August 30, 2004
Amnesty Betrayals Past And Present —A Handy
Reference Guide
By
Juan Mann
Amnesty: n. a decision by a government to
forgive people who have committed particular illegal
acts or crimes.
--Cambridge
Dictionary of American English
As the
Republican National Convention gets underway in New
York City, the quest by Congressman Tom Tancredo to
"stop amnesty" in the GOP and "raise hell" if
thwarted bears watching.
But the threat of “amnesty”
is not something that can be blocked just by defeating
one heinous bill in
Congress. The President doesn’t really need
something as public as an
executive order to give illegal alien amnesty
either—because amnesty is already underway in many
forms.
The Eisenhower Administration’s
successful illegal alien round-ups under the
Immigration Act of 1952 were America’s last experience
of real immigration law enforcement. Since that time,
rewarding illegal aliens for their lawbreaking has
become a central theme of federal immigration policy.
Notwithstanding Ike’s
heroic after-the-fact efforts at border control, the
reality since World War II is that there never really
was any physical control of our borders in the first
place.
The difference now is that in the
wake of America’s first across-the-board amnesty in
1986—the ridiculously-named “Immigration Reform and
Control Act” (IRCA)—illegal aliens have been
arriving at an even faster rate.
And eighteen years after IRCA, the
rate of increase in illegal immigration is
intolerable even by pre-1986 standards.
Through the years there has been
one constant in America’s immigration law – de facto
amnesty . . . before, during and after IRCA. It’s
now simply undeniable that the legalization of millions
of lawbreakers in 1986 did nothing to stem the tide.
Lax
enforcement, pointless bureaucratic systems, and Treason
Lobby appeasement has been the reality of American
immigration policy even long before the Clinton
administration installed that champion of immigration
non-enforcement,
Doris Meissner, as Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) Commissioner.
And yes, Virginia, as I’ve
written before, the Immigration Act as presently
constituted (post-1965) amounts to a permanent amnesty
for illegal aliens and criminal alien residents.
There’s a huge federal immigration
bureaucracy in place to implement it too. The culprits
are the obscure U.S.
Immigration Court system and Board of Immigration
Appeals (BIA) in the Department of Justice’s Executive
Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), aided and abetted
by the
three-headed immigration monster of the Department
of Homeland Security (DHS).
Remember . . . when it comes to the federal government,
things can always get worse.
As
long as the idea of a one-time amnesty free-for-all
remains overwhelmingly unpopular with the American
people—as it should be—the federal immigration
bureaucracy look for ways to give more legal status to
more illegal aliens more often . . . all behind closed
doors.
DHS
now has a separate “service” division called
Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) under the
direction of former international banker
Eduardo Aguirre. This separate agency dedicated to
helping illegal aliens with all of their customer
service needs consolidates all of the traditionally
alien-friendly INS “service” operations under one roof .
. . with no apparent law enforcement supervision.
The
General Accounting Office (GAO) has
already reported that it could not determine the
full extent of immigration benefit fraud in the former
consolidated INS. Who will be watching for
immigration benefit fraud at Aguirre’s USCIS . . .
when they have their own agency all to themselves?
The
USCIS is the same agency that boasts a corps of asylum
officers with a record of finding that
97 percent of asylum applicants have the required
“credible fear” of persecution back home, and
immigration examiners, now called District Adjudications
Officers (DAOs), whose “grant” stamps are at the ready,
while their “denial” stamps are under lock and key as a
matter of policy.
The USCIS also carries on the
legacy of former INS managers who granted an untold
number of fraudulent agricultural amnesty applications,
overruling the decisions of the agency’s own
front-line interviewers. These nameless and faceless
bureaucrats have never been accountable for their
crimes—as I’ve reported, the 1986 amnesty fraud evidence
is disbursed among millions of files concealed under
red covers, supposedly to protect the aliens’
privacy.
So who
is going to stop the next clandestine amnesty at USCIS?
Or
more importantly, if no one is talking, who would even
know the extent of immigration benefit fraud, or
bureaucratic laziness (in granting applications) at the
new USCIS candy store?
The moral of the story: IRCA 1986
wasn’t the end of amnesty, it was just the beginning. As
far as rewarding illegal aliens goes, we possibly ain’t
seen’ nothin’ yet!
Given the nature of the federal
immigration bureaucracy – with its tendency to expand
the give-away programs and ignore law enforcement
provisions passed by Congress – there really are several
different types of lawbreaking reward programs now
underway. The reality is even more sinister than a
publicized one-time, massive
Green Card give-away.
I offer the following summary of
the six types of amnesty in current federal immigration
policy, along with the statutes and regulations. Read
‘em and weep . . . for America.
