The last amnesty, in 1986, gave legal status to hundreds of thousands of criminals and others who should not have been allowed to stay under the conditions of the law.
The federal government is not equipped to process the flood of applications from a proposed immigration legalization bill and the agency that would oversee that program won’t be ready for “a few years,” the office of the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general told Congress on Tuesday.
The warning, from Assistant Inspector General Frank Deffer, could severely complicate President Obama’s new push to pass an immigration bill this year.
Mr. Deffer said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, is in the midst of trying to move from being a paper-based system to having electronic records. He warned that adding millions of new applications, as the bill would do, would be a bad idea.
“Adding 12 million more people(1) to the system would be the mother of all backlogs. Clearly to us the systems could not handle it now,” Mr. Deffer told the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee. “It’s going to take a few years, so it’s something for Congress to consider that, when they implement this, they don’t have a date too soon.”
(1) It’s more like 30 million not counting relatives currently residing in Mexico,et al. — Ed.