One of the few potential fraud-curbing provisions of the DREAM Scheme is that you have to be younger than 31 to apply.
This is the program, now called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), that will (or at least can) give temporary legal status to an estimated 1.75 million young illegal aliens. Applicants are supposed to have arrived illegally before the age of 16, and have spent at least five years in the States since they got here.
So, if someone comes in looking to apply for DACA, and looking like they are 40, they get tossed out of the program, right?
Wrong!
There are no automatic face-to-face interviews in the DREAM Scheme as outlined by USCIS in recent public events.
The entire review, unless a staff member senses fraud, will be a mail-order, papers-only process, and if you are 40 and more or less look it, it is far easier to present phony documents indicating that you are no more than 31 than to pass yourself off as that young in a face-to-face interview.
After all, a forged birth certificate, complete with a notary's seal, costs rather less than plastic surgery.
But USCIS, not that worried about fraud, is about to hand out amnesty papers in this program without looking at the people who will benefit.
Interviews were demanded in an earlier amnesty, the one created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), in which fraud was widespread despite the interviews. Think what it will be like this time around, without interviews.
