Congressional Oversight on Immigration Is Actually Congressional Overlook

Micheal Cutler
February 9, 2015
As seen in:
Frontpage Mag

This past month the Center for Immigration Studies released a report authored by Jessica Vaughan, that organization’s director of policy studies.

The title of the report was, “Government Data Reveal 5.5 Million New Work Permits Issued Since 2009.”

Jessie is an old friend and colleague. I contacted her to discuss her astonishing report. I was more than a bit curious as to how she had come to focus on how millions of aliens were granted employment authorization when, under existing immigration laws, they would not qualify to be granted this important immigration benefit. I was especially interested to know if any official reports issued by the GAO, at the behest of an appropriate congressional oversight committee, had been behind the initial findings. She was crystal clear in her response: There were no such reports, she came to do the study on her own.

Here is how her report begins:

Government data reveal that about 5.5 million new work permits were issued to aliens from 2009 to 2014, above and beyond the number of new green card and temporary worker admissions in those years. This is a huge parallel immigrant work authorization system outside the limits set by Congress that inevitably impacts opportunities for U.S. workers, damages the integrity of the immigration system, and encourages illegal immigration.

Approximately 1.8 million new work permits were issued to aliens with temporary visas or those who entered under the Visa Waiver Program. Of these, about 1.2 million (67 percent) had a visa status for which employment is not authorized by law. For example, more than 470,000 work permits were issued to aliens on tourist visas and 532,000 were issued to foreign students. More than 156,000 were issued to dependents of students and guestworkers, all in categories not authorized for employment by law.

In addition, 963,000 new work permits were issued to aliens who have been granted permanent status or have a status that will lead to a green card. These are primarily refugees (418,000), fiancés of U.S. citizens (164,000), and approved asylum applicants (174,000).

About 982,000 new work permits were issued in this time period to illegal aliens or aliens unqualified for admission. Of these, 957,000 were aliens who crossed the border illegally (Entered Without Inspection). Inexplicably, 1,200 new work permits were issued to aliens who were denied asylum, were suspected of using fraudulent documents, were stowaways, or were refused at a port of entry.

A huge number of work permits, 1.7 million, were issued to aliens whose status was unknown, not recorded by the adjudicator, or not disclosed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that processes the applications. This should be a concern; work permits are gateway documents to driver’s licenses and other benefits, and if the government agency issuing them does not know or will not disclose how the bearer arrived in the country how can others rely on the authenticity of an individual’s identity? It is equally disconcerting if the government does know and chooses not to disclose it.

This raises an obvious question: What in the world is going on with our elected “representatives” in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate? They are supposed to exercise oversight over the Executive Branch of our government. How could such a monumental betrayal of America and Americans be carried out by an integral component of the Department of Homeland Security over a period of more than five years yet go unnoticed by our supposed “watchdogs”?

While Republicans denounce the administration’s ongoing plans to implement an immense temporary amnesty program for five million or perhaps even more illegal aliens, they somehow managed to overlook what this administration has already done and has been doing since 2009. The administration has provided 5.5 million aliens with employment authorization even though there is no legal justification for doling out these Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) to this huge number of illegal aliens. EADs are “breeder documents.” An alien who has been issued such a document is immediately able to obtain a Social Security Card, a driver’s license, credit cards and other such documentation.

Among the aliens who have been provided with these employment documents are aliens who applied for immigration benefits such as political asylum and were denied those benefits. Immigration fraud, especially among aliens who claim political asylum, was identified by the 9/11 Commission as a favored means of entry and embedding for terrorists — and not just the terrorists who attacked our nation on September 11, 2001. Indeed, it would certainly appear that the most recent example of terrorists who engaged in committing political asylum fraud were the Tsarnaev brothers who attacked the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013.

These EADs have clear implications for national security.

On December 19, 2014 Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) posted my commentary “Obama’s ‘Gift’ to International Terrorists: Immigration Executive Action.” The concerns I articulated about the impending administration’s plans to use executive orders to provide temporary lawful status apply to the practices of the administration as reported above.

Additionally, consider how many times various news programs focus on “job creation” and unemployment numbers and new jobless claims. Consider how frquently the “talking heads” on the various news programs express confusion at how we can have such low unemployment numbers and yet average family incomes continue to decline as an increasing number of middle class families lose their tenuous grip on solvency and their place in the middle class.

Just about every candidate for nearly every elected office in the United States on the local, city, state and federal level all promise to help create jobs and/or bring jobs to their jurisdictions.

Prior to the Second World War the enforcement and administration of our nation’s immigration laws were primarily the responsibility of the United States Department of Labor. The goal was to shield American workers from unfair competition. This is how our middle class was created and nurtured. America’s middle class is synonymous with “The American Dream.”

On February 4, 2015 NewsBusters published the report, “Gallup CEO Blasts Press’s Complacency in Covering Unemployment and Underemployment.”

The final paragraphs of the hard-hitting article sum up the opinions and facts stated by Jim Clifton, the CEO and chairman of Gallup (emphasis added):

Of all the key figures BLS presents, the unemployment rate is probably the one which can be most easily manipulated without leaving telltale tracks. The key lies in determining whether a person is considered to be looking for work.

Translating what my (Census Bureau) informant has told me into layman’s terms — while emphasizing that this person cannot specifically describe how the perceived rigging is occurring after surveyors electronically submit their data — it appears that taking what many people would see as an acceptable level of unsuccessful action to find work is no longer enough to place one into the ranks of the unemployed. The surveyed person apparently must have taken multiple specific steps during a given week to try to get a job. Surveyors believe that the bar to be considered actively looking for work has been artificially raised, and that many people who are somewhat diligently but not constantly seeking employment are not being classified as unemployed, and are therefore not even considered members of the civilian workforce.

From here, it seems that this manipulation could be perpetrated with relatively minor computer programming changes. The IT people involved in implementing these changes would likely not grasp their significance unless they happened to be very well versed in the bureau’s detailed survey compilation procedures and rules.

Even with minor changes, the unemployment rate can change significantly. If only two million of the record 92.6 million Americans classified as not in the labor force (that figure was 92.9 million in December — Ed.) really should be considered workforce members and therefore unemployed under consistently applied rules, the official unemployment rate would be more than a full percentage point higher.

Clifton is contending that perhaps six times as many Americans (his 30 million is 12.5 million higher than BLS’s official 17.5 million) should be considered part of the labor force, and therefore reported as unemployed — at the very least in the U6 sense (which would raise that rate to 17.8 percent), with many of them, probably beyond my 2 million lowball example, also included in the official U3 rate.

Clifton’s “Big Lie” contention revolves around the press’s near-complete refusal — there are rare exceptions, but they don’t get wide circulation — to dig beneath the surface of the official unemployment rate or to question the nature of the jobs the economy is generating. Thus, President Obama now laughably claims that he “saved the economy,” and that the economy is now so great that the federal government can once again turn on the federal spending spigots without negative consequences.

The current press treatment is in stark contrast to the historically proven false “hamburger flipper” claims the press and the left (but I repeat myself) made with absolutely no supporting evidence during the Reagan administration’s boom years. As to Wall Street, longtime observers are finally acknowledging that the stock market’s fortunes are entirely in the hands of the Federal Reserve — “Any metric you followed 20 years ago doesn’t matter, because you’re dealing with massive central bank manipulation and accommodation in an attempt to keep everything steady.”

Any truth to the allegations of BLS data manipulation I have reported would confirm that it’s not just a big lie as Clifton described it. It would then also be a carefully orchestrated one.

A succession of reports has shown that almost invariably, new jobs are most often taken by the newly arrived aliens and most new jobs pay minimum wage or minimally above minimum wage.

Meanwhile members of Congress, in both parties, continue to push for greatly expanding the number of H-1B visas for high tech workers, undermining Americans who have the skills, education and experience to do those jobs.

On July 22, 2014 FrontPage Magazine published my article, “Immigration ‘Reform’: Engineered Destruction of the Middle Class — The real reason high-tech titans are lining up behind the amnesty effort.”

Currently politicians and talks show hosts who call for reducing “income inequality” or the corollary of promoting “income equality” are acting as little more than shills for the mega-wealthy executives of Silicon Valley. While most folks naively think that income equality would narrow the gap between America’s middle class and the mega-wealthy, the truth is far different. This is about narrowing the income gap between America’s middle-class and poor by lowing middle-class wages by forcing the highly skilled and educated Americans to have to compete with foreign workers.

On January 23, 2015 CAPS (Californians for Population Stabilization) posted my most recent commentary: “For America to Do Well, Americans Must Do Well.” It is time for our elected representatives to accept that premise and act on it on behalf of the citizens of the United States.

Only then would they truly earn the title “representative.”