One Creative Thought: Online NewsHour: Politics of Citizenship -- March 4, 1997

Think immigration reform is something "timely" and all about the rights of the millions of individual law-breakers now wanting to become US citizens?

Here's a blast from the past... and a very stable indicator of why the US is in the pickle it is right now with regards to illegals:

(Doris Meissner was at the time, the INS Commissioner)

Online NewsHour: Politics of Citizenship -- March 4, 1997 | PBS:

Did election year politics play a role in the rules of citizenship?

Chairman Rogers cited a report in today's "Washington Post" that suggested Vice President Gore's office had pressured the Immigration Service to increase the number of naturalizations before election day.
REP. HAROLD ROGERS: You waived all normal standard common sense procedures to check these people for criminal records. You waived that in order to get them so they could vote in the election. And I find that reprehensible.

DORIS MEISSNER: Mr. Chairman, I must dispute that assertion. That is not what occurred. We at every step along the way strengthened the procedures where fingerprints were concerned. We were strengthening a system, as I say, that had been functioning since 1982--

REP. HAROLD ROGERS: You naturalized them without even hearing from the FBI.

DORIS MEISSNER: The--the method that we were using at that time we did not realize was a system vulnerability.

So you know - it was all about getting votes and cheap labor then and nothing has changed.

Period.