Immigration Reform: A Nation Without Borders?

The thinking goes something like this: In states where we can register Latin voters, we can increase the ranks of Democrats and elect more Democrats (hopefully, permanently), so why now legalize all the illegals? Hell, tear down that wall and let them all in!

Even the New York Times is writing about Obama's plan to legalize all those would-be Democrats, and the head of the United States Citizenship and Naturalization Service (USCIS), Alejandro Mayorkas, is already preparing for an onslaught of 12.5 million applicants for visas.

Planning has become so intense that the USCIS is setting up a system of what it calls lockboxes (sort of like stand-alone mail receptacles), so the illegals can mail in their applications. No word on what happens after that. Maybe ACORN will use their names and addresses and go register them to vote.

Meanwhile, USCIS head Mayorkas is the same Clinton appointee who, when Clinton issued his notorious midnight pardons upon leaving office, got a convicted Argentine cocaine smuggler named Carlos Vignali released from a 15-year prison term. Mayorkis was later forced to resign in shame from his position as a U.S. Attorney in California for his role in the pardon. Now he's the head of the USCIS, so expect more of the same. In short, money--and in this case, votes--talks.

Car Washes Targeted by ICE Illegal Worker Raids

News item from the blogosphere:

Earlier this year, Car Care Inc., a subsidiary of Mace Securities Inc., was ordered to pay a fine of $100,000 and to forfeit $500,000 to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following a 2006 investigation. (At one time, Mace, a manufacturer of security and personal defense products, was one of the largest carwash chains in the nation.) Car Care Inc., based in the Northeast, had employees on the payroll who were using false identification cards to show legal status to work. $600,000! On top of that, five managers are awaiting criminal actions against them, personally.

Actually, I found this little tidbit while following a Google Alert on the I-9 employment verification form that employers must keep on file for each employee. The quoted tidbit is both newsworthy and instructional in and of itself, but it's also part of a blog posting by labor law attorney Jacob Monty.

Monty's whole point is how much safer and easier an employer's life becomes when he or she uses the E-Verify online database to check the "legal to work in the U.S." status of each new employee. The system is free, he says, works in about 10 seconds, and produces a document to file with each employee's I-9 that virtually guarantees you won't get fined by the government. Using E-Verify, you've done your due diligence, in other words.

The blog where Monty posted this was one for the carwashing and detailing industry, and he blithely warns his readers that car washes are "low-hanging fruit" when it comes to ICE illegal worker raids.

For his final advice, Monty warns, "ICE knows which companies are using the system and which are not—and they target those who are not using E-Verify."

I personally always rely on Personnel Concepts to keep compliant with the various laws and regulations of the nation, and that long-time labor law compliance company has issued an instructive and useful I-9 Compliance Kit. Highly recommended.

USCIS a Paper-Jammed Nightmare, Soon to Be Our Big Brother Thanks to a Bushian Bailout

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a $2.6-billion-a-year agency. It is also the paper-jammed and -backlogged agency formerly known as the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service).

Ask anybody who's dealt with the agency in either incarnation and you'll hear horror stories of standing in blocks-long lines before dawn and spending the whole day waiting for your name to be called. Then a year or two later, you might hear something--if you're lucky.

Someone caught on to the nightmare known as the INS in 1999 and began a modernization process, but they forgot to fund it. Then came 9/11, then the merger into DHS, and then more lack of funds.

Finally, late in 2008 IBM was chosen to take the whole process online in a $500-million, long-overdue project. Considering that it costs the USCIS $100 million a year just to ship and store the huge files it creates for each immigrant, it seems that they coulda and shoulda found the $500 million many long years ago. In five years of operation or so, the computerization will pay for itself.

The goal is to process each applicant in six months' time, down from the 18 months to three years that it typically takes, using electronic applications and database filing.

The new system will allow government agencies, from the Border Patrol to the FBI to the Labor Department, to access immigration records faster and more accurately. In combination with initiatives to link digital fingerprint scans to unique identification numbers, it would create a lifelong digital record for applicants. It also would eliminate the need for time- and labor-intensive filing and refiling of paper forms, which are stored at 200 locations in 70 million manila file folders. (Big Brother has finally arrived!)

To its credit, the USCIS did manage to put its appointments system online a few years back (for another cool $500 mil), and those lines that snaked around several city blocks have now been reduced. Queues still exist, but people show up at appointed times rather than lining up for a limited number of seats each morning. That part is now more manageable, but the processing time is still far too lengthy.

The whole system is so dysfunctional that immigrants who get tired of the wait (or whose documents are simply lost or misplaced, rendering them a non-person) can turn to the court of last resort called (funnily) OIL, Office of Immigrant Litigation, which employs 250 lawyers and costs the government another $20 or more million a year to operate.