The president’s proposal for immigration reform, which was announced last week, will make America more secure, officials say, but critics argue it will be impossible to adequately police the new system, which they fear will create new loopholes for terrorists to exploit.
“Our homeland will be more secure when we can better account for those who enter our country, instead of the current situation in which millions of people are unknown … to the law,” said President Bush as he outlined his proposal last week.
Officials say legalizing the estimated 8 million undocumented alien workers in the country will benefit national security.
“It’s better to know who these people are,” said Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
But many are skeptical about a system that will add more work to an already overloaded bureaucracy.
Establishing the identity of even a portion of the country’s vast pool of undocumented workers “will be impossible with the current level of resources,” said former immigration agent Mike Cutler, who supports better enforcement of immigration laws.
Immigration advocates agree.
“The immigration agencies are notoriously unable to keep up with their workload even now,” said Lisa Navarrete, of La Raza, a Hispanic civil rights group. “How will they cope with millions of these applications?”
Mr. Cutler said in 1996, the last occasion when an effort was made to regularize the status of large numbers of illegal residents, “tens of thousands of criminals — many of them felons — were naturalized, because there simply were not the agents available to check their backgrounds.”
Officials said the fee that undocumented workers will have to pay will help defray additional costs and that bringing such people out of the shadows will free other resources.
“It will reduce the flow of people trying to cross our borders illegally to get jobs,” said Asa Hutchinson, the Department of Homeland Security’s undersecretary for border and transportation security, “which is what a substantial number of our border patrol agents are focused on at the moment.”
Officials also said the proposal will drain the swamp in which people-smuggling and document-forging rings thrive. These networks can be used by terrorists, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told reporters Friday.
“There’s a whole infrastructure to get … undocumented aliens into the United States. … And if you can get an undocumented alien into this country, you certainly can get a terrorist,” Mr. Ridge said, adding, “that process of validating or legitimizing the presence of these undocumented aliens … hopefully will at least dry up in part this incredible network” of document forgers and people smugglers.
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