Glamour-Girl Gov, Gone?

enough. We also need to fix the federal agencies that are responsible for implementing them. Four years ago, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that immigration fraud owing to the widespread use of phony documents was “pervasive and significant.” This poses a security problem: Two-thirds of the 94 foreign terrorists known to have operated in the United States between the early 1990s and 2004 committed immigration fraud. The GAO also concluded in a recent study that the Department of Homeland Security has little prospect of discouraging the use of fraudulent documents because it has no strategy for punishing offenders.

Another report found that although U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has a statutory mandate to eliminate its backlog of immigration applications by September 2006, at least 1.2 million such cases remain and are unlikely to be eliminated by the September deadline. “Comprehensive” immigration reform would add amnesty applications from 11 million illegal aliens, and visa applications from at least an additional 400,000 guest workers a year, to a bureaucracy unable to cope with its current caseload.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

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enough. We also need to fix the federal agencies that are responsible for implementing them. Four years ago, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that immigration fraud owing to the widespread use of phony documents was “pervasive and significant.” This poses a security problem: Two-thirds of the 94 foreign terrorists known to have operated in the United States between the early 1990s and 2004 committed immigration fraud. The GAO also concluded in a recent study that the Department of Homeland Security has little prospect of discouraging the use of fraudulent documents because it has no strategy for punishing offenders.

Another report found that although U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has a statutory mandate to eliminate its backlog of immigration applications by September 2006, at least 1.2 million such cases remain and are unlikely to be eliminated by the September deadline. “Comprehensive” immigration reform would add amnesty applications from 11 million illegal aliens, and visa applications from at least an additional 400,000 guest workers a year, to a bureaucracy unable to cope with its current caseload.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.