Religious organizations are raising an unholy ruckus over proposed changes in religious worker visa regulations that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says would reduce rampant fraud in the program, reports The Washington Post:

[R]eligious organizations that increasingly serve immigrant populations cite a need to bring in workers with the spiritual, cultural and linguistic expertise to serve them.

Religious worker visas are used to bring in Catholic nuns, Hebrew teachers, Muslim imams and Baptist church administrators, among other workers. In 2006, more than 11,000 of the visas were issued, most to natives of Korea, Israel and India.

Religious organizations say no other visa category fits their workers as well, and they praise the current system for being relatively hassle-free: Religious workers get visas at U.S. consulates abroad or ports of entry. But the process might have invited fraud, immigration officials say. …

A 2005 Department of Homeland Security review of 220 religious worker petitions found that nearly a third had been falsified. … Last fall, federal immigration agents arrested 33 Pakistanis who held religious worker visas but who, in many cases, had no theological training and were working secular jobs.

The changes would require employers to file petitions in the United States before consulates could issue visas and to renew the visas more frequently. They would give notice of possible site inspections. Religious organizations say increased paperwork would make the process costly and cumbersome. Widespread site visits, rather than just to those whose applications raised red flags, would cause major delays, they say.

The latest National Intelligence Estimate warns that “Although we have discovered only a handful of individuals in the United States with ties to al-Qa’ida senior leadership since 9/11, we judge that al-Qa’ida will intensify its efforts to put operatives here.”

The report adds, “The arrest and prosecution by US law enforcement of a small number of violent Islamic extremists inside the United States – who are becoming connected ideologically, virtually, and/or in a physical sense to the global extremist movement – points to the possibility that others may become sufficiently radicalized that they will view the use of violence here as legitimate.”

Considering that all over the U.S., there are camps training wannabe jihadis, madrassas teaching wahhabism (a fundamentalist, anti-Western form of Islam) and radical imams preaching jihad, it’s high time someone looked into whether the religious visa program is a conduit to funnel Muslim terrorists into the U.S.

The increased paperwork burden the new regulations impose on religious organizations is small compared to the benefit of enhanced national security for us all.

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