Those who push for amnesty claim that the applicants will be closely scrutinized, that there will be criminal record checks before they are granted amnesty.  That’s a pretty thought, but those of us who were involved in carrying out the 1986 amnesty (known as IRCA) know it is a hollow promise.  The proponents of amnesty are either deliberately misstating the case to support their political desires, or they are woefully ignorant. At NAFBPO we suspect both, depending on who is doing the talking.

 

There are several reasons that criminal record checks will be meaningless – we know this from the personal experience of some of our members.

 

First, as a practical matter, the FBI will be incapable of carrying out the ten or twelve million fingerprint checks in a timely fashion.  Because their priority is (properly, in our view) to conduct fingerprint checks in criminal cases, these applicant prints will receive low-priority treatment.   In 1986, if the FBI did not respond to the submission of a fingerprint card within a specified period of time (flexible, but usually about six weeks) the record check was presumed to have revealed no derogatory information and the application for legalization was approved.  If a derogatory response came after approval of the application, generally, no action was taken to revoke the approval.  Thus, those criminals are still among us.

 

Second. there will be no foreign criminal record checks conducted; there is no system in place to do so, nor will there be.  We will thus have to rely on the applicant’s honesty when he is asked if he has a criminal record in a foreign country – and he will know that if he admits one he will be ineligible to legalize, so . . . draw your own conclusions.  Even if it were bureaucratically possible to query, say, Mexico, about an individual’s criminal record, the Mexican government has no reliable central index of criminal histories. And Mexico is but about half of the problem. Millions of others, from Afghanistan to Zambia will apply, and there will be no foreign check.

 

Third, there will be fraud in the submission of fingerprint cards.  Because U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will not be able to fingerprint every applicant, and because most police departments will refuse to take on the task, USCIS will authorize private groups (called QDE's, for Qualified Designated Entites in 1986) to take the fingerprints.  Our experience from IRCA tells us that some of the employees of those entities will be corrupt, some for money, others because they place a higher value on ethnic identity than national loyalty, and still others due to a misplaced sense of sympathy for the applicant. 

 

Also, in some cases, an applicant who has a disqualifying criminal history will send someone else in carrying his identification, so that the fingerprints submitted in his name will not reveal the criminal history this was not a rare circumstance in the previous amnesty.

 

There is a substantial number of criminals, even violent criminals, in the population of illegal aliens who will seek amnesty, so we cannot afford to ignore the misstatements about record checks.

 

Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, Ph.D. of the Violent Crimes Institute, Atlanta, Georgia, is a social scientist.  In 2006 she conducted a study to determine the number of sex criminals to be found in the group – her data covered the period from January, 1999 to April, 2006. Briefly, the results of that study lead to the conclusion that there are about 240,000 sex criminals amongst the illegal alien population (assuming a population of twelve million illegals). They averaged four victims each during the period she studied, for a total of nearly one million victims.  Her publication can be found at http://www.drdsk.com/articles.html#Illegals.

 

We offer the foregoing example only to illustrate that the problem of criminals in the population proposed for legalization is not inconsequential.  Kauflin's study covered a narrow range of criminal behavior. Other readily-available information reflects that illegal aliens heavily populate the growing number of gangs in the U.S. Mara Salvatrucha, for instance, one of the most violent, is known to be largely made up of illegal aliens.  Much of the cocaine trade, a growing amount of the traffic in methamphetamine, and nearly all the human trafficking is carried out by foreign organizations operating in the United States with illegal alien underlings. You can read an article on the subject at
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mac_donald04-13-05

 

So, the fact is, despite representations there will be criminal record checks, those checks will be largely worthless.  As a result, we will legalize unknown, but large numbers of criminals, who will become permanent members of our society.