Catching heat and crooks

Washington Times:

It's usually thought of as the kinder, gentler arm of immigration, but U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services helps nab an average of five criminals a day, including the occasional murder suspect -- a point that agency Director Emilio Gonzalez underscores when he discusses the USCIS role in the Homeland Security Department.
A little more than a year ago, Mr. Gonzalez took over the agency in charge of granting citizenship, green cards signifying a legal permanent immigrant and visas for work or study. In that year, he has started a pilot program to test a new naturalized citizenship exam, finished off a backlog of millions of benefit applications and created several offices that would put national security first at the agency.
But those who interact most with USCIS say Mr. Gonzalez's tenure will succeed or fail on his latest proposal to increase fees an average of more than 60 percent in order to finish the transformation from a much-maligned 20th-century paper-based bureaucracy into 21st-century streamlined, self-sufficient, services-based enterprise.
"All those people that are out there complaining about long waits, dingy buildings, poorly trained personnel, this is an opportunity for us to take those into account and fix it," Mr. Gonzalez said last week from his office overlooking Massachusetts Avenue and Union Station.
"We have been woefully underfunded, even under the days of [the former Immigration and Naturalization Service] and the Justice Department," he said in defending the proposed new fees. "There's absolutely no way I could in good conscience continue to head an agency that's treading water. We're coasting. And when you're coasting, you're going backwards; nobody ever coasted uphill."
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"Those are folks who think they can get away with murder, literally, come in to get a new green card, come in with a wife or girlfriend to help them apply for a benefit. We run a check and find out there's a warrant on these folks," Mr. Gonzalez said.
He has created a special unit to handle difficult national-security cases and also created a benefit revocation unit, which is designed to help officials at the local offices go after those whose green card or citizenship should be taken away.
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These guys need the funding and if Congress is looking to higher fees for illegals who would be granted citizenship, they should also permit those doing it legally to pay the cost of the service. It will be a test to see whether they are really serious about immigration enforcement and the rule of law. I would not bet on seriousness out of a Democrat controlled congress.