Neville W. Cramer, United States Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Special Agent-in-Charge (Retired), Port St. Lucie, Florida.
This was originally posted by Vero Communiqué on July 2, 2017.
Dear Tom, Due to the upcoming debates over “Immigration Reform,” I wanted to forward you an editorial that I wrote ten years ago [ now 11.5] due to the upcoming debates over “Immigration Reform .” Hopefully my comments will enlighten some of your readers about the problem that could descend upon us if our Government fails once agin to legislate proper immigration controls.
Prior to granting the illegal immigrants any type of legal status, we first need to revamp the way we deploy our current Customs and Border Protection resources.
The borders must be secured using technology such as drones, sensors, night vision, ground radar systems and even satellites. Human intelligence gathering must also be significantly increased. We are also in dire need of several large detention facilities on or near our Southwest border to house apprehended illegal immigrants for periods of up to one year.
More Border Patrol Agents will help in some areas. However, as we have seen over the last half-century, increasing manpower for the sake of making “political points” makes the U.S. Border Patrol a bigger agency, but does little to truly secure our borders.
In the recent debates, very little is being mentioned about the most effective method we could use to curtail illegal immigration – mandatory utilization of E-Verify – the system that advises employers if their employees have the legal right to work in the United States.
I suggest that anyone who is interested in truly curtailing illegal immigration, read the Executive Summary of the 1993 report of the bi-partisan Commission on Immigration Reform. Readers will realize that E-Verify is the most effective way to bring about humanitarian change to our immigration enforcement programs, significantly reduce the influx of illegal immigrants (no matter how they arrived) and prevent the need for future amnesties.
Speaking of “amnesty,” to achieve “comprehensive immigration reform” there is no need to grant “a path to U.S. Citizenship” to any of the estimated eleven million illegal aliens currently living here.
In an attempt to be “humanitarian,” our representatives in Washington are failing to tell their constituents about the resulting chain migration that will descend upon us. If we offer eventual U.S. Citizenship to this group, it will likely lead to a legal influx of more than fifty million or more new “immediate relative immigrants” over the next fifteen years.
The U.S. cannot survive this type of mass migration without serious damage to our public education system, health care programs and general infrastructure. In short, a “path to U.S. Citizenship” will lead to the demise of the United States as we know it today.
As I have advocated numerous times to groups across America, (and written in my book “Immigration Chaos” in 2007), the maximum benefit we should offer to most of our illegal alien population is something similar to a renewable “non-immigrant worker” visa – and that’s all! The claim that this will create some sort of “second class” person is absolute nonsense. There are currently hundreds of thousands of legal “non-immigrants” currently living in the U.S. and most are quite happy to be here.
As opposed to many other growing problems in the U.S., successful immigration reform is truly quite achievable.
However, instead of focusing on another failed amnesty, America first needs to get operational control of our physical borders.
In addition there must be a federal mandate for all employers to use E-Verify, accompanied by an effective and punitive employer sanctions program. Without these critical components, we will never curtail illegal immigration, and the current attempt at immigration reform will simply be another useless attempt by Congress and the White House to end our immigration chaos.
NEVILLE CRAMER – BIOGRAPHY
Neville W. Cramer served more than twenty-six years as a law enforcement officer with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). At the time of his retirement in late 2002, he was one of the most experienced INS Special Agents in the U.S. Department of Justice.
After serving four years as a police officer in Arizona and Florida, he began his immigration law enforcement career in 1976, as a U.S. Border Patrol Agent in Eagle Pass, Texas. After his tour of duty on the U.S.-Mexican border, Cramer held the following positions at INS;
- 1977-1984 Special Agent and Supervisory Special Agent in Chicago, Illinois and Washington D.C.
- 1984-1986 Senior Special Agent, Office of Enforcement, INS Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
- 1986-1990 Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Enforcement Division, INS Headquarters Washington, D.C.,
- 1990-1996 Director, Immigration Officer Academy, Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) Glynco, Georgia.
- Special Agent-in-Charge, Overseas Enforcement, INS Headquarters, Washington, D.C. (1996-2002)
During his tenure as Deputy Assistant Commissioner, he was responsible for the development and implementation of the first INS status verification system, now known as E-Verify.
After his retirement from the INS in 2002, Mr. Cramer began his own successful consulting firm. Many of his contracts with the Antiterrorism Assistance Administration (ATA) required training in more than fifteen countries, including Algiers, Yemen, Jordan, Colombia and Tajikistan.
In 2012, Cramer was selected by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Government of the United Arab Emirates to serve as an immigration enforcement expert. After serving almost three years in the Emirates, he returned to the U.S. and relocated to Port St. Lucie, Florida in 2017.
In addition to being an active proponent of effective U.S. immigration reform, Neville Cramer has authored two books, including his latest Immigration Chaos – Solutions to an American Crisis (2007). He has been featured on several local and national television and radio programs. He has a Bachelors Degree in Law Enforcement Administration from the University of Arizona and a Masters Degree in Criminal Justice from the George Washington, University, Washington, D.C. He was also the first INS Special Agent to attend the prestigious FBI National Academy (157th Session).
Vero Communiqué 
“The borders must be secured using technology such as drones, sensors, night vision, ground radar systems and even satellites.” This is very true but most experts today agree – these compliment a strong border wall in many areas along the border. For practical reasons, one can see that with a strong, impenetrable wall in some areas, border agents can turn their attention to other problem areas without having to physically be there to monitor equipment. Systems like ground radar, drones and satellites are all well and good – but once they detect illegal activity attempting to cross, agents have to be there on site to stop the crossing. With a large wall, the illegals will be forced to use other areas to try and cross.
His comment about the flood of immigrants through chain migration is critically important. The problem is compounded by the fact that many coming here this way are not interested in assimilating. Why bother when you don’t have to go through a rigorous process, just walk across? A country housing an entire population of non-assimilated residents cannot survive.
As Theodore Roosevelt said, “In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language… and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
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“The borders must be secured using technology such as drones, sensors, night vision, ground radar systems and even satellites.”
Preface Cramer’s quoted sentence above with “An impenetrable physical barrier to border crossing, where appropriate, is essential to securing our porous southern border. Augmenting this barrier, we must use technology such as…” and his article has merit (save for the discussion about facilities needed to detain those who manage to cross because we’ve relied on such technology to detect, but not prevent crossings!).
Without a physical barrier to massively constrain illegal crossing, all the drones, sensors and satellites will do is tell you where people are crossing. Smugglers and other criminal crossers (all who do not legally enter through a border crossing point) will find new places to cross and will continue to cross in many smaller groups, making such technological advances ineffective at their task to prevent such crossings. Such technologies would require a massive increase in personnel required to be responsive to crossing detections. Putting “sensors” in quantities required to defeat tunneling is a massive problem in itself.
An appropriately deployed physical barrier will focus attempted crossings to areas that can be sufficiently manned to defeat any attempts to cross.
And the only “catch and release” program that makes sense is to catch attempted crossers and release them back across the border into the hands of Mexican authorities.
We wouldn’t need the mass detention centers if we had an adequate physical barrier system.
Some politicians and other fools respond by saying, “We cannot stop crossings with a wall.” Of course, any barrier has some probability of being defeated by a single penetration. But, just as former President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, et al, have discovered (and everyone living in a gated community) walls, by focusing traffic to a controlled area, are extremely effective in dropping illegal traffic across any border down to a trivial trickle, which is far more effective than programs to detect and then respond after the damage is done.
The cost to erect and maintain a secure border barrier (impenetrable fence or wall, it doesn’t matter what its called) where physical conditions of the terrain warrant, is far less than any alternative. And it’s far less than the massive cost to deal with illegal aliens in our presence (schooling, welfare, food stamps, health care, incarceration of criminals, job losses, etc.).
… and “ditto” to Susan Mehiel’s comment.
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