http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.5726/pub_detail.asp
Michael Cutler
The fraud that permeates the immigration system has many guises. This week, a report surfaced that a California man took college exams for Middle Eastern students. Six of the students were arrested, although more than100 students availed themselves of Daniel Higgins' "services."
Many of the students came from "Special Interest" countries – countries have a known involvement with terrorism. While this should not necessarily be construed to mean that the students were involved in terrorism, there is nothing to say that none of them were involved with terrorism, either. Additionally, according to the article, Higgins has been doing this for a decade and "business" was so good he had to hire additional people to defraud the immigration system. How was he able to get away with it for so long? How did ICE finally find out about this?
Where are these other students and are they known by name? If so, were any of their names on any terror watch lists? If they weren't in school, where were they and what were they doing? Does anyone in the government know the answers to these questions?
Schools are generally on the "honor system" and police the program by which they provide documentation to foreign students to enable them to come to the United States to attend school. While this is the way business is now conducted, many years ago the INS conducted occasional investigations of schools to try to create some integrity to the system. Today, I do not believe that any ICE agents perform any of these investigations routinely and not all of these schools are really schools. The schools that can issue I-20s make a ton of money from this and it is actually against their best interests financially to go after the students who pay their tuition to the schools.
While the official position is that they have never seen this before, I doubt this is the first time this sort of fraud has been successfully carried out.
The reality is that government is not willing to discuss the extreme lack of resources dedicated to going after fraud and enforcing the immigration laws from within the interior of the United States. As a number of my contacts at ICE have told me, there is often more concern about those who produce counterfeit Gucci handbags than those who produce counterfeit passports.
I would love to know if ICE is looking for any of the other "students" who were not attending school and if they are, what resources are being made available to the investigation? All too often in this game of hide and seek, ICE lacks the resources to do an effective job of seeking.
The challenge that confronts ICE is illustrated by the last sentence of the report linked above:
More than 220,000 foreign students study each year in American colleges and universities, including about 15,500 from the Middle East.
Nothing is being said about the imperative to combat massive levels of immigration fraud. Indeed, the administration and members of Congress are already licking their chops at the prospect of creating an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens whose true identities are unknown and unknowable. There is no way of knowing their true nationalities. There is no way of knowing if they are wanted fugitives fleeing law enforcement in their own countries. There is now way of knowing who they are affiliated with or what their true intentions are in running our nation's borders. There is also no reliable way of even knowing how long they have been in the United States.
By using multiple false identities, these illegal aliens have so effectively covered their tracks that an alien who arrived here last week would have absolutely no problem in convincing the beleaguered adjudications officers at USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) that they have been in the United States for as many years as they would need in order to qualify for participation in Comprehensive Immigration Reform. This is why two years ago I strongly suggested that a much more accurate and descriptive name for that legislation would have been the "Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act.”
Criminals and terrorists should give our government the MVP Award.
It is often said that when people do too little too late to remedy a dangerous situation that they locked the barn doors after the horses were stolen. Where our borders and the immigration system are concerned, the horses were stolen, the barn was burned down and our leaders are still refusing to lock the doors to the farmhouse.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michael Cutler is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a recognized authority who addresses the implications of immigration on national security and criminal justice. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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