The Boston Globe highlighted a DHS report that says loopholes are being exploited in the US special visa program:

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.

Whoa. That’s a high-rate of failure but it reminds me of the visas given to Russians to escape religious persecution in the 1980s. I actually met a woman many years ago who confided she practiced Judaism because her family claimed it as their religion in order to emmigrate to the US. They continued practicing after they lived in America out of fear of being deported. Ironic, considering that the US enforced strict quotas that blocked Jews immigrating to the US during the pogroms. The Center for Immigration Studies points out how much the immigration policy has changed:

Until the Refugee Act of 1980, the United States’ definition of a refugee mostly involved persons fleeing Communist regimes. The definition since 1980 stipulated that a refugee is any person who is outside his/her country “and who is unable or unwilling to return … because of persecution, or a well-founded fear of persecution, on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” Therefore, after 1980, Soviet emigres had to prove to an immigration officer in Rome that they had a well founded fear of persecution. Most managed to do so. Until the late 1980s, United States policy accepted all Soviet Jews as refugees.

Identity is definitely an odd thing since you never know who will define it for you and for what. Hmmm, that almost sounds like something Heidegger might say. Scary. Does the need for a democratic state to close loopholes in identity management outweigh a person’s right to control their destiny?

Homeland Security auditors who reviewed an application for a 33-year-old Pakistani man, for example, could not locate the alleged religious group listed on the petition as his sponsor, and when investigators went to the group’s address they found an apartment complex.

Perhaps we should ask whether a religious group these days would want to be discovered by federal investigators? It’s like that old Far Side cartoon where men dressed in animal pelts and carrying TVs run away from the window to their hut yelling “Quick! The Anthropologists are coming!” Also, given the history of religion in the early US (not to mention the true definition of the word “church”), is it so unusual for a modest home to be a place of practice? Is a mega-stadium of worshippers a more legitimate identity to carry than a small family gathering?