Amnesty: "The mother of all backlogs"

The Washington Times: "The federal government is not equipped to process the flood of applications from a proposed immigration legalization bill and the agency that would oversee that program won't be ready for 'a few years,' the office of the Homeland Security Department's inspector general told Congress on Tuesday.

The warning, from Assistant Inspector General Frank Deffer, could severely complicate President Obama's new push to pass an immigration bill this year. Mr. Deffer said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, is in the midst of trying to move from being a paper-based system to having electronic records. He warned that adding millions of new applications, as the bill would do, would be a bad idea. (TCC editorial note: YES!!)

" 'Adding 12 million more people to the system would be the mother of all backlogs. (TCC pesky query: How many more federal employees would have to be hired to process all these applications?) Clearly to us the systems could not handle it now,' " Mr. Deffer told the House Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee. 'It's going to take a few years, so it's something for Congress to consider that, when they implement this, they don't have a date too soon.' "