The discovery that 19 hijackers lived and trained for their suicide missions in the United States has sparked a fundamental question about the agency charged with securing the nation’s borders.
Can the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service protect the country from terrorists?
Without a significant shift in the agency’s priorities, interviews with experts and former INS officials suggest, the answer is no.
Faced with huge increases in visitors, INS has placed growing emphasis on smooth, speedy service through international airports and across borders, key to American business interests.
In recent years INS measured itself in large part by how quickly it managed its work. The agency boasts on its Web site, for instance, that it cleared nearly 80 percent of all plane flights “within 30 minutes or less” in 2000.
Left behind, critics say, were other priorities: security and investigations inside the country.
“The focus was on making it easy: don’t bother to track people, disregard wholesale violations of immigration laws unless they’re horribly egregious,” said Jim Dorcy, a former INS worker who consults for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an INS critic. “We didn’t want to do anything to impede international commerce. INS, to hold up a businessman, that was asking for trouble.”
Change in philosophy
To create an adequate first line of protection against terrorism, the INS would need to change its philosophy, placing far greater emphasis on tracking visitors here, with more funds, more investigators and better technology.
In Washington the pressure to do that since Sept. 11 has been mounting. Bipartisan Senate legislation calls for INS to ramp up its investigative capability. Still, with the concerns of business interests and immigrant advocates at stake as well as a long history of being steered by pressure from special interests, the question of INS’ long-term priorities is far from answered.
“Its mission is one the nation is ambivalent about,” said Doris Meissner, INS’ commissioner during the Clinton administration, “and that ambivalence has been there throughout our history.” On Sept. 10, she said, “the entire debate in this country was how we should be easing the ways in which immigrants could come here and stay here.”
The sheer scope of INS’ task is enormous, and has grown exponentially since the late 1980s, when an amnesty transformed roughly 3 million illegal immigrants into legal residents, making them eligible for INS services including, eventually, citizenship. Through the 1990s a prosperous global economy fueled travel as never before, nearly doubling the number of legal visitors entering the U.S. to 31 million in 1999, up from 17.5 million in 1990.
Every year 4,775 inspectors, out of a total INS workforce of 30,500, process about 550 million border crossings. The agency has only about 2,000 agents to conduct investigations once visitors clear a port of entry.
INS spokeswoman Nicole Chulick denied that the agency has focused on processing visitors to the detriment of enforcement. “There has been an emphasis on facilitation as well as on enforcement,” she said.
But the evolution of the immigration service’s budget reflects the priority on smooth commerce over interior security.
From 1994 until 2000, the INS budget tripled to $4.8 billion from $1.6 billion, with more than half of the growth devoted to services for people from other countries, such as processing work-permit and citizenship applications and quickly clearing visitors at ports of entry, and a massive expansion of efforts to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants, primarily at the Mexican border.
In that span, INS increased spending for border management by more than $1.1 billion and for services to immigrants by nearly $500 million. Meanwhile, funding for “interior enforcement”–investigations of visa holders and potential threats inside the country–increased by only $146 million.
Though patrolling the border is designed to keep illegal immigrants out, recent history suggests it does little to filter out terrorists, who generally find their way into the country using legal or phony documents.
“Border patrol is the infield, and interior enforcement is the outfield,” said an INS special agent who asked not to be named. “We’ve not played nearly enough attention to the interior. We’re playing baseball without an outfield.”
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Chulick conceded that more attention has been placed on patrolling the border than on mounting investigations inside the country.
Visa system scrutinized
Many of the questions raised since the attacks about interior enforcement have centered on the visa system, which many of the hijackers used to their advantage. Thirteen of the 19 obtained legal visas to come to the U.S., INS commissioner James W. Ziglar said last week. A month after the terror attacks, the agency said it cannot find records on the rest.
Although four hijackers had visa statuses that might have drawn attention–they stayed longer than allowed or never showed up at the school listed on a visa–none drew notice from the INS or other federal investigators until a few weeks before the attacks. By then, two whose names came up on a law-enforcement “watch list” could not be located.
What happened during the terrorists’ stays in the U.S. is not unusual. The INS does not track the whereabouts of most visitors once they get here. It rarely knows when a student fails to turn up for school. It does not look for most people who overstay their visas.
“The terrorists did something that’s not uncommon–either they didn’t proceed to where they were supposed to go or they came and stayed longer,” said Ira Kurzban, an immigration lawyer in Miami. “INS is the only enforcement agency that doesn’t do enforcement.”
The attacks have prompted lawmakers in Washington to weigh dramatic shifts in INS’ priorities that would turn unprecedented attention and new funds to interior enforcement.
New legislation
One proposal calls for tracking all visa recipients while they are in the country and when they leave. The bill would require development of an automated system, including digitized fingerprints, with up-to-date addresses and other information on visa holders.
The bill also aims to improve screening for visas by forcing the FBI, INS and other federal agencies to share more intelligence.
Measures mandated by the legislation would cost between $350 million and $500 million, according to Ernest Blazar, a spokesman for co-sponsor Sen. Christopher Bond (R-Mo.).
Before Congress last week, Ziglar endorsed many of the proposals. He conceded that the INS is playing catchup in the terror war: “The structure of the organization and the management systems we have in place are outdated and, in many respects, inadequate for the challenges we face.”
INS technology is in an especially woeful state. A General Accounting Office investigator told the same congressional hearing that INS, despite spending $300 million a year, does not have the information technology to do its job.
Not everyone agrees that it is realistic, or even desirable, to try to keep track of millions of people who come here with visas. What’s more, millions of others from Europe and elsewhere do not need visas to travel here if they are from the nation’s 29 “visa waiver” countries, although that program is being re-evaluated.
David Cole, an immigration specialist from Georgetown University Law Center, warns that keeping track of so many people may prove unwieldy. “It’s incredibly intrusive, incredibly expensive,” Cole said.
Others cautioned against letting fear push lawmakers too far in enacting measures that unduly crimp commerce and sap immigrant vitality.
“We need to take measures that are focused,” said Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “You could be talking about killing the U.S. economy with some of these measures. There are many out there who have simply wanted to shut down immigration to this country, not because of terrorism, but because that’s what they always wanted. Many of them now are dusting off the same old tired proposals–close the borders, pull up the drawbridges. But we need to isolate terrorism, not America.”
Political will challenged
Many of the ideas behind the new wave of INS legislation are not new, a fact that raises questions about whether lawmakers will have the long-range political will to carry out fundamental changes to INS’ philosophy on interior enforcement.
In the aftermath of bombings at the World Trade Center and in Oklahoma City in the 1990s, Congress authorized the INS to set up one computerized system to monitor the entry and exit of visa recipients and a second one specifically to track student visa holders. Neither system was fully funded because of complaints that they were overly burdensome to administer.
Blazar acknowledged “that there are parts of this bill that are not new,” but he predicted the terrorist attacks will have swept away previous resistance. “It’s a different world after Sept. 11,” Blazar said. Still, he acknowledged that political pressure to back off may build if much time passes without further attacks.
“How do you institutionalize a sense of urgency? That’s a difficult question that I don’t think anyone has an answer for,” Blazar said.
There also is not an easy answer for how to reinvigorate an agency dispirited by scandals as well as by congressional sensitivity to special interests.
T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union that represents border control workers, said the border patrol relies on deterrence–stopping people from sneaking into the country simply by their presence at various spots along the border.
Recruits, he said, “come in all excited,” but many leave after a few years when they find out what the job actually entails. “They have these fancy recruiting videos…. And then you get here, and you’re told to sit for 10 hours a day and do nothing but sit.”
Gene McNary, a former INS commissioner, said he spent his years at the helm working to boost morale. “It really was a bastard child,” he said. “INS was always blamed for everything. Whatever happens, even now, you’ll see INS blamed.”