February 11, 2008

Burdened DHS: 10s of thousands get green cards before background checks

From this:

In a major policy shift aimed at reducing a ballooning immigration backlog, the Homeland Security Department is preparing to grant permanent residency to tens of thousands of applicants before the FBI completes a required background check.

Those eligible are immigrants whose fingerprints have cleared the FBI database of criminal convictions and arrests, but whose names have not yet cleared the FBI's criminal or intelligence files after six months of waiting.

The immigrants who are granted permanent status, more commonly known as getting their green cards, will be expected eventually to clear the FBI's name check. If they don't, their legal status will be revoked and they'll be deported...

..."[Background checking is] a very complicated process," said Bill Carter, a FBI spokesman. "It involves dozens of agencies and databases and often foreign governments."

...Although the FBI clears about 70 percent of the name checks within 72 hours, the bureau struggles to keep up with more than 74,000 requests per week, roughly half arising from immigration applications.

As discussed here, this isn't a good omen for "comprehensive immigration reform".

And, assuming 10,000,000 applicants for amnesty and the present rate of 37,000 per week (only half of their present rate of 74,000 per week are immigration related), that means it would take over five years to process all of those. And, that doesn't take into account those currently in line. If the processing capability was allocated evenly between amnesty applicants and those who are already in line, it would be over ten years before all amnesty applicants had been processed, and that would obviously have a serious impact on those currently in line. And, under the various versions of reform, the DHS had only 24 hours (perhaps 48 hours in one version) to disapprove someone, or they'd be given their "Z-visa". Note that that's less than the 72 hours mentioned above.

All of that leads me to strongly suspect that amnesty applicants would basically be shuttled through the program with minimal checking.

Raising that point and crunching the numbers would make a good line of inquiry if anyone gets to ask Hillary, Obama, or McCain a question. Bringing along a calculator and crunching the numbers as you ask the question would make a very good prop and help drive the point home to those who saw the video.

Posted to Immigration_terror at February 11, 2008 11:37 AM