Last week, the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended the CNVH (also known as “CHNV”) immigration sponsorship program due to concerns about fraud. in an article reasonCato Institute immigration policy experts David Bier and Alex Nowrasteh explain why this is a bad decision:
President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last week suspended a key component of his immigration agenda that would have allowed immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter and work legally in the United States. The program, known as the CHNV Parole Program, has helped reduce illegal entry by hundreds of thousands of people since its inception. DHS should immediately restart the CHNV program.
The CHNV provides a vital lifeline to immigrants fleeing totalitarian socialist and communist terror in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as well as endemic chaos in Haiti. This process provides a legal and orderly path for immigrants to pursue the American dream. As these countries slide further into political and economic dislocation, CHNV becomes more important than ever in preventing chaos at the borders.
Under the CHNV process, immigrants require sponsorship from a U.S. citizen or legal resident to legally enter the United States. The Department of Homeland Security has halted the program in response to an internal report that allegedly found evidence of sponsor fraud. In fact, it all points to the agency’s anti-fraud unit’s incompetence in analyzing big data.
Until now, almost all immigration applications have been submitted on paper. For the first time ever, DHS required all CHNV parole applications to be submitted online, resulting in a massive archive of 2.6 million records. The agency’s Fraud and National Security Directorate (FDNS) apparently first tried to assess “potential fraud indicators” within it.
FDNS finds blank input fields, phone numbers that don’t work, zip codes that don’t exist, strange street addresses, Social Security numbers associated with deceased persons, duplicate text and duplicate filers, and other similar anomalies. FDNS concluded that these issues indicated fraud.
But these oddities and errors are not evidence of fraud—they are an important part of large administrative collections, especially those compiled by governments. Fraud involves intentional deception, intentional misrepresentations or omissions by applicants to obtain benefits for which they are not eligible. These problems are more likely due to changes in circumstances between the submission form and the FDNS analysis form, copying and pasting between different types of electronic documents, and simple human error.
It’s absolutely normal to find errors like this in big data. First, statistically speaking, some sponsors must have died after submitting their sponsorship applications. The bigger problem is that when 2.6 million people fill out the forms, sometimes on behalf of relatives or clients, mistakes are made, such as swapping numbers and letters, writing a mailing address when a physical address should be written, or confusing mailing and physical addresses is inevitable.
It is precisely because of shortcomings in the Department of Homeland Security’s new online filing system that errors could be introduced. As one of us learned firsthand when sponsoring someone, DHS’s system purges draft applications after 30 days. This means that many applicants draft responses on paper or in a separate electronic format and then post the responses. This will inevitably lead to some answers being accidentally repeated or put into the wrong field. These shortcomings can easily be interpreted as honest mistakes rather than fraud.
FDNS also incorrectly interpreted duplicate applications from sponsors as fraudulent. However, the CHNV parole process expressly allows for the sponsorship of multiple applicants. Even if all beneficiaries are from the same household, DHS requires sponsors to submit separate applications for each person. Of course, there will be duplicate words and duplicate filings—which is mandated by the Department of Homeland Security. It’s like the FDNS was looking for evidence of fraud in CHNV’s documentation before understanding how CHNV works…
DHS should not overreact to the illusions of fraud inherent in big data sets. Any actual incidents of fraud should be addressed through the agency’s normal procedures, targeting individual fraudsters or reforms to paperwork and electronic filing procedures and audits…
CHNV is the most novel and important part of Biden’s immigration agenda. To undermine it now would be a catastrophic mistake that could undermine U.S. border security, reduce the economic benefits of immigration, and place a huge humanitarian burden on immigrants fleeing totalitarian socialism in Latin America and the Caribbean.
I’d like to take this opportunity to expand a little on Bill and Noraste’s excellent points.
First, as a sponsor of the United for Ukraine program, which is very similar to CHNV and requires essentially the same forms, I can attest from personal experience that the submission process can be clunky and error-prone, especially if you Multiple applications are being submitted. I warned about this problem early on; in a January 2023 article that generally praised U4U, I pointed out a number of shortcomings, including “[t]The program could be improved…by further streamlining the paperwork, some of which is confusing and repetitive. The more complex it is.
It is important to remember that most potential sponsors are not lawyers and legal scholars (like me) or immigration policy experts (like Bier and Nowrasteh). Most people are not familiar with and comfortable with legal-bureaucratic forms. Some are recent immigrants themselves. Therefore, they are prone to making unintentional mistakes. That probably explains much of what FDNS found here.
Second, Cuba and Venezuela face increasing repression, the latter as governments suppress protests against their recent falsified election results. Things are also bad in Haiti and Nicaragua. It would be wrong to close the door to immigrants fleeing horrific oppression and violence just because some funders don’t suspect enough fraud (as Beale and Norast point out, DHS has found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the immigrants themselves ).
Third, as Bier and Nowrasteh point out, the CNVH program plays a valuable role in reducing border chaos; if the government removed the arbitrarily low participation cap of 30,000 people per month (which is the total number across all four countries), the effect could be Much bigger. Bill and I elaborated on this in more detail in an article USA Today article. If the government wants to reduce the number of illegal border crossings, it should restart CNVH and expand it.
Finally, it is worth emphasizing that, like most other immigrants, CNVH participants are an asset to the United States, not a burden. They make valuable contributions to our economy and reduce the federal budget deficit.
I do have one small disagreement with Bier and Nowrasteh: they advocate a $575 fee for CNVH sponsorship applications. I object to this, for reasons explained here, in response to a similar proposal by Daniel DiMartino of the Manhattan Institute:
Social science evidence shows that even modest bureaucratic barriers can significantly reduce participation in a variety of programs. Imposing fees would likely reduce the number of Americans willing to serve as sponsors, thereby reducing the benefits of the program. People hate having to do paperwork, and they hate having to pay for the “privilege” of doing it even more. Instead, the additional tax revenue generated by parolees working in the United States more than offsets the cost of processing the forms.
