From 2001.

By SUSAN HELEN MORAN, For United Press International
Nov. 28, 2001 at 3:04 PM

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 (UPI) — The United States immigration system must initiate a new and complex balancing act by strengthening its weak links while maintaining its “openness to the world,” according to a new report from a Washington, D.C., think tank.

In “After the Attacks: Protecting Borders and Liberties,” published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, outlines several ways to strengthen the system.

She writes that overall, the INS and the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs — which issues visas overseas — must improve visa screening and admissions decisions, modernize systems that provide information about visitors (including foreign students), and develop faster and more effective methods to share data among key government agencies including the FBI and the CIA.

The report’s recommendations include expanding the number of agents patrolling the Canadian border and tracking the departure of foreign visitors who hold visas.

“Great effort must be devoted to providing front-line officers with criminal histories and other sensitive intelligence information,” Meissner writes. In the 1990s, integrating the databases of the INS, State Department and other federal agencies, and installing automated lookout sharing access to information at all consulates and international ports were high priorities, but were not completed.

“A system must be developed to give the INS, the consulates overseas, the Border Patrol and others access to vital information,” says Michael Scardaville, a policy analyst for homeland defense at the Heritage Foundation.

In addition, the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency must develop a methodology to safely list sensitive information needed to identify the highest risk cases, according to the report. This need was underlined by recent congressional testimony: Several weeks before Sept. 11, the CIA informed the FBI that two suspected terrorists were entering the United States via Canada, but the information was not reported to the Federal Aviation Administration in time to stop the men from boarding one of the airliners that they crashed into the World Trade Center.

“Capacity must be given to all inspectors to electronically access visa application information, such as photographs and other identifying data from consulates abroad,” Meissner writes. Inspectors at some locations have this kind of access, but funding must be increased to install this capability at all locations, she says.

Meissner notes that in 2001, consulates will process more than 7.5 million nonimmigrant visas, half-a-million immigrant visas, and 7.8 million passports for U.S. citizens. “Staffing must increase,” according to the report.

“At present, our system appears to be overwhelmed,” agrees Will Marshal, president of the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. PPI supports a consolidation of agencies — Customs, the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard.

“Adding more people is not the whole answer,” says Meissner. “A new organizational model for visa screening is needed.” At the least, she writes, “visa screening must be treated as a career specialty for staff who get ongoing training, access to information, and technological support. … If this work is not suited to Foreign Service careers and rewards, it should be done by a new civil service cadre dedicated to this mission.”

“The INS should create a specialized visa corps with representatives around the world, answerable not only to the local ambassador, but also to INS headquarters in Washington — and ultimately to the new head of homeland security, Tom Ridge,” says Mark Krikorian, president of the Center for Immigration Studies.

“To leave the responsibility for issuing visas with the State Department is a bad idea. What diplomat would want to give visa applicants a hard time or turn them down, when his mind-set is to cultivate friendly relations?” Krikorian writes in an article in the Autumn 2001 issue of City Journal.

Meissner also recommends quickly and universally implementing the international student information system, which now operates on a pilot basis only.

“At a minimum, Washington should develop a mechanism to track whether foreign citizens who obtain student visas actually enroll and stay in class,” says James Lindsey, senior analyst at the Brookings Institution.

The report also recommends that the State Department create special-purpose posts at high risk locations, examine policies that allow multiple entries, enforce new inspection requirements, and build liaisons with the law enforcement agencies and intelligence communities in host countries.

In addition to the nearly 8 million people entering the United States with visas each year, many millions more enter under visa waiver agreements or through commuter arrangements with Canada and Mexico. Meissner believes these millions are vital to North America’s progressively more interdependent economies, and that new strategies to manage these flows should be based on segmenting the populations. That way, she writes, “travel by the law-abiding majority can be certified in advance through the use of biometrics and other reliable techniques.”

At airports, “advance passenger information …(would) allow airline passenger manifests to be electronically matched against lookout information while flights are en route,” she writes. The new process should be implemented quickly, and would allow the majority of passengers to proceed quickly while inspectors identified individuals requiring in-depth inspections.

For land border crossings, machines that read “laser” green cards and daily passes must be deployed as quickly as possible, Meissner advises. The new cards would incorporate state-of-the-art security techniques, photographs and fingerprints.

While policy analysts at think tanks across the political spectrum agree that the immigration system must be strengthened, some of them question whether it can — or should — simultaneously maintain the openness that Meissner achieved during her tenure at the INS under President Bill Clinton.

Reducing the number of immigrants and visitors to the United States will not hurt the economy, says Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies. “For too long, some in the U.S. business community have seen the borders as an impediment to trade and the economy, rather than a national security protection,” he says. “Fewer visas to process overseas (means) more time to do background checks and fewer people to track once they are here.”

“We must be much more careful in who we admit into this country,” says PPI’s Marshal. “If it means slowing down, most Americans would support that. … The cost to the economy and society of curtailing immigration seems smaller now than before Sept. 11.”

“The issues raised by Sept. 11 (concern) a system that allows people with hostile intent to enter the country — not the number of immigrants entering the country,” says Lindsay. “The 19 hijackers were not immigrants, they were visitors,” he says, and points out that the distinction between immigrants holding green cards and those holding short-term visas is vital to the current debate. “I think it would be a terrible mistake to halt immigration for nine months while we decide what to do,” referring to a recent proposal by Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.

“The real danger is that immigration opponents will exploit legitimate concerns over terrorism to promote a crackdown on immigration,” says Dan Griswold, associate director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

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