Migrant Lobby’s Need for Speed Poses Problems for U.S.
The appetite for more immigration by open-borders advocates seems to know no bounds. They lobby tirelessly for ever-higher volumes of migrants, and they want them here yesterday. Any impediments are derided as behind the times, or worse.
“Antiquated U.S. Immigration System Ambles into the Digital World,” a recent essay from the Migration Policy Institute, summed up the mindset – with no mention of border integrity, national security or impacts on U.S. workers.
Putting the wants and needs of migrants at the forefront, authors Muzaffar Chishti and Julia Gelatt bemoan any delays in issuing visas, work permits or immigration documents. They applaud Biden administration shortcuts, and call for more.
Against the backdrop of big businesses eager for cheap foreign labor, the State Department in August 2020 began waiving in-person interviews for select applicants. By fiscal year 2022, 48 percent of the 6.8 million nonimmigrant visas issued were approved for applicants sight unseen.
That may concern many Americans, but MPI is more worried that the workaround is due to expire at the end of December. “If the authority to waive visa interviews is not renewed, wait times could again balloon, affecting foreign-born workers and their sponsoring employers,” the authors warn.
MPI also hailed a move by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to extend work permits for up to five years (versus longstanding one- or two-year terms). “This reduces the fees they need to pay for renewals and reduces the USCIS workload,” assert Chishti and Gelatt. While kicking the can down the road, however, the authors fail to consider that reduced fees deprive USCIS of the very funds the fee-based agency needs to operate.
Advocating for more “technology” – an open-borders totem – MPI points admiringly to the CBP One mobile app that queues up migrants to enter the country. Here, too, Americans should be skeptical. In October, FAIR reported that of 278,431 appointments scheduled via CBP One, a whopping 266,846 aliens were released into the United States. Of those, 19,828 came from hostile nations such as Russia, China and Iran.
MPI’s failure to mention – much less examine – vetting procedures or security issues for visa applicants isn’t surprising. Those are not a priority. MPI does not even acknowledge that the Biden administration’s reckless open-borders policies are largely responsible for the unprecedented strain on America’s immigration system.
Chishti and Gelatt omitted another disturbing trend that makes this country less secure. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), more than 850,000 foreign visitors overstayed their visas last year, thus becoming illegal aliens. The current overstay rate of 3.64 percent is more than double that of recent years.
While true that the visa extensions touted by MPI will artificially lower overstay numbers in the short term, that statistical sleight of hand to cover overstayers shouldn’t fool anyone. Indeed the rise in overstays signals the need for a coordinated entry-exit tracking system – a subject the MPI paper also ignores.
As legal and illegal migration continues expanding under the Biden administration, groups like MPI (allied with a business class clamoring for cheap labor) are determined to bend immigration law to their collective will. Their digital fixes are not qualitative improvements; rather, they are quantitative schemes to increase the mass and speed of migration into this country.