Posted by Tina
Change continues as more of the same…
** One of President-elect Barack Obama’s top immigration advisers oversaw a Clinton-era program that awarded U.S. citizenship to thousands of convicted criminals and failed to conduct adequate FBI background checks on foreigners during a push to reduce a backlog of naturalization applications. **
** T. Alexander Aleinikoff, former executive associate commissioner for programs at the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service, staunchly defended the program, Citizenship USA (CUSA), before Congress a decade ago, although the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General concluded in 2000 that the program failed to address weaknesses that pushed the immigration system beyond its limits. *** CUSA saw 1.2 million foreign nationals become U.S. citizens in 1996. Many of them later were identified as convicted criminals. The program was endorsed vigorously by President Clinton but attacked by critics as an election-year ploy to speed naturalizations for political gain, noting that the program targeted INS districts in heavily Democratic Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City and San Francisco. *** More than 180,000 naturalization applications were vetted without proper FBI fingerprint analyses, including 80,000 immigrants who had fingerprint checks that generated criminal records but were naturalized anyway, according to congressional and federal investigators. *** The inspector general’s report said applicants who were ineligible because of criminal records or because they fraudulently obtained green cards were granted citizenship because the INS was “moving too fast to check their records.” *** According to the inspector general’s 684-page report, CUSA failed to address national security concerns, did not develop or coordinate anti-fraud operations, and failed to ensure that foreign nationals seeking naturalization underwent law-enforcement background checks. ** (emphasis mine)