Obama Promises to Vet Syrian Migrants, Can't Even Run Immigration Database
If you liked ObamaCare, get ready for ObamaMigrate
November 9, 2015
Daniel Greenfield
The disastrous ObamaCare website wasn't an extraordinary exception to the way this administration does things. Here's what the immigration database currently looks like.
Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms.
A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.
This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it’s now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats, according to documents and interviews with former and current federal officials.
Did anyone really expect another outcome? The VA records system is a disaster. The ObamaCare database was a disaster. The only database that works is the one used to track Democratic voters.
By 2012, officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which includes USCIS, were aware that the project was riddled with hundreds of critical software and other defects. But the agency nonetheless began to roll it out, in part because of pressure from Obama administration officials who considered it vital for their plans to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, according to the internal documents and interviews.
Obama was running for reelection and was intent on pushing an ambitious immigration reform program in his second term. A workable electronic system would be vital.
“There was incredible pressure over immigration reform,” a second former official said. “No one wanted to hear the system wasn’t going to work. It was like, ‘We got some points on the board, we can go back and fix it.’ ”
Oh look, it's just like ObamaCare. A broken system, political pressure to move things along so Obama can pull off another left-wing policy "win".
Only three of the agency’s scores of immigration forms have been digitized — and two of these were taken offline after they debuted because nearly all of the software and hardware from the original system had to be junked.
I'm sure these guys will have no trouble vetting a whole bunch of Syrian migrants with little to no actual information. They may not be able to do basic things like filling forms online, but they'll have no trouble with the big, difficult and complicated stuff.
Immigration reform never made it out of Congress, but it could resurface after the presidential election next year. If it does, and if it involves possible citizenship or legal status for the 11.3 million immigrants who are in the country illegally, the policy would flood the government with millions of complicated new applications.
“Oh, God help us,’’ said Harry Hopkins, a former immigration services official who worked on the Transformation project. “If there is immigration reform, they are going to be overwhelmed.’’
Doesn't he mean Allah? And we are going to be overwhelmed, in every possible way.
DHS officials acknowledge the setbacks but say the government is well on the way to automating the immigration service, which processes about 8 million applications a year. The department has scrapped the earlier technology and development method and is now adopting a new approach relying in part on cloud computing.
Count on it. It'll only cost 3.1 billion and when it's done, 10 years from now, everything will be completely outdated and on fire. But it won't matter by then once the "immigrants" have set off an EMP.
When the electronic immigration system began in May 2012, it was hailed as “a significant milestone in our agency’s history” by the USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas, who is now the deputy secretary of homeland security.
Ladies and gentlemen, our national security couldn't possibly be in better hands.
