Why the Biden Administration Was Wrong to Suspend the CNVH Immigration Parole Program for Migrants From Four Latin American Nations
Last week, the Biden Administration Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended the CNVH (AKA “CHNV”) migrant sponsorship program, because of concerns about fraud. In an article for Reason, Cato Institute immigration policy experts David Bier and Alex Nowrasteh explain why this is a terrible decision:
President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) paused a key component of its immigration agenda last week, which allowed immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter and work legally in the United States. Known as the CHNV parole process, this program has helped reduce illegal entries by hundreds of thousands since its launch. DHS should restart the CHNV program immediately.
CHNV has provided an important lifeline for migrants fleeing the horrors of totalitarian socialism and communism in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as well as the endemic chaos of Haiti. This process offers a lawful and orderly way for migrants to pursue the American dream. As these countries spiral further into political and economic dysfunction, CHNV has become more important than ever to prevent chaos at the border.
Under the CHNV process, immigrants required sponsorship from U.S. citizens or legal residents to lawfully enter the United States. DHS has halted the program in response to an internal report that allegedly found evidence of sponsor fraud. In fact, all it shows is the agency’s anti-fraud directorate’s ineptitude at analyzing big data.
Until now, nearly all immigration applications were filed on paper. For the first time in its history, DHS required all CHNV parole applications to be filed online, resulting in a monstrous data file of 2.6 million records. The agency’s Fraud and National Security Directorate (FDNS) apparently took its first stab at assessing “potential fraud indicators” within it.
FDNS found blank entry fields, phone numbers that don’t work, zip codes that don’t exist, strange street addresses, Social Security numbers associated with dead people, repetitive text and repeat filers, and other similar anomalies. FDNS concluded that these issues indicate fraud.
But those oddities and errors are not evidence of fraud—they are part and parcel of large administrative datasets, especially those compiled by the government. Fraud involves intentional deception, deliberate misrepresentation, or omission by applicants to obtain benefits they do not qualify for. These issues are more likely due to changing circumstances between the time when the forms were filed and the FDNS analyzed them, copying-and-pasting between different types of electronic documents, and simple human error.
Finding mistakes like this in big data is absolutely normal. For starters, statistically, some sponsors have certainly died since filing their sponsorship applications. The bigger issue is that when 2.6 million people fill out a form—sometimes on behalf of a relative or client—errors such as transposing numbers and letters, writing their mailing address when they should write their physical address, or mixing up mailing and physical addresses are inevitable.
Errors can be introduced precisely because of
Article from Reason.com
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