There was a lot of talk recently about the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4393">DIGNIDAD Act</a> — 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 <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5836991-maria-salazar-dignity-act-immigration/#:~:text=public%252C%2520perhaps%2520televised%252C-,debate,-over%2520her%2520legislation">debate she’s proposed</a> 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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnHiAWlrYQc">Lucy-in-the-chocolate-factory</a>, 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.
The first was the 1986 amnesty. The Immigration Reform and Control Act was signed by President Ronald Reagan 40 years ago this fall and amounted to a “grand bargain” of amnesty now in exchange for promises of enforcement in the future. (Sound familiar?)
The amnesty had two main parts. One was for illegal aliens who had lived here since before 1982. The other was the “Special Agricultural Worker” amnesty, the brainchild of then-Rep. <a href="https://cis.org/Fishman/Schumer-Architect-Most-FraudRidden-Immigration-Program-US-History-May-Do-It-Again">Chuck Schumer</a>, who feared the whole bill could be defeated without including a special deal for the farm lobby.
The <a href="https://cis.org/Report/Lessons-Learned-Legalization-Programs-1980s">SAW program</a>, as it came to be called, had much looser requirements than the pre-1982 amnesty, making it the chief target for fraudsters. The Department of Agriculture estimated that there were 300,000 to 500,000 illegal-alien farmworkers in the country. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) planned for 800,000 applications, just to be on the safe side. But because SAW was the easier mark for ineligible aliens, nearly 1.3 million illegal aliens applied, far more than the ostensible target population. Upon questioning, some alien “farmworkers” claimed to have picked watermelons from trees, dug cherries out of the ground, and picked purple cotton.
Most were approved anyway because of a lack of resources and political pressure to move things along as quickly as possible. This turned SAW into “one of the most extensive immigration frauds ever perpetrated against the United States Government” – in the words of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/12/us/migrants-false-claims-fraud-on-a-huge-scale.html">New York Times</a>, no less.
Nor was this a victimless crime. Apart from subverting the rule of law, one of the “farmworkers” who finagled a green card was Mahmoud “The Red” Abouhalima, an Egyptian visa-overstayer who drove a cab in New York. It was only after he was fraudulently legalized that he could freely travel in and out of the country, enabling him to go to Pakistan for the terrorist training that equipped him to be one of the leaders of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.
The second experiment in politically driven administrative overload came 10 years after IRCA, in 1996. As the election approached, operatives in the White House – possibly including Vice President Al Gore himself – pushed the INS to naturalize immigrants as quickly as possible, to maximize votes for President Bill Clinton’s reelection in November.
There was indeed a large and growing backlog of naturalization applications stemming from the 1986 amnesty, as the former illegal aliens who had received green cards became eligible for citizenship. Even without the approaching election, there would have been political pressure to cut corners in response to constituent complaints that Grandma was having to wait too long to get sworn in. Hectoring from the White House and left-wing advocacy groups dialed the pressure up to 11.
Thus was born <a href="https://cis.org/Report/Did-Clinton-Administration-Churn-Criminal-Aliens-Naturalized-Citizens-Just-Time-Vote">Citizenship USA</a>, an INS initiative to mint one million new Americans by Election Day.
If you’ve read this far, you can guess what happened.
The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) later testified before Congress about INS employees who complained about “the extraordinary rush imposed on naturalization adjudications during CUSA [that,] according to these witnesses, meant that INS had naturalized people without ensuring that they were eligible.”
And the problem wasn’t that harried INS adjudicators overlooked some uncrossed “T”s and undotted “I”s. Rather, as the OIG noted, “some INS offices were naturalizing applicants so quickly that applicant criminal history reports … were arriving in INS offices only after the applicant had been sworn in as a United States citizen.”
OIG said that of the people naturalized during CUSA, fully 18% had not received a full criminal background check. Some 6,000 newly minted citizens were identified after the fact as possibly ineligible for criminal reasons. The Clinton DOJ pursued denaturalization cases in only 27 instances, and as of May 2000, only four had been stripped of their ill-gotten citizenship.
And this is only the tally of those ineligible due to criminal history. No doubt other frauds were also missed in the rush to create new voters, meaning that there have likely been thousands of immigrants enjoying the benefits of U.S. citizenship over the past three decades – all because politicians demand speed over integrity in immigration processing.
According to current USCIS Director <a href="https://x.com/USCISJoe/status/2046350246645502190">Joseph Edlow</a>, “Fraud permeates our entire immigration system.” He already has his work cut out for him in <a href="https://cis.org/Parsing-Immigration-Policy/Immigration-Newsmaker-Podcast-Conversation-USCIS-Director-Joseph-Edlow">rooting out that fraud</a> in the millions of work permits, green cards, and naturalizations his agency has to process every year – not to mention the huge backlog created by Biden’s open-border policies.
Politicians may think that by just writing down words they can create a new reality, but bitter experience shows that not to be the case.
***
Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

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Mass Amnesty And Fraud — The New Bill That Invites Both