Month: January 2011

From: Michael Cutler <mcutler007@aol.com>

Date: January 26, 2011 4:40:57 PM PST

To: Michael Cutler <Mcutler007@aol.com>

Subject: Congressional testimony for hearing on Worksite Enforcement conducted earlier today…

Hi Gang:

Here is my prepared testimony for the immigration hearing that was conducted on Wednesday, January 27th by the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement.

The  hearing was entitled, “ICE WORKSITE ENFORCEMENT – UP TO THE JOB?” 

I am providing you with my prepared testimony in two formats.  

The practice of good citizenship does not end in the voting booth, it only begins there.

The large scale apathy demonstrated by citizens of this nation has emboldened elected representatives to all but ignore the needs of the average American citizen in a quest for massive campaign funds and the promises of votes to be ostensibly delivered by special interest groups. There is much that we cannot do but there is one thing that We the People absolutely must do- we must stop sitting on the sidelines!

The collective failure of We the People to get involved in make our concerns known to our politicians have nearly made the concerns of the great majority of the citizens of this nation all but irrelevant to the politicians.  I implore you to resolve this year to get involved!

If this situation concerns you or especially if it angers you, I ask you to call your Senators and Congressional “Representative. This is not only your right- it is your obligation! 

All I ask is that you make it clear to our politicians that we are not as dumb as they hope we are!

We live in a perilous world and in a perilous era. The survival of our nation and the lives of our citizens hang in the balance.

This is neither a Conservative issue, nor is it a Liberal issue- simply stated, this is most certainly an AMERICAN issue!

You are either part of the solution or you are a part of the problem!

Democracy is not a spectator sport!

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

-michael cutler-

Please check out my website:

https://www.michaelcutler.net/

TESTIMONY OF
MICHAEL W. CUTLER, SENIOR SPECIAL AGENT, INS (RET.)

FOR THE HEARING
TO BE HELD ON JANUARY 26, 2011 ON THE TOPIC:

“ICE WORKSITE
ENFORCEMENT – UP TO THE JOB?”

BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON
IMMIGRATION POLICY AND ENFORCEMENT

Chairman Gallegly, Vice
Chairman King, Ranking Member Lofgren, members of the Congress,
distinguished members of the panel, ladies and gentlemen:

I would like to start out by
thanking House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, Subcommittee
Chairman Elton Gallegly and Vice Chairman Steve King for their
steadfast leadership in the critical issue of immigration law
enforcement as well as thanking them for the invitation to appear
before you today; it is an honor and a privilege to be provided with
this opportunity.

The effective enforcement of
our nation’s immigration laws and the creation of an immigration
benefits program that has real integrity must be seen as vital
components in the “War on Terror” and in efforts to protect our
nation and our citizens from various pernicious transnational
criminal organization such as the Mexican drug cartels. Simply
stated, we cannot protect our nation and our citizens from these and
other threats as long as our borders remain porous and millions of
illegal aliens whose true identities are unknown and unknowable, live
and work in communities throughout our nation.

Our nation’s immigration laws
can only be effectively enforced if all elements of the enforcement
program and the immigration benefits program are made to operate as
components of a unified system.

The prospect of securing
illegal employment provides the motivation that draws the majority of
the illegal aliens across our nation’s borders, whether they enter
our country by running our nation’s borders or by entering via the
inspections process and then, subsequently, violating the terms of
their admission. The incentive that such employment provides is so
strong that it often causes aliens to go to such extremes that their
efforts to circumvent the inspections process imperils their safety,
if not their very lives.

Additionally, in order to
achieve the goal of entering the United States, illegal aliens often
pay large sums of money to smugglers who may well use these aliens to
facilitate the smuggling of narcotics into the United States. The
revenue that the smuggling trade provides often fills the coffers of
criminal organizations from all over the world. Once an alien
succeeds in violating our nation’s borders and making his (her) way
to a city in the United States, he is likely to pay other criminals
such as document vendors and identity thieves in order to secure
identity documents.

Many of the illegal aliens
who enter our country are single young men who, at least initially,
leave behind their wives and girlfriends. This large population of
illegal aliens provides potential clientele for houses of
prostitution that leads to more crime and more human trafficking and
more unspeakable exploitation.

Until the Immigration Reform
and Control Act (IRCA) was enacted in 1986, unscrupulous employers
who intentionally hired illegal aliens had little to fear from
immigration law enforcement officers. Unless they harbored, shielded
or transported illegal aliens there was no statutory authority, under
the Immigration and Nationality Act, to punish exploitive employers.
Because of this, employers were able intimidate their illegal alien
workforce by threatening to call the former INS to have illegal alien
employees arrested if they complained about working conditions that
often involved not only wages that were well below prevailing wage
levels or even minimum wage standards, but also often involved
employment situations where a wide variety of health and safety
issues were utterly ignored.

As an INS special agent I
often saw horrific examples of such outrageous situations when I was
involved in investigating illegal aliens who were working in a wide
variety of industries in the United States.

On paper, at least, IRCA was
to change the dynamics of this situation. Finally unscrupulous
employers could be fined and ultimately prosecuted for intentionally
hiring illegal aliens. This legal weapon in the legal arsenal
provided my colleagues and me with encouragement that an era with a
far more balanced approach to immigration law enforcement was
dawning. Of course there were never nearly enough agents conducting
these investigations to truly act as a deterrent and there were other
issues I hope we will be able to discuss later on today, but at least
the enactment of employer sanctions provisions did provide us with
encouragement that was, unfortunately, short-lived. We understood
that when employers intentionally hired illegal aliens there was a
tacit understanding between the employers and the employed with both
sides now vulnerable to punishment under the law.

Aliens motivated to violate
our borders to seek unlawful employment would be deterred from
violating our nation’s borders and other laws, if they became
convinced that our government had the resources and political will to
secure our nation’s borders and effectively enforce the immigration
laws from within the interior of the United States, seeking to
locate, apprehend and remove illegal aliens from our nation.

This would certainly take
significant pressure off of our nation’s porous borders and make the
work of our beleaguered, valiant Border Patrol Agents a bit easier.
Denying employment to illegal aliens would also stanch the flow of
tens of billions of dollars of money wired or otherwise transmitted
by illegal aliens from the United States to their home countries.
This is money that is not spent in the United States, money that is
not invested in the United States and money that is not earned by
United States citizens and lawful immigrants who are finding it
increasingly difficult to support themselves and their families given
the economic hardship that ever so many Americans are now facing
today.

Just about every politician
talks about the need to create new jobs. However, if new jobs are
created but are then taken by illegal aliens and not United States
citizens or resident aliens, neither our citizens nor our nation
would benefit from those newly created jobs.

While I am not an economist,
I am convinced that increasing resources to the interior enforcement
mission would save our nation’s economy more money than would be
invested in such an increase in resources.

An effectively managed
employers sanctions program would provide important national
security/community safety benefits that would accrue through the
implementation of such a program. I ask that you consider that
terrorists and criminal aliens often seek employment as a means of
embedding themselves in a community. Terrorists and criminals are
often described by the jobs they held at the time that they were
arrested, jobs that provide them with money, camouflage and
mobility.

Some terrorists also avail
themselves of opportunities to acquire lawful immigration status by
committing immigration benefit fraud- an issue I hope you will delve
into in detail in future hearings, but it is also important to note
that as an INS Special Agent I often apprehended criminal aliens on
the jobs where they worked. These aliens had lengthy conviction
records and may well have been previously deported and were working
at nondescript jobs that enabled them to hide in plain sight.

Leaders at ICE often note
their concerns about illegal aliens working at what are described as
being components of “critical infrastructure.” Among such stated
venues are airports, nuclear power plants, chemical plants and
military bases to name the most commonly noted facilities.

Recently officials of the DHS
voiced concerns about Mumbai-style attacks being carried out in
Europe or the United States that would target hotels or places where
large numbers of people congregate as well as recently stated
concerns about efforts by al-Qaeda to poison patrons of restaurants
or hotels.

It would then logically
follow that critical infrastructure should also include food
processing plants.

How secure is our nation and
how safe are our citizens, when you consider that there are many
thousands of illegal aliens working in our country in a variety of
venues, including food processing plants as well as restaurants and
hotels, where they may come into direct contact with the food we eat
and there is no way of knowing their true identities, or backgrounds,
or intentions?

In my nearly 40 years of
involvement with the immigration issue, I have not seen any
administration distinguish itself by effectively securing our
nation’s borders or enforcing the immigration laws of our nation.
However in my view, the current administration has all but rolled out
the welcome mat to illegal aliens. Consider that the President and
high level members of the administration have made it clear that
during the course of employer sanctions investigations, employers
would be punished but that no meaningful effort to arrest, detain and
seek the removal of illegal aliens relating to the worksite
investigation would be undertaken. This sends a clear and very wrong
message to illegal aliens and to people around the world who might be
contemplating running our nation’s borders or otherwise entering our
country to seek illegal employment- such aliens have virtually
nothing to fear from the special agents of ICE.

To expand a bit on this
point, when I was an INS special agent I was convinced that when my
colleagues and I encountered illegal aliens and then failed to take
them into custody and seek to have them immediately brought before an
Immigration Judge that we actually did more harm than if we had not
encountered those illegal aliens in the first place. Many of these
illegal aliens used multiple false names and all too often provided
false addresses. Through “Catch and Release” we emboldened these
aliens because it became readily apparent to them that the former INS
lacked the resources to take action against those foreign nationals
who violated our nation’s borders and a variety of law including, but
limited to, our immigration laws. Most of these illegal aliens never
showed up for hearings even if they were served with an Order To Show
Cause. My perspective was shared by most of of my colleagues who
were also demoralized by this deplorable situation.

Today illegal aliens who
are encountered during the course of Employer Sanctions
investigations may not even be served with a Notice To Appear- the
equivalent document. This makes it abundantly clear that the
government of the United States is unconcerned about aliens who
violate our borders and violate a slew of laws as well. Imagine the
astonishment of the illegal aliens who are encountered by the special
agents of ICE and quickly discover that no meaningful action is taken
against them for their violations of our borders and our laws.
Imagine the phone calls that they will undoubtedly make to their
friends back in their home countries telling them that federal
immigration law enforcement officers couldn’t care less about them or
the laws they violated. Think how many more foreign nationals become
persuaded to run our nation’s borders to seek unlawful employment and
ignore the very same immigration laws that the government of the
United States is apparently happy to ignore.

Additionally, from what I
have heard, all too frequently worksite investigations are carried
out purely by ICE personnel auditing I-9 forms and do not even
involve interviewing the employees of the companies at all. This all
but guarantees that illegal aliens will not come into contact with
special agents of ICE and hence will not be taken into custody.

Last week, the Wall
Street Journal reported on ICE’s creation of the “Employment
Compliance Inspection Center” that is supposed to facilitate the
auditing of I-9’s and supporting documents for companies that hire
large numbers of employees. Such auditing operations have been aptly
given the nickname “silent raids.” These “raids” do not
involve the arrest of illegal aliens and therefore I suspect most
illegal aliens hear nothing about these efforts to punish employers
accused of intentionally hiring illegal aliens. Certainly “silent
raids” do not deter illegal aliens from entering the United States
which should be an important goal of worksite investigations.

Furthermore, the
President and members of Congress of both houses and both major
parties have spoken frequently about the need to place illegal aliens
on a “pathway to United States citizenship” thereby all but
declaring that running our nation’s borders is a prerequisite for
becoming a United States citizen.

Also
worth noting is the lawsuit filed by the United States Department of
Justice in an effort to block the State of Arizona from enforcing its
own immigration laws that parallel the federal statutes- not only
won’t the federal government enforce the federal immigration laws
effectively, it is clear it will seek to block any state that
attempts to fill the enforcement vacuum created by the
administration’s stance on immigration law enforcement. This offers
further encouragement to illegal aliens and those foreign nationals
who aspire to become illegal aliens in our country.

If
morale was low when I was employed by the former INS because of the
the reasons I noted previously, morale at ICE today has to be all but
nonexistent given the current state of affairs concerning the current
administration’s posture on the enforcement of our nation’s
immigration laws.

I would like to end my
prepared testimony by recalling that prior to World War II, the
enforcement of the immigration laws had been the responsibility of
the Department of Labor out of a concern that if large numbers of
foreign workers were able to enter our country to seek employment
that such an influx of workers would serve to drive down wages and
worsen the working conditions of the American worker. Indeed, our
laws still reflect that it is illegal to hire foreign workers if, in
so doing harm is done to the American workforce.

Effective worksite
investigations are supposed to protect our nation and our workers and
turn off the power to the “magnet” that draws so many illegal
aliens to our country. The time has long since come for our
government to actually provide the resources and the leadership to
enforce these important provisions of our nation’s immigration laws.

I am gratified that you are
holding this hearing on an issue that is of such profound importance
to all Americans, especially today.

I look forward to your
questions.