One of the visa programs I singled out in Invasion in 2002 as ripe for exploitation by terrorists and in need of immediate reform was the religious worker visa program.

Or as I like to call it: The “Radical Muslim Cleric Importation Plan.”

Now comes word via Newsbeat1 that the Department of Homeland Security is finally waking up to the problem. The Boston Globe reports:

A special visa program that allows churches to bring thousands of foreign religious workers into the country each year is riddled with fraud, an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security investigation has found.

The probe found numerous instances in which groups in the United States falsely claimed to be churches, and visa applicants lied about their religious vocations in order to get into the country . More than a third of the visas examined by investigators were based on fraudulent information.

A report on the investigation, obtained by the Globe, said that instances of fraud were particularly high among applicants from predominantly Muslim countries, and the report raised concerns about potential terrorism risks.

Duu-uu-uuh.

More:

The program has long been suspected of being susceptible to fraud. In 1999, for example, the General Accounting Office found that many applicants for temporary religious worker visas were unqualified for the positions they were coming to fill.

Such concerns have grown since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In September 2004, a Pakistani man living in Brooklyn was convicted of visa fraud for helping more than 200 illegal immigrants falsely obtain religious worker visas. The man had declared himself to be an imam and the basement of his store to be a mosque.

The Brooklyn case helped prompt Homeland Security, which had inherited the religious worker visa program from the old Immigration and Naturalization Services, to conduct an audit. The internal investigation was completed in August 2005, but it has not been made public. The Globe obtained a a redacted version with several pages missing.

Stewart Baker, assistant secretary of homeland security for policy, said in an interview that the department is still wrestling with how to crack down on fraud in the program without hurting the benefits it provides to legitimate churches.

“There is way too much fraud in this program,” Baker said. “One of the things we need to do is go there more often and actually check that it is a real institution, because unfortunately one form of fraud is to say `I have a storefront church,’ and when you go to that address there is a store, not a church.”

Baker said the department is significantly increasing the number of “fraud detection and national security investigative officers.” There were only a “negligible” number of such agents before 2005, he said. Last year the department trained 160, and this year it is adding 220 more.

For a whopping 380.

At the rate we’re going, this London Muslim hate-spewer could probably slip through on an R visa…and who would catch him?

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