10/03/2005
There’s a big story in the Washington Times about corruption in the Citizenship and Immigration department of the former INS.
If you recall, the point of splitting the INS into two agencies was so that one side could concentrate on enforcement and the other could concentrate on "customer service."
It seems that they've been carrying this "customer service" ethos too far, and gaining benefits not usually available to civil servants:
The agency charged with admitting immigrants to the United States is in disarray, an internal investigator told closed congressional briefings last week, with employees facing thousands of charges of misconduct and having to make decisions on letting in foreigners without knowing whether there are national security risks. Two sources familiar with the briefing said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS) employees face 2,500 misconduct charges, including bribery and exchanging immigration benefits for sex. There are also charges that some employees are being influenced by foreign governments. "The thing that took most of the oxygen out of the room was the realization that there is the distinct possibility that people who have terrorist backgrounds have been able to obtain green cards because of a lack of ability to check their backgrounds," said one of the sources.
[U.S. probes 'green cards for sex'By Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times,October 3, 2005 ]
The story is a banner headline in the Times treezine, and while it’s the sex angle that sells newspapers, but it’s obviously the terrorism angle that’s the most important.
Politically, of course, it means that the guest worker program is less and less credible:
CIS already faces a backlog of applications for green cards, and the new information about the dysfunction at the agency comes at a time when President Bush is asking the agency to take on millions of new cases under a guest-worker program he is pushing Congress to enact.
Would you like to know how far USCIS from being able to do background checks on millions of illegals? One problem is that not all their employees have access to the criminal check databases — because they haven’t been able to do background checks on their own employees.
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