On International Migrants Day, Homeland Security Warns Potential Border Crossers No Citizenship In Their Future

At a news conference on Wednesday held to commemorate International Migrants Day, Alan Bersin, assistant secretary of international affairs for the Department of Homeland Security, warned potential unauthorized border crossers that even if they made it into the United States successfully, any future immigration reform passed by Congress would be unlikely to extend a path to citizenship to them. The Associated Press reports that Bersin said he wasn't sure if human traffickers, or "coyotes", were trying to drum up extra business by encouraging people to cross before the passage of a reform, but added that he would not rule it out, given the smugglers' lack of scruples.

"It seems to me that it is supremely important that people who are crossing, or trying to cross ... they have to realize they will have no right to take advantage of any immigration reform law that gets passed," Bersin said, according to the AP. The DHS's so-called "border czar" who was tapped in 2009 by President Barack Obama to handle unauthorized immigration and drug violence along the US-Mexico border, indicated that his office hadn't noted an upswing in illegal crossing attempts since June, when the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration overhaul. But he added that border security along the US-Mexico frontier had reached such a point that "it is practically impossible to cross without a coyote".

The Senate bill's "cutoff date" is Dec. 30, 2011, meaning those who came unlawfully to the United States after that would not be eligible for the legal status or path to citizenship which it would extend to an estimated 8.3 million of the nation's 11.7 million undocumented immigrants. Added to the bill to discourage a sudden surge of migrants hoping to make it to the United States before the deadline, the relatively early cutoff - immigrant advocates had pushed for it to be Jan. 1, 2013, about five months prior to the bill's introduction in the Senate - was reportedly a concession to Sen. Marco Rubio, a key conservative member of the "Gang of Eight" which authored it.

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