photo by Britt Selvitelle
Academics may want to downplay the increasing level of unchecked immigration at America’s southern border but those levels keep rising in real time.
“Late in 2013, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials and members of Congress raised concerns that the number of aliens caught crossing the southwest U.S. border illegally or arriving at the ports of entry without a visa and seeking asylum had increased dramatically over the prior year,” Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) wrote in a study that CIS released at the National Press Club last week. “The House Judiciary committee held a hearing on February 11, 2014 to explore these concerns.”
“At the hearing it was noted that approval rates for the so-called ‘credible fear’ reviews — the first step in the asylum process — had increased dramatically in the prior five years, reportedly to the point where about 90 percent of all applicants were approved. It was further noted that USCIS had documented very high rates of fraud in the asylum application pool; specifically, an internal audit found that only 30 percent of the audited asylum applications were fraud-free.”
Interestingly, the top countries that most of these asylees hail from include five Latin American nations and India.
