Illegal Alien Advocates Ignore the Problem

For the Catholic Church to take a stand on an issue that has such extreme implications for national security is outrageous.  What is also outrageous is the fact that while the Church decries the lack of dignity that the arrest of illegal aliens represents (in the Church's judgment), why is the Church conspicuously absent at those factories and other work sites where illegal aliens are horribly treated? Why is the Church not showing up to protest the terrible conditions under which illegal aliens often live and work?

During my long career at the former INS, I found (on many occasions) illegal aliens living in abject squalor. I have seen 20 adult men "living" in an apartment that was intended for a family of four.  These men slept on mattresses laid next to each other and placed end to end. They shared a single bathroom. They shared the apartment that had no furnishings with vermin that scampered across the floor and with bugs that encrusted the walls to the extent that when you flipped on the light switch, those bugs would scatter in all directions – creating what we used to refer to as a "moving wall."

The stench was so awful and pervasive that it would sometimes remain in my nostrils for a week.

I have also raided factories that essentially recreated the horrific conditions found in the Triangle Shirt Factory, which existed 100 years ago in New York City. (On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on a Saturday afternoon, causing the deaths of 146 young women. There was no way for them to escape the flames.) I have seen conditions in factories in which fire exits were blocked by boxes of fabrics and other supplies. And while the owner of the factory might have had his office air conditioner cranked up to maximum output on a hot summer day, the workers on the factory floor had no air conditioners. Oftentimes the windows were barely open, and between the heat from the summer sun and the steam presses running full tilt, the only breeze was provided by filth-laden fans on tall stanchions. These workers sat shoulder to shoulder and the dust from the fabric mixed with the hot humid air that was being re-circulated by those fans.   

I’ve also witnessed restaurant workers sleeping on hammocks that were strung up between the pipes in the basement of a diner, providing the appearance of a slave ship. There were days that I found it difficult to go to sleep after a day at work and seeing the wholesale abuse and mistreatment of human beings at the hands of unscrupulous employers.

Aliens who benefited from the amnesty of 1986 were often quickly fired by their unscrupulous employers once they were legal. Those employers did not have to wait long for new employees who would not make such demands as fair pay, regulation hours and safe work conditions. They simply hired the next wave of illegal aliens.

The issue is that lawful immigrants cannot be exploited, but illegal aliens can be, and are, exploited.

The officials of the Church have to understand how this all happens. At best the Church is being naïve; at worst, they don't care about this exploitation because their interest ends with the recruitment of more members for the Church. The article linked above parallels that sentiment and even goes so far as to recommend that the economic stimulus package that has just been approved by the President should also apply to illegal aliens.

Illegal aliens are not "undocumented immigrants,” and we have no idea as to their identity and, consequently, why they entered our country illegally. This is why I compare illegal aliens with burglars. If, heaven forbid, you came home and found a total stranger sitting in your living room, sipping your iced tea and watching your television, I do not believe your first thought would be to offer him a job and the keys to your home.

A nation's primary responsibility is to provide for the safety and security of its citizens just as a family's primary responsibility is to provide for the safety of the members of that family. Inviting an utter stranger who broke into your home to move into your guest room makes about as much sense as it would for our nation to provide lawful status to aliens whose identities and backgrounds are unknown and unknowable.

The "background checks" that the proponents of open borders and a Guest Worker Amnesty program claim will properly identify millions of illegal aliens really will not work, because if a terrorist or criminal provides a false name on the application, there would be no way of knowing that the name is a false. If the alien in question is someone wanted in another country but has no criminal history here, then his fingerprints may well come back as “clean.” In this situation a criminal or even a terrorist could receive a temporary identity document and go on to receive the other identity documents, all in an assumed identity to enable him to embed himself in our country.

Let me remind you that according to the 911 Commission, the 19 terrorists who attacked our nation on September 11, 2001 used a total of 364 false names and variations of identity among them! This is the reason that the Real ID Act was enacted – to try to address a serious vulnerability.

In addition, the USCIS is unable to cope with its current workload. To expect an agency that, according to the GAO, "lost" 111,000 files relating to aliens seeking a variety of immigration then adjudicated all of those applications without the relating files should keep every American awake at night. This level of incompetence and malfeasance should have resulted in the firing of the managers of this agency, but no one was fired. If you want to read the ugly and unvarnished truth about this monumental disaster, read the press release issued by Senator Charles Grassley who joined Senator Sue Collins in demanding an investigation by the GAO.

The point of the matter is that while the President and other politicians often state that the "illegal aliens are willing to do the work Americans won't do," the hard reality is that illegal aliens will accept unreasonable wages under often illegally dangerous conditions because they are vulnerable to exploitation.

If open borders advocates could muster huge numbers of illegal aliens and their supporters to stand on street corners across the United States to chant that ever-popular war chant of illegal aliens "Si se Puede!"  ("Yes we can!") (a chant that has been picked up by none other than Presidential candidate Barack Obama), then why doesn't the they mount demonstrations outside of factories and meat processing plants that pay illegal aliens substandard wages under substandard conditions? Wouldn't this make it clear that this is all about human dignity? When vulnerable humans are exploited, it makes sense to stand up and oppose that exploitation.

Why would the Church complain that illegal aliens are not going to receive the economic stimulus checks that American citizens and lawful immigrants are going to receive? Consider the following statement from the article:

“We should not accept the fruits of the labor of these workers at the same time we refuse to provide them the protection of our laws."

So if the Church is concerned about the protection of our laws, why have they not taken a visible position on the labor laws? Why haven't we heard or seen the representatives of the Church complaining about the substandard wages and substandard working conditions under which the illegal aliens toil? As for the stated concern that illegal aliens must be protected by our laws, illegal aliens are protected by all of the due process provisions of our laws. What must be remembered is that protection of law does not include the right to violate it.

The third leg of that tripod is the interior enforcement component of the immigration laws. This includes seeking out and arresting aliens, known as “absconders,” who fail to show up for deportation hearings. There need to be an adequate number of ICE special agents to investigate those who commit immigration fraud. Interior enforcement must also include a vigorous effort to go after the employers of illegal aliens and those they hire.

Our nation must gain control over our borders if we don’t wish to be inundated by criminals and potential terrorists. As we wage a war against terrorists and violent gangs, it is absolutely vital that our nation be able to prevent their entry before they do grave harm to our nation and our citizens. Open borders also lead to the movement of massive quantities of illegal drugs entering our country – the root cause of much of our crime and violence.

The massive influx of illegal aliens also hammers the ability of Americans and resident aliens (lawful immigrants) to support themselves and their families by driving down wages and rolling back many of the hard-fought and hard-won battles by the labor movement over the past century. In the 1940s, the enforcement and administration of the immigration laws was placed under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Labor to protect the American worker from the deleterious effect of the entry of exploitable labor offered by illegal aliens. Back then, our government was actually concerned about the well-being of our citizens.

Finally, while we are on the topic of American workers, wouldn't it also make sense for those who claim to be motivated by a concern about morality to want to provide opportunities for American citizens and resident aliens to be able to find work and help bootstrap them into mainstream economic America and enable them to participate in the "American Dream?"

Michael W. Cutler began working for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in October 1971 when he entered on duty as an Immigration Inspector assigned to John F. Kennedy International Airport. From 1973 until 1974 He was assigned as an examiner to the unit which was responsible for adjudicating petitions filed by United States Citizens and Lawfully Admitted Permanent Resident Aliens (LPRs) on behalf of their alien spouses to accord them LPR status. His goal in this assignment was to attempt to uncover fraud marriages and fraud marriage rings.

In August 1975 he became a Criminal Investigator (Special Agent) for the INS at NYC. He rotated through virtually every squad in the Investigations Branch. From 1988 until 1991 he was assigned as the INS representative to the Unified Intelligence Division (UID) of the DEA in New York. In 1991 he was promoted to the position of Senior Special Agent and was assigned to the Organized Crime, Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) which required that he work with members of other law enforcement agencies including the FBI, DEA, ATF, U.S.Customs and local and state police as well as law enforcement organizations of other countries including Israel, Canada, Great Britain and Japan, to conduct investigations of aliens involved in major drug trafficking organizations which ultimately resulted in the seizure of their assets as well as their arrest and successful prosecutions for a wide variety of criminal violations.

Finally, Mr. Cutler has appeared on numerous television and radio programs including the O'Reilly Radio Factor, O'Reilly's No Spin Zone, Fox News and the Lou Dobbs Tonight Program on CNN to discuss the enforcement of immigration laws and has participated in various public debates and panel discussions on issues involving the enforcement and administration of immigration laws.

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