There was a lot of talk recently about the DIGNIDAD Act – a “comprehensive immigration reform” measure championed by Florida congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar and sponsored by 20 of her fellow Republicans and an equal number of Democrats.
Salazar has been pushing this bill (whose acronym is the Spanish word for “dignity”) for a couple of Congresses now and is sure to keep at it, maybe even with a debate she’s proposed with GOP freshman superstar Brandon Gill.
Much of the controversy surrounding the bill has focused on whether it should be considered an “amnesty” for the millions of illegal immigrants it would give work permits to.
Of course it’s an amnesty.
But that’s less interesting than a question no one seems to have thought to ask: Is such a huge undertaking even administratively feasible without inviting massive fraud?
By Salazar’s own estimate, DHS would be deluged by at least 10 million illegal-alien applicants, and would have to determine – one by one – whether they meet all of the bill’s complicated eligibility requirements, pass criminal background checks, pay the fines, do the required check-ins, etc., etc.
All this would be dumped on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS, the DHS division that handles work permits, green cards, and citizenship. USCIS already has its hands full dealing with its normal workload. Dropping 10 million additional files into its in-box would turn it into Lucy-in-the-chocolate-factory, with political pressure to speed things up inevitably leading to rubber-stamping of applications and the awarding of legal status to fraudsters, criminals, and other undesirables.
This isn’t just idle speculation. In recent decades, we’ve conducted two large-scale social experiments that show what happens to the integrity of the immigration system when politicians overwhelm it beyond what it can reasonably be expected to handle.
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