Would President Trump Fix the "Broken" Immigration?

We keep hearing that our current immigration system is broken and it must be overhauled to better serve the immigrants, especially the illegal ones. And in this process, it seems that immigration, whether legal or illegal, is not necessarily run in the best interest of the American people, but in the best interest of crony capitalists and the ruling elites.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency with the Department of Homeland Security, was created in 2002 and assumed its functions on March 1, 2003, as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. USCIS has over 200 offices around the world and staffs 19,000 employees and contractors in four directorates and nine program offices. Applications are processed in four major USCIS Service Centers and 83 Field Offices in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Guam.

Funding USCIS operations largely from user fees, less than 4 percent of its FY2014 budget came from Congressional appropriations. According to William A. Kandel, writing in a Congressional Service Report in May 2015, $124 million USCIS funding came from direct congressional appropriations and $3.097 billion came from user fees in 2014. http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R44038.pdf

Over twenty years ago, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was transformed by creating the Immigration Examinations Fee Account (IEFA) in 1988 to fund the agency’s activities. “The agency has two other small accounts that were created to support specific purposes both within and outside USCIS: the H-1B Non-Immigrant Petitioner Fee Account; and the H-1B Fraud Prevention and Detection Fee Account.”

When DHS receives its annual funding, USCIS also receives its direct appropriations. In previous years, Congress also funded special projects through direct appropriations such as backlog reduction. In recent years, according to CRS, appropriations have exclusively funded E-Verify and immigrant integration grants. E-Verify is a system that electronically confirms if individuals have proper authorization to work in the United States.

INS was legally allowed to charge fees for immigration services even before the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA). When the Immigration Examinations Fee Account (IEFA) was created, USCIS collected most of its budget from user fees, and its budget was no longer subject to annual congressional approval. Congress has little or no influence on our immigration policies and enforcement.

Our President issued on November 20, 2014 the Immigration Accountability Executive Action which included provisions such as an expansion of the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program started in 2012, and the new Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program that “grants certain unauthorized aliens protection from removal, and work authorization, for three years.”

Applicants submit petitions and pay user fees to USCIS which “would purportedly pay for the cost of administering the program.” This executive action benefited 5 million unauthorized aliens living in the United States. “The deferred action programs of the President’s executive action have been temporarily enjoined.”

Some Congressmen, reflecting the wishes of their constituents, oppose deferred action programs but have little or no options to stop the programs using the annual funding process. They cannot control an agency which is largely independent of Congress. To change this situation, an enactment of law would be required which Congress does not seem interested in pursuing, as the illegal immigration debacle continues unabated despite the recent violent attacks in Paris by “refugees” from Syria and elsewhere who were allowed into EU unrestricted.

While some are happy that USCIS reduces the burden of cost to American taxpayers, others are concerned over the lack of congressional oversight on its activities and its lack of accountability to Congress.

Additional potential issues include the level of fees that may prevent potential applicants from seeking benefits or deter lawful permanent residents from becoming citizens; the pace and progress of information technology modernization may not serve legal petitioners efficiently, causing huge backlogs of 4 million legal applications; and the inability of Congress to oversee the adequacy of personnel management and resources.

With the leading purpose of processing immigrant petitions, USCIS handled in 2014 six million petitions for immigration-related services and benefits. USCIS performs other functions:

-          Adjudication of immigration and naturalization petitions

-          Refugee and asylum claims and related humanitarian and international concerns

-          Immigration-related services such as issuing employment authorizations

-          Petitions of nonimmigrant change-of-status

“Humanitarian functions have no associated fee” but the following do levy user fees:

-          Immigration adjudication

Of the 6 million petitions processed each year, 1 million are for permanent status and 5 million are for temporary non-immigrant status; adjudicators determine if immediate relatives and family members of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent resident (LPRs) are eligible; if employees U.S. businesses demonstrate they are needed and no other Americans are available; they also determine if foreign nationals on a temporary visa are eligible to change to another non-immigrant status or LPR status

-          Work authorization

Screens aliens for work under certain conditions

-          Employment verification

Checks lawful status to work in the United States (since FY2007, congressional appropriations have funded the E-Verify)

-          International Services

USCIS Office of International Affairs “adjudicates refugee applications and conducts background and record checks related to some immigrant petitions abroad;” a component of this program is the asylum officer corps who interview and screen asylum applicants; according to USCIS, “a person seeking asylum is applying for protection from persecution for the same reasons as a refugee but, unlike a refugee, is present in the United States”

-          Fraud Detection and National Security

This office flags applications and petitions that trigger national security and criminal database notifications; such duties, formerly performed by INS enforcement, are now under the responsibility of DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

-          Civic Integration

Instructing and training on citizenship rights and responsibilities via a Citizenship Resource Center website and via the Immigrant Integration Grants Program “which assists public or private nonprofit organizations that provide citizenship instruction and naturalization application services to LPRs

-          Naturalization

Granting U.S. citizenship to LPRs; adjudicators must check if aliens have continuously resided in the U.S. for a specific period of time, have good moral character, are able to read, write, speak, and understand English, and have a basic knowledge of U.S. civic and history;

Do unsavory characters who are not worthy of American citizenship or of refugee status slip through the adjudication process? Of course they do, the terrorist Tsernaev brothers come to mind.

One of the biggest criticisms of USCIS is that petitions are still processed in the “outmoded” paper form and there are constant complaints of lost files. Since 2008 USCIS has embarked on IT Modernization and Client Services in order to “improve information sharing, workload capacity, and system integrity.” Eventually the system will be “paperless, centralized, and consolidated, ensuring national security and integrity, customer service, operational efficiency, and quality in immigration benefit decisions.” (Fiscal Year 2016 Congressional Budget Justifications, p. 3357)

Since Congress is so weak and unwilling to protect our borders, our American interests, and our sovereignty, would a President Trump be ready to use his executive pen to stop the flood of illegal immigrants by building a fence, enforcing current immigration laws, and deporting criminal illegal aliens?

 

 

A New Breed of Global Communism on Steroids

Politicians like to tell us ad nauseam that the immigration system is broken. What exactly is broken? I asked this question recently of the panel on immigration at CPAC 2015. It became obvious that conservatives and progressives conflate the issue of legal immigration with the issue of illegal immigration.

One of the panelists began to show us a very complex chart of the LEGAL immigration system and the hoops and offices that a person must navigate in order to legally immigrate to this country. The system appeared no different than the system in place in 1982 when I became a naturalized American citizen. We are told that there are 4.1 million unresolved applications for LEGAL permanent residence in the United States, some of them backlogged 15 years or more. These people want to join their families already legally in the U.S. They are unfortunate that they cannot jump a fence, swim across a river, or walk across the desert. They are not the chosen ones to be flown or bussed across the border by our own government that wants to fundamentally change the demographic makeup of our country.

What politicians and their minions talk about when they refer to the broken immigration system, is the wait time for LEGAL immigrants. What IS BROKEN is the fact that the government is not securing the borders, and is not enforcing the laws already on the books in regards to ILLEGAL immigration into our country.

Rep. Robert Pittenger of North Carolina, Chairman of the Congressional Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare is telling us that “Americans should prepare to protect their homes, businesses, and families in the event of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster” in a 24-page booklet that was just released.

Yet they are leaving our southern and northern borders vulnerable to entry of any citizen of another country who wants amnesty. And we are not just talking about illegal Mexicans. Border patrols have found prayer rugs and Qurans abandoned in the desert on the southern border.

The government is bringing in refugees from countries that hate our western culture, our legal system, and our way of life. They are bringing in thousands of refugees each month from Somalia and Syria to resettle them in the United States, knowing that these people are not interested in learning our language, accepting our culture, and becoming Americans.  As soon as they arrive, they become wards of the state, and start making demands to install Shariah Law and to accommodate their needs for madrassas schools, for exercise of their Islamic religion, and to take down anything that is American and offensive to them: our flag, our National Anthem, our Pledge of Allegiance, and our Christian religious symbols.

The new standards of education called Common Core, adopted pretty much around the country, are indoctrinating our children into communism and proselytize for Islam. It’s no news that academia has been communist for years but lately the assault against anything American has picked up speed. Take the case of the Irvine, University of California ban on the American flag. It is not the work of misguided individual students; they are supported by their professors. These are not isolated incidents. They are happening around the country at every level of our educational system and of our government.

When I came to this country legally, I had every intention of assimilating into the American culture, of learning the language, and becoming a contributing member of society. I did not run to the nearest Social Security office to sign up for benefits, to vote illegally, and to form barrios, countries within our country, bringing with me the hellhole I escaped from.

Politicians tell us that these people come here to work; they don’t come for the welfare or the in-state tuition. But the welfare figures and the earned income tax credit given to newly arrived illegals are in the billions of dollars a year and they are incontrovertible evidence that most don’t come here to work and then return home to their countries. They are here to stay; we are their social featherbed and financial support. The IRS tells us that they are entitled to retroactive earned income tax credit for 2011-2013 to the tune of $35,000 per family, even though they paid no taxes in those years and were here illegally.

Politicians and the main stream media tell us that illegals live in the shadows, they are euphemistically called undocumented Americans. They don’t live in the shadows. They draw welfare, they go to the same churches with us, they shop at the same stores, and they send their kids to the same day care, kindergartens, and schools. On the day when SNAP and EBT are distributed, all the cash registers at Walmart have lines of Hispanics and Middle Easterners who do not speak a word of English, not even “thank you.”

The illegal children that arrived last year to supposedly join their families were not all children after all , some were known-gang members and drug dealers from Mexico, many were sick, bringing in diseases that were formerly eradicated in the U.S. and new ones that are endemic to Central America. Some of our children have died from the enterovirus and a mysterious paralysis. Some adults contracted antibiotic-resistant TB. Illegals brought in measles, scabies, Chagas disease, and lice.

In New Hampshire there are some schools were 82 different languages are spoken.  How do you accommodate so many different children who do not speak English and have no relatives, and still maintain a semblance of normalcy in schools where scores are now plummeting?  How do you maintain standards of excellence without dragging down American students?

Churches took them in with open arms because they received millions of dollars in grants to do so from the federal government. It was not just the Christian thing to do; it was a money-making machine. The children were injected into small communities around the country, mostly without the knowledge of the population. Talk about forced colonization!

Many of these illegal immigrants come from dictatorships of communism, socialism, or totalitarianism. They don’t know what a democracy is, don’t care, and will not understand it. Many are illiterate in their own languages. Democracy for them is welfare from the government. Their trust and belief system are in BIG government. Capitalism and self-reliance are foreign concepts to them. Piracy, theft, cheating, stealing, bartering to survive, and a poor work ethic are the norm.

I remember the feelings of elation when I arrived in New York. I deplaned and I breathed freedom into my lungs. I knew, if I worked hard, I could be anything I wanted to be because I had freedom of opportunity, not guaranteed welfare. I did not expect anybody to support me and I did not expect others to translate everything for me into my language while I lazily pretended that I was too dumb to learn.

I still had a tremendous fear of the police state I escaped from and cringed every time someone knocked on the door and my heart pounded when I saw a policeman. Under communism, they were there to harass and to control us. We were always guilty no matter what.

Thirty-seven years later, I find myself more each day reliving the former communist country I fled in 1978. We now live in a neo-communism of sorts where the police state is everywhere, surveillance is more sophisticated and intrusive than the Soviets would have ever thought of; there is no need to place a spy on each street or stairwell in every block of apartments who registered the comings and goings of residents. There is no need to wiretap someone’s phone or home.

Now we have electronic surveillance that is neatly stored by NSA in Utah. If we don’t make it easy for them via Facebook and other social media, they now have installed smart grids, smart meters, smart appliances that communicate with the mother ship everything we do in our own homes under the guise of convenience, saving the planet from manufactured and imagined global warming, and saving us money. They are spying on us without a warrant not just with drones and cameras at every intersection, but with our TVs, our laptops, our GPS devices, our car computers, and even medical tags and I.D. tags embedded under your skin.

The immigrants of today are a total different breed from the immigrants of 37 years ago. They are here to demographically alter the makeup of our society in order to “fundamentally change” who we are as a nation, just like we were promised by our president five days before Inauguration. He has been mystifyingly successful beyond anybody’s imagination.

The 30-50 million illegals that were amnestied by both parties in Congress will change America into a borderless country with no identity, no sense of real history, no traditions, no pride, a hodge-podge of global citizens of various ethnic backgrounds and multi-cultures who have no allegiance to the Founding Fathers, to the Constitution, and to the citizens before us who have sacrificed themselves and built this country with their treasure, sweat, tears, and blood.

If you want to know what America will look like ten or twenty years from now, look at Sweden, Paris, London, Marseille, Belgium and other countries where senescent populations are replaced by fertile Middle Eastern and African populations. Europeans and now Americans are not having enough babies, instead are strolling dogs and cats. This fundamental change was brought by decades of progressive indoctrination in schools and universities that have destroyed the fabric of many societies with their preaching of communism, tolerance, diversity, multi-culturalism, and immorality.

For the last seven years, we have gone daily and weekly from one manufactured crisis to another, where a misperceived social injustice had to be redressed by creating more and more bureaucracies that we will never be able to undo. We have become the most racially divided that this country has ever been, thanks to the current administration.

We have witnessed the creation of the progressive thought police and intolerance, labeling everyone with whom they disagree as bigots, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and domestic terrorists. We have also witnessed the government’s social engineering in action and takeover of the main stream media, of morality, marriage, education, finance, banking, housing, car manufacturing, health care, of millions of acres of arable land and parks, of the military, the Internet, privacy, nutrition, free speech, free assembly, of religion, and pretty soon the last bastions – the state police and the personal freedom to bear arms. It is déjà vu for me but it is communism on steroids.

Copyright:  ILEANA JOHNSON  2015