn’t raid them. They simply subpoenaed their personnel records and checked all the Social Security numbers and alien registration numbers,” he said.
Of the more than 24,000 records that were checked, approximately 4,700 contained discrepancies. The INS asked the meatpackers to schedule those employees for interviews during May and June of 1999. More than 1,000 persons appeared, and all but 34 of these were able to straighten out their records, providing missing documentation or correcting simple errors.
But more than 3,000 simply failed to show up for interviews and disappeared, presumably because they were in the country illegally and thus not authorized to work. Follow-up inspections every 90 days were intended to keep workers from returning to their old jobs. Eventually, the program was supposed to expand to other industries, resulting in fewer and fewer places for illegal aliens to work.
Opponents Go 'Berserk'
Critics said the program was a failure because it apprehended just 34 illegal aliens, while "chasing off” 13 percent of the Nebraska meatpacking industry’s work force.
"In the wake of the first wave of enforcement, the governor of the state, one of its senators, Chuck Hagel, the meatpackers and the ranchers all went berserk,” Krikorian charged.
Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture jumped in, posting a statement on its Web site from American Meat Institute, which called Operation Vanguard "an irrational approach to interior immigration enforcement.”
"The INS got the message, and they stopped,” Krikorian said. "They did it once, but it never happened again. The guy who thought it up no longer works for the INS.”
Krikorian argues that Operation Vanguard was a success, because it helped achieve a fundamental goal, turning off "the magnet of jobs” that is at the root of the illegal immigration problem.
"The point is to make it as difficult as possible, and to create as many opportunities for the bad guys to trip up and for law enforcement to find them,” he said. Operation Vanguard "was a great idea, and they could do it tomorrow, if somebody gave them the OK,” he said.
Self-Protection: A Community Responsibility
That’s not likely to happen, however. Even in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, there are still groups opposed to a general crackdown on those who are in the country illegally. For example, Crystal Williams, director of liaison and information for American Immigration Lawyers Association, says such efforts are misguided.
"I’m not sure that we’re going down the right road to be targeting immigration in general here,” she said. Although she acknowledged that tracking those who overstay or otherwise violate their visas is "a good idea overall,” she added: "Whether it will help us in preventing terrorism, I think there is a stretch there.
"Knowing that somebody’s visa has expired and they’re still here doesn’t necessarily mean knowing that they’re about to engage in a terrorist act. The vast, vast, vast majority of people who overstay are overstaying for innocent reasons, not so that they can wreak destruction upon the United States.”
But of the 19 terrorists who committed the Sept. 11 hijackings, at least three, and possibly as many as 10, were in the country illegally. As a result, Americans are starting to pay attention, many for the first time, to the problem of illegal immigration and its costs to the nation.
"The idea that most illegal aliens aren’t here to blow up buildings is obviously true, but it’s irrelevant,” Krikorian said. "Most people getting on planes don’t have box cutters, either, but everybody still goes through the metal detectors. ...
"Immigrants are just people,” he added. "There are good ones, and there are evil ones. The point is, as a community, we have a responsibility to keep out people who are going to harm us, and some of those people are immigrants. And we need an effective system to protect ourselves.”
We need to pursue terrorists overseas, but compared to where the real danger lies, that's only a distraction.
Did you hear him say he wants our school kids to write letters to school kids in Islamic countries, did that make anyone's heart go "ping"?
When our Commander in Chief said "Let's Roll" and everybody got a tear in their eye........
Did anyone hear him say "let's roll" the illegals off our streets and out of our country???
The stateside dog and pony show continues.....
It's like we had this sort of moral line of credit we've been borrowing against for 30 years, and not having made the small maintenance payments, now the account is due and the payments are huge.
How much has 9/11 cost us? Wouldn't it have been a lot less costly to build and maintain an effective INS and intelligence community?
Actually, the problem isn't that the ruling elites don't get it. They do get it quite clearly: the problem is that ordinary Americans are the ones who don't get it.
Don't you guys think it's a little odd that after 12 years of Reagan Bush ( and now Bush again) that not one Republican administration has done much to crack down on illegal immigration?
The reason is fairly simple: Republicans like cheap labor and economic growth through population growth. So, in other words, they won't do anything about slowing or stopping immigration because it would hurt the US economically.
Or rather, it would hurt the US's elites economically. Whether immigration affects the little people doesn't really matter to them that much.
It's not that hard or costly to build such a system. What's hard is getting some of your fellow AMERICANS to go along with it.
In order for such a system to work, you'd have to actively discourage the hiring of nannies, agricultural workers, waitresses or people from any other job that involves paying people under the table.
A labor force made of illegal immigrants is something that is that many corporations actually desire. It's a workforce that can't go on strike without fear of deportation, and that happily accepts lower wages for the same reason.
I work at a large, well known American multinational based in the US. Of the 6 person technical team that I'm part of, only two are actually American citizens. The others are on visa, with the exception of one person who has a green card.
And guess what? I happen to be one of those guys working in the US under a visa. I long ago realised that the basis for visas in the US is only for the benefit of businesses. If the US really wanted to clean its visa system, it could.
That it won't is purely due to economic reasons, not political ones.
Yep. I think it is a strong argument for the government being an "reflection of the people". Why do we demand accountability from our government when we don't require it from one another? The people themselves have to change.
Call my congressman? He would prefer that all U.S. citizens be deported, and a fleet of busses sent to Mexico to haul all of Mexico here.
Our representatives know that almost 80% of the American people are for tighter border controls and for enforcement of existing quotas and immigration laws. The problem is, how do you get them to act?
Keep pounding away at them and remind them that you are going to the polls in 2004.
BINGO!!
Democrats want them for votes.
And the ones that lose are the American people.
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