The Illusion of The Vetted Migrant
Real due diligence is time consuming and expensive; pretending migrants have been ‘cleared’ is fiction that’s even more costly to the country
By Mark Cromer
The debacle that has steadily unfolded in Des Moines after the superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district was taken into custody by ICE agents has revealed once again the pervasive corruption that has permeated so many American institutions with respect to immigration.
The salacious elements surrounding now former Superintendent Ian Roberts’ arrest in September are the stuff of dark comedy, with the supposedly mild-mannered educational policy savant ditching his district-issued car as he fled ICE agents on foot, leaving behind a loaded Glock 9mm handgun, a fixed-blade hunting knife and a brick of “bug out” cash that he apparently abandoned in his panic.
The man who preached something he called “radical empathy” to students, parents, staff and faculty alike was apparently prone to packing heat when he peddled his own brand of a progressive miracle elixir around the Des Moines district. The absurdist theater that has followed his arrest has exposed additional details that make “Dr. Roberts” look every bit the congenial charlatan his detractors have painted him to be, with the Associated Press reporting that he was funneling significant district funds into a consulting firm that also had him on its payroll.
But the real scandal of this sordid saga—perhaps best dubbed The Wild Ride of Doc Roberts—is the breezy nature with which the school board feigned ignorance to the true identity and the actual past of a man who they were paying six-figures while he was on the lam from the law and ducking a deportation order.
Sadly, the Des Moines Unified School District is in very crowded company when it comes to intentionally indulging institutional malfeasance in the face of adequately vetting individuals and particularly when it comes to migrants—a classification which the board did know about Roberts, who is apparently from Guyana.
Accordingly, the school board knew enough to not want to know much else.
For nearly 40 years, ever since President Ronald Reagan affixed his signature to the legislation that became known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act in 1986, a vast infrastructure has grown throughout the United States that’s designed to accommodate and accelerate mass immigration into the country through every available channel.
This multi-decade build-out of a vast logistics network, including a constellation of nonprofits, NGOs, staffing agencies, think tanks and advocacy groups ranging from the National Council of La Raza to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has been a thoroughly bipartisan endeavor among a governing class that sees in mass migration different benefits and dividends for different constituents.
It might be best summed up with the assessment that in the human tide relentlessly entering the United States, the Republicans saw expanded profits, while the Democrats saw expanded power.
The only thing the American people have seen is the resulting chaos and its underlying corruption on high-definition display in such tawdry episodes as what has unfolded in Des Moines.
What has not been seen in the United States—and will never be seen in this nation when it comes to migration policy and protocols at the federal, state and local levels—is anything even remotely consistent with the long-promised vetting of migrants entering the U.S. to ensure the number of bad actors slipping in is kept to a bare minimum.
Promises made by Republican and Democratic leaders alike to match any amnesty for immigrants illegally in the country or in exchange for an increased number of legal visa holders with a vigorous regimen of screening background checks is the stuff of bad fiction.
Phrased less generously: The government is lying to you.
I know this because after years of working reporter beats in metro Los Angeles for numerous newspapers, I steered my career into the emerging field of business intelligence and investigations at the dawn of the Millenium. It’s a fancy term for corporate spook work.
For much of the aughts I was deployed primarily in the field for Kroll, the global risk analysis corporation, that put me on what it called the “spearpoint” of investigations in cases that included high profile Washington politicians and A-list Hollywood celebrities.
In 2010, I joined Sapient Investigations, Inc., as a senior staff investigator and spent the next 12 years working all manner of cases for the boutique full-service firm. A constant component of that case work included conducting deep-dive due diligence background checks for an array of private equity outfits, venture capital groups, hard-money lenders and high net worth individuals—all of whom wanted penetrating portraits of people with whom they were considering business relationships.
Those clients paid pricey retainers in order to properly vet individuals, a process that when done right can better reveal reputational risks and course-of-business perils by analyzing criminal histories, civil litigation patterns and financial health profiles among other data fields that allowed our clients to sometimes penetrate conscious efforts that subjects had made to conceal secrets or even secret lives.
To pierce the veil, investigators employ a dizzying array of exclusive and proprietary database utilities that can deliver all manner of information on Americans, and that’s without even having to leave the office to burn shoe leather in the field. From a bad divorce, a college DUI and a restraining order to an old tax lien, a high-voltage fraud lawsuit and oh so much more, investigators today are able to recover and assemble a holistic snapshot of an American’s life, red flags and all.
The key word in all of that is American.
Absolutely central to all of this vetting is a nation that has a longstanding First World infrastructure that reliably collects and actually preserves most key data; including court records, police incident reports as well as tax and corporate filings, along with all sorts of other ephemera.
Once outside the country, even in the other First World societies around the globe, collecting and assessing such galaxies of data becomes much more challenging and considerably more limited as a result of different laws governing different countries. What is quite challenging in America under the best circumstances can be exceedingly daunting in peer nations such as Australia, Canada, France, Japan or the United Kingdom.
Outside of those countries and a few others, well, forget about it.
The suggestion that the tens of millions of migrants who have made landfall in America in the 21st century, legally or otherwise, have been or can be seriously vetted through comprehensive background checks is beyond just fictional as to be fantastical. It’s magical thinking to believe that the migrants marching out of the sprawl of a developing world that’s defined by economies of subsistence living, corrupt and failing nations and the byzantine patchworks of local patronage systems that pose as municipal or regional governments can somehow be screened using the metrics that our American system allows for with our own citizens.
Migrants emerging from countries around the globe that can’t supply reliable clean running water to their own people are not going to arrive here with a comprehensive paperwork trail awaiting American review back in their homelands. They don’t exist and neither do the systems necessary to collect and maintain them. Pretending otherwise is dangerous.
As the case of “Dr. Roberts” in Des Moines demonstrates, evening accurately pinning down a genuine date of birth and age becomes a mercurial proposition. Roberts has presented conflicting dates of birth by years seeded across multiple documents. And it seems every month brings a new headline about a 20-something migrant found hiding in an American high school classroom, often exposed as the result of another criminal disaster.
It is abundantly clear that the board governing the Des Moines Unified School District didn’t care about what may have been lurking in Roberts’ background—he was the symbolic hire they were hellbent on running up the district’s flagpole for its 30,000 students to gaze upon in wonderment, come what may.
And at the end of the day that was the board’s prerogative.
But what they don’t get a pass on is now pretending that they somehow did their level best to determine the factual background and actual history of the man who was cruising their school district strapped with a Glock and sporting fat stacks all on the taxpayers’ dime.
The cold, factual truth of the matter is that America has to make a decision about the tens of millions of migrants that can now be found virtually everywhere around the nation.
Whatever their fate may be is solely the purview of the American people, and only the American people. Guests and interlopers don’t get a say. But an honest discussion and debate among Americans about who may stay and who must leave has to acknowledge two things: We do not know who these people really are, and we must make our collective decision with that in mind.
Mark Cromer is a journalist who has written for the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, and he worked as an investigator for Kroll and Sapient Investigations. His new book, California Twilight: Essays and Memories of the End of the Golden State, chronicles the impacts of mass immigration.
