By Federale
03/26/2013
Winston Churchill famously said, “"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” The Obama Administration thinks A Big Lie needs a bodyguard of smaller lies.
Washington is waging a war, but the enemy is its own people: the traditional American nation. The horrible truth about the Obama/ Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration Surge is that it is advanced precisely because it will dispossess Americans. That unmentionable reality is concealed with a bodyguard of smaller lies, petty deceits in service to the larger deception that immigration laws cannot be enforced.
A recent example: we are told that the federal government cannot fulfill a Congressional mandate to establish a biometric entry-exit system to allow the government to fulfill its basic responsibility of ensuring which individuals are complying with their period of admission and which are not. Instead, even though this system is not in place, the Department of Homeland Security assures us that the government is still mysteriously capable of identifying “those who overstay their visas” even though the basic infrastructure does not exist.
The frontman for this particular falsehood: one David Heyman, a senior Democrat operative who is Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Department of Homeland Security. Since being sworn in June 2009, Hayman has developed a certain amount of expertise in relatively obscure areas of immigration law enforcement. Not bad for a former Clinton Administration junior official and biology major at Brandeis University.
Heyman’s responsibility for “policy” means administering the multifaceted and complex Obama Regime Administrative Amnesty. Well-trained in the art of the lie, Heyman does not go big, but goes small, in the Gramscian manner of the “Long March through the institutions,” step by step.
There’s a host of these small lies in this USA Today op-ed by Heyman. He wrote:
For two decades, the federal government has worked to obtain accurate and timely data on individuals who have overstayed their period of admission to the U.S. After 9/11, Congress passed a law to develop a biometric entry-exit system, requiring some form of biometric — fingerprints, for example — be collected when non-citizens enter and leave the U.S. The point is to match entry and exit records and determine which individuals are complying with their period of admission, and sanction those who are not.
DHS: We Can Identify Those Who Overstay On Visas, February 25, 2013
In fact, a mandatory exit verification system was first required by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA) and reiterated numerous times in other Acts of Congress.
Heyman’s reinvention of this long-standing effort as a post-9/11 response is a slick attempt to misdirect the public. He covers himself by mentioning biometric systems, a gleam in the eye of visionaries back in 1996. IIRAIRA’s requirement then was based on a documentary system utilizing unique numbers and other identifying marks found in passports and visas.
Still, remember this twenty year period of non-enforcement. It will be important. Heyman continues,
However, the U.S. did not build its border, air and immigration infrastructure with exit processing in mind. Airports don’t have designated exit areas for departing passengers or specific checkpoints where a passenger’s departure is recorded by an immigration officer, as many countries do.
True — but why not? Which administration did not inform airport authorities that any new, much less existing, international arrival terminals at airports would have to include secure departure Federal Inspection Services (FIS) facilities?
Of course, it was the very Clinton Administration that Heyman once served and that signed these regulations into law.
The Clinton Administration’s failure was not for lack of resources. After all, it was the Department of Justice under Janet Reno which showed a fanatical willingness to endure untold trouble and expense to arrest and deport a little Cuban boy named Elian Gonzalez. However, somehow this same Janet Reno never instructed Immigration and Naturalization Service to plan for secure departure facilities at future international airports.
The Clinton Administration had no intention of enforcing the laws which Bill Clinton himself signed. Enforcement of “departure control” (as it is called in immigration law enforcement) was as deliberately overlooked.
Thus, if the Clinton Administration had wanted to enforce the law, it could have done so quite easily at San Francisco International Airport (SFO.) The airport was designed in the mid- to late-1990s, but Clinton’s INS neglected to use its power to force the airport authority to provide for a secure FIS departure control.
Furthermore, even though the powers-that-be today have the time to rename it to Harvey Milk International Airport, they do not trouble themselves to retrofit the international terminals to provide a secure FIS for departures.
The main arrival area already had all the facilities necessary for the Immigration Inspectors, Customs Inspectors and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Inspectors. Only a minor amount of funding and political will was necessary.
Of course any effort at departure control offends the interests of the usual suspects. As Heyman complained in his Op-Ed:
[T]he Department of Homeland Security (DHS) piloted various biometric programs in 15 airports to try to achieve such a system. We found that the limitations of existing technology, plus the lack of infrastructure for departing passengers, would drive the cost of a biometric program to $3 billion or more, while disrupting air travel, for passengers and airlines alike.
But those pilot programs were designed to fail. In practice, all that was created were lonesome kiosks utilized by the ever diligent Japanese and ignored by all others. The staff consisted of low-paid recent immigrants with questionable language abilities and legal status.
The cost to the taxpayer? Literally nothing. International arrival inspections both in the 1990’s and today are paid for by international passenger and importers. International passengers pay a fee; importers pay a duty. A simply policy change of doubling the fee from $10 to $20 per arriving passenger would easily fund the added expense of more Immigration, Customs and Agriculture Inspectors (who in any event are now conveniently merged in One Face at the Border in the person of U.S. Customs and Border Protection ([BP]).
Heyman’s $3 billion cost figure is an outrageous scare tactic akin to the $PLC’s warning of the return of the Klan. Had Democrats like Heyman and his fearless leader Janet Reno fulfilled their duty decades ago, there would be no problem today.
Heyman continues:
Over the past three years, DHS has taken steps to implement affordable measures to achieve the underlying goals of the requirement. Through enhancements to our system, which matches the information on an individual’s passport at arrival and departure, DHS can now identify and target for enforcement those who have overstayed their period of admission and who represent a public safety and/or national security threat.
We take action — including revoking visas — against confirmed overstays. Moreover, we continue to move forward toward building a biometric air exit system and advancing requisite technologies, to be integrated into the system when it’s cost effective and feasible.
My comment: there have been some improvements in data systems used by the alphabet soup of sub-agencies in DHS. But they are so divided that they ensure system-wide failure. Simple improvements in data systems cannot identify overstays without review of each suspect record by a human. When enforcement is divided among various sub-agencies, there are massive gaps in the records and investigations.
In any event, ICE HSI has abandoned investigation of visa overstays as part of the ongoing Obama Regime Administrative Amnesty. No one is actually arrested unless they have a felony. The Department of State is far more concerned about cranking out tourist visas than enforcing immigration law.
Above all, contra Heyman, no one at DHS can revoke a visa. Only the Department of State can do that. Heyman’s claim is not just a lie, but an impossible lie.
If officials like David Heyman despise us so much that they are not willing to do their duty, they should have the courage to say so.
But of course, a lie cannot stand on its own. It requires its own bodyguard of lies. And, as the push for nation-breaking amnesty continues, the lies just keep on multiplying.
The blogger Federale is a 4th generation Californian and a veteran of federal law enforcement, including service in the legacy Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and other federal law enforcement agencies.
Federale’s opinions do not represent those of the Department of Homeland Security or the federal government, and are an exercise of rights protected by the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.