AMNESTY TRUTH SHEET

The Truth About Amnesty
Amnesty overlooks the alien's illegal entry and ongoing illegal presence and creates a new legal status that allows the recipient to live and work in the country.

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U.S. Senate

Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007
This is the highly controversial 'compromise' immigration reform bill that failed in the Senate. It drew more criticism than support from all sides in the debate.

Get the 790-page bill, S. 1348.

The Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration
Reform Act of 2007
This is the "security-first" bill that was designed to draw more votes for comprehensive immigration reform. It failed a critical vote in the Senate.

Get the 762-page bill, S. 1639.

GAO Testimony

Prospects For Biometric US-VISIT Exit Capability Remain Unclear
DHS has invested about $1.3 billion over 4 years and delivered basically one-half of US-VISIT, meaning that biometrically enabled entry capabilities are operating at almost 300 air, sea, and land POEs, but comparable exit capabilities are not. Moreover, the prospects for this changing are essentially as uncertain today as they were 4 years ago.

Get the 16-page report.

CBO Testimony

Budgetary Impact of Current and Proposed Border Security and Immigration Policies
CBO estimates that implementation of S.2611 would require $81 billion in additional appropriations over the 10-year period, resulting in $78 billion in added outlays. Economic growth would increase by only a small degree.

Get the 12-page report.

Has Anyone Seen a "War on Terror" Anywhere?

Cranking Out New Citizens is the Focus

March 16, 2008 -- If we are supposed to prevent the next terrorist attack then it would make sense to keep the terrorists who want to kill us out of our country. In point of fact, rather than build a real fence that might impede if not block the torrents of illegal aliens into our country, the Congress gives us a "virtual fence" that costs lots of money and stops virtually no one! Instead of hiring an adequate number of Border Patrol agents and providing them with the tools they need to secure our borders, Border Patrol agents Ramos and Compean were maliciously and wrongly prosecuted. The rules of evidence were violated and a law that deals with the use of firearms in committing a crime were misused to see to it that these two valiant protectors of our nation and our borders would languish in prison for more than a decade each. That had to be a real morale booster for their colleagues who stand watch on our nation's borders. They know that they risk their lives just by going on duty. Now they know that their biggest enemy may well be the government they swore and allegiance to. And the outrageous case of Ramos and Compean are not the only such cases.

Many of us have complained about the lack of resources dedicated to enforcing the immigration laws from within the country. In fact, I have testified at two Congressional hearings on the resources allocated for immigration enforcement. And have testified before other hearings about related issues. You can read the transcript of the hearing before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims at which I testified on the topic: "Interior Immigration Enforcement Resources" on March 10. 2005. I was extremely critical about the lack of an adequate number of special agents at ICE who were dedicated to enforcing the immigration laws.

Read the transcript of that hearing.

Since that hearing, the administration no longer divulges the number of such agents claiming that such information is national security information and would assist the terrorists if they knew how many agents were on the hunt. In point of fact, I suspect that the more likely motivation to conceal those numbers is to keep the American people from knowing the truth!

Now we have an article that appeared in yesterday's edition of the New York Times that makes it clear that the focus of the wonder folks at USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) is to crank out as many applications as possible with little or no attention being paid to the integrity of the process that provides aliens with the "keys to the kingdom."

I know I have made these arguments many, many times before but it is important to understand that if USCIS is focused on cranking out as many new citizens as possible, presumably so that they will be able to vote in the next election, any semblance of quality control (which is all but gone at this point) will be utterly trashed!

The 911 Commission made very clear recommendations about immigration and border security- virtually all of which are being ignored nearly 6.5 years after the terrorist attacks.

Consider this excerpt from that report towards the bottom...

Terrorist Travel

More than 500 million people annually cross U.S. borders at legal entry points, about 330 million of them noncitizens. Another 500,000 or more enter illegally without inspection across America's thousands of miles of land borders or remain in the country past the expiration of their permitted stay. The challenge for national security in an age of terrorism is to prevent the very few people who may pose overwhelming risks from entering or remaining in the United States undetected.

In the decade before September 11, 2001, border security-encompassing travel, entry, and immigration-was not seen as a national security matter. Public figures voiced concern about the "war on drugs," the right level and kind of immigration, problems along the southwest border, migration crises originating in the Caribbean and elsewhere, or the growing criminal traffic in humans. The immigration system as a whole was widely viewed as increasingly dysfunctional and badly in need of reform. In national security circles, however, only smuggling of weapons of mass destruction carried weight, not the entry of terrorists who might use such weapons or the presence of associated foreign-born terrorists.

For terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons. Terrorists must travel clandestinely to meet, train, plan, case targets, and gain access to attack. To them, international travel presents great danger, because they must surface to pass through regulated channels, present themselves to border security officials, or attempt to circumvent inspection points.

In their travels, terrorists use evasive methods, such as altered and counterfeit passports and visas, specific travel methods and routes, liaisons with corrupt government officials, human smuggling networks, supportive travel agencies, and immigration and identity fraud. These can sometimes be detected.

Before 9/11, no agency of the U.S. government systematically analyzed terrorists' travel strategies. Had they done so, they could have discovered the ways in which the terrorist predecessors to al Qaeda had been systematically but detectably exploiting weaknesses in our border security since the early 1990s.

We found that as many as 15 of the 19 hijackers were potentially vulnerable to interception by border authorities. Analyzing their characteristic travel documents and travel patterns could have allowed authorities to intercept 4 to 15 hijackers and more effective use of information available in U.S. government databases could have identified up to 3 hijackers.

Looking back, we can also see that the routine operations of our immigration laws-that is, aspects of those laws not specifically aimed at protecting against terrorism-inevitably shaped al Qaeda's planning and opportunities. Because they were deemed not to be bona fide tourists or students as they claimed, five conspirators that we know of tried to get visas and failed, and one was denied entry by an inspector. We also found that had the immigration system set a higher bar for determining whether individuals are who or what they claim to be-and ensuring routine consequences for violations-it could potentially have excluded, removed, or come into further contact with several hijackers who did not appear to meet the terms for admitting short-term visitors.

Our investigation showed that two systemic weaknesses came together in our border system's inability to contribute to an effective defense against the 9/11 attacks: a lack of well-developed counterterrorism measures as a part of border security and an immigration system not able to deliver on its basic commitments, much less support counterterrorism. These weaknesses have been reduced but are far from being overcome.

Recommendation: Targeting travel is at least as powerful a weapon against terrorists as targeting their money. The United States should combine terrorist travel intelligence, operations, and law enforcement in a strategy to intercept terrorists, find terrorist travel facilitators, and constrain terrorist mobility.

Last year, you may recall, Senators Chuck Grassley and Sue Collins commissioned an investigation into allegations that USCIS claims to have "lost" 111,000 alien immigration files of aliens seeking a wide variety of immigration benefits including some 30,000 such aliens who were naturalized without their relating files!

There have been many other such reports issued by the GAO and the Office of the Inspector General (Internal Affairs) concerning the widespread lack of integrity to the immigration benefits program. The 9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel found that of 94 terrorists who had been identified as operating in our country in the decade preceding the attacks of 9/11, 59 of them of about 2/3 had committed immigration benefit fraud in order to either enter the United States or to embed themselves once they got here and hide in plain sight among us.

We the People must demand that our government deal with the national security issues that threaten our nation's security and the lives of our citizens. Having 90 year old grandmothers remove their shoes before they are permitted to board an airliner to purportedly make us safe is an affront to our intelligence when there are 20 million of more illegal aliens present in our country and their identities are unknown and unknowable. It is also an affront to our intelligence that while we are taking off our shoes because Richard Reid, the so-called "Shoe Bomber" concealed explosives in his shoes that citizens from Great Britain (his country of citizenship) are still able to enter the United States under the Visa Waiver Program and that program is now adding 5 countries from Eastern Europe. In point of fact, the Visa Waiver Program should have ended the day after the first attack on the World Trade Center on February 25, 1993. Meanwhile the Transit Without Visa Program was left in place by President George W. Bush until August of 2002, nearly a full year after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

By granting United States citizenship to aliens without regard to proper investigations would be insane at any time, but as our nation continues to confront the potential for a terrorist attack on our nation and our citizens makes this situation absolutely unforgivable!

Incidentally, you may be interested to know that when our nation confers United States citizenship upon an alien, he or she may take a new name when he (she) naturalizes. If they then apply for a United States passport, the passport will only reflect the name that they took when they became a naturalized citizen!

In effect, the naturalized citizen can place himself into his very own, private witness protection program!

Meanwhile, we are being subjected to increasingly invasive searches when we seek to board an airliner! I am not opposed to being searched, I do, however resent the many failings of our own government to take the reasonable measures to make us truly secure.

The news media often portrays those of us who are concerned with border security and the failings of the immigration system to be political "Conservatives" (and worse!)

For the record, I am a lifelong Democrat - I don't know any Democrats (or Republicans or Independents) who want to see our nation attacked or our citizens slaughtered. I don't know any Democrats (or Republicans or Independents) who want to see Americans lose their jobs because illegal aliens will take their jobs for lower wages under dangerous conditions. I also don't know any Democrats (or Republicans or Independents) who want to see vulnerable aliens from Third World Countries exploited or see alien gang members enter the United States, set up shop and threaten the safety of our communities.

In fact the only Democrats or Republicans who do apparently favor such lunacy have a name: politicians! These are the politicians who vote for a virtual rather than a real fence. These are the politicians who favor in-state tuition for illegal aliens and want a guest worker amnesty program. We the People can and must give these "leaders" a new title: Unemployed!

The backlog of applications and the lack of integrity to the system can be effectively addressed. All that needs to be done is to hire many more special agents of ICE and, while they are being trained, detail agents from other federal agencies the way that there are drug task forces and terrorism task forces. Have them go out and conduct field investigations into those who apply for residency and United States citizenship. When American citizens enter into fraud marriages and a case can be made arrest these co-conspirators. They are committing a felony and should be treated accordingly. I am quite familiar with this process, I spent a year as an acting adjudicator in the unit that dealt with these petitions. I also spent several years as an agent in the Frauds Unit. We even arrested attorneys for arranging such marriages.

Additionally, we need to arrest the aliens in these cases and seek to have them prosecuted and then deported after they do their jail time upon conviction.

Today there are precious few field investigations done in conjunction with such fraud schemes. Petitioners are almost never arrested and aliens are almost never arrested, prosecuted or deported! If they succeed in getting away with such fraud, the odds are good that they will go on to become United States citizens. That is how Nada Nadim Prouty became an FBI special agent and them spied on the FBI and CIA for Hezbollah!

When aliens get away with committing such fraud, they are likely to tell their friends about their success story. This encourages still more fraud and the backlog continues to grow. This leads to the bureaucracy running the bureaucratic conveyor belt even faster as the news article I have attached below indicates. This makes it still more likely that those who commit fraud will get away with it and this further imperils our safety and our nation's security.

It is time that We the People contacted our elected representatives and that we give them a clear and unequivocal message: Truly secure our nation's borders and make damn certain that our immigration system honors those who play by the rules and abide by the law and punishes those who would defraud the system! That is the job that We the People must demand that they do. If they refuse to do this simple job, consider them to be insubordinate to the wishes of the American people and do what any boss would do with an insubordinate employee: Fire Them!

Democracy is not a spectator sport!

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

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ANCIR is a volunteer 501(c)(4) citizens organization. Our goals are to educate the public on the problems created by current U.S. immigration policies and to promote legislation to correct them. Donations to 501(c)4s are not deductible for tax purposes.

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America's Immigration Security Crisis

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More Maxwell...

Checking Terrorism at the Border
Employee corruption within USCIS... how ongoing national security investigations are being jeopardized!

Get the 35-page brief.

Listen to the testimony.

Check the video.

More Jenks...

Shortfalls of 1986
Amnesty
Failed to wipe the illegal
immigration slate clean; failed to deter future
ilegal immigration.

Get the 17-page brief.