Focus on immigration holes, not old records

Citizenship fraud is a legitimate issue that threatens security, but the government must sharpen focus.

The U.S. government may be stepping up a program that questions the citizenship status of Latinos with U.S. birth certificates — refusing to renew passports in some cases and beginning detention proceedings in others.

Citizenship fraud is a legitimate issue that threatens the nation’s security, but the government must sharpen its focus.

It’s less important to determine where babies were born decades ago than to keep people like Mollie Tibbetts’ alleged killer from slipping over the border now.

Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, an undocumented Mexican national, worked on an Iowa farm for at least four years after allegedly providing a false name and identification to the owners. He’s charged with murdering Ms. Tibbetts, a 20-year-old University of Iowa student, while she was out for a jog last month.

How Mr. Rivera may have gotten into the country, obtained a false identify and escaped detection in rural Iowa are unclear. How so many other undocumented workers end up in the nation’s underground agricultural workforce also is baffling.

The extent to which others might exploit the same vulnerabilities for other purposes — terrorism, for example — is unknown.

Getting to the bottom of those questions is more pressing than challenging the citizenship of a 40-year-old man, identified by The Washington Post only as Juan, who has had trouble getting his passport renewed despite having a U.S. birth certificate and a resume that includes Army, Border Patrol and prison guard service.

According to The Post, Juan was swept up in a crackdown that began during Barack Obama’s presidency and has accelerated under Donald Trump.

It centers on Latinos with U.S. birth certificates who were born in the Texas-Mexico border area from the 1950s through the 1990s.

During that period, the government claims, midwives and physicians sometimes provided illegal birth certificates to babies born on the Mexican side of the border.

Besides refusing to reissue passports in some cases of suspected fraud, the government has revoked others and stranded heretofore U.S. citizens in Mexico.

It has also initiated deportation proceedings against some believed to be holding phony documents and locked them up in detention centers.

It has told some that they have the burden of proving they were born here.

The crackdown may ferret out some cases of fraud, but it’s also likely to strip citizenship rights from a certain number of bonafide Americans.

It’s a waste of manpower and other resources to go down this rabbit hole, to scrutinize decades-old birth certificates, when people like Mr. Rivera are slipping across the border now and assuming false identities with stolen or forged documents today.

The government must find a way to secure its borders without sweeping innocent Americans into a dragnet, and immigration authorities must not be distracted from their main mission.

Even if Juan has been holding a fake birth certificate all his life, taking his passport or deporting him will be a hollow victory as long as undocumented workers continue poring through bigger holes in the immigration system.

It’s a waste of manpower and other resources to go down this rabbit hole, to scrutinize decadesold birth certificates, when people like Mr. Rivera are slipping across the border now and assuming false identities with stolen or forged documents.