Border Lines - What to do about immigration after 9/11.

On the day hijackers slammed their jumbo jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on a measure the pro-immigration lobby has wanted for years. It's called "245(i)," and it would have let illegal aliens adjust their status without leaving the United States. In other words, people living in this country in violation of its immigration laws would be able, when eligible, to pick up green cards at their local INS office-as opposed to having to travel abroad to seek them at consular offices. This is another example of how official Washington winks at illegal immigration, and it would have won easy approval but for the emergency evacuation of the House Chamber.

A lot changed on September 11. The 245(i) provision may still pass-it's pretty popular among politicians because there's a specific constituency for it-but there won't be any more talk about a broad amnesty for illegal aliens. (Opponents probably wouldn't hesitate to point out that one of the men responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing became a legal resident because of the last amnesty, in 1986.) To the extent that the amnesty measure survives at all, it will downshift into a guest-worker program for agriculture, whose advocates feel compelled to speak in terms of what they call "food security."

The whole immigration debate has moved dramatically away from questions of access to those of control. Attorney General John Ashcroft already has released a new set of detention and deportation rules that allow the INS to hold people without charges for 48 hours (it used to be 24), and also to hold them indefinitely in "extraordinary" circumstances-a term that, not coincidentally, now applies to some 75 suspects linked to the massacres. Reformers interested in greater immigrant regulation won't stop there: Congress will also take a close look at border management. In doing so, it can play a useful role in combating terrorism-and illegal immigration, too. But success will require that conservatives keep a narrow focus on security issues and not overreach. Ramesh Ponnuru has shown on these pages how restrictionists on the right have not realized many of their policy goals because of tactical mistakes involving a desire to achieve too much all at once (see "Minding the 'Golden Door,'" April 2). The opportunity now is to improve the border as a tool of enforcement. This will be achieved not by tying other agendas to it-such as a reduction in overall admission quotas, as several members of Congress have suggested-but by enacting a few small steps that may pay big dividends.

One of the most obvious ways to improve border security is to increase the size of the Border Patrol. Congress has doubled the number of agents since the mid 1990s, but has ignored what may be considered America's adjunct Border Patrol: the State Department's consular corps in U.S. embassies. These are the people responsible for issuing tourist, student, and immigrant visas-and they represent a portal many foreigners must pass through before they even set foot on American soil. Roughly half of all illegal aliens got into the U.S. not by swimming across the Rio Grande in the black of night, but by entering with valid visas and then staying past their expiration dates. According to authorities, at least 16 of the 19 hijackers came into the U.S. with legal visas.

Yet the people tasked with reviewing visa applications are overworked and underappreciated. As former foreign-service officer Nikolai Wenzel wrote last year in a Center for Immigration Studies analysis: "In Mexico City, for example, the unrealistically high numbers of daily interviews meant that each officer usually interviewed 150-200 applicants over a span of five to seven hours. This led to an average of about two minutes per application, during which a consular officer had to review documents, ask questions in Spanish, determine whether the applicant qualified for a non-immigrant visa, and fill out the requisite paperwork."

This is no recipe for quality control. The job is demoralizing drudgery reserved for junior foreign-service officers; Wenzel likens it to "hazing in college fraternities." The ambitious ones are desperate to get out, and don't want to make waves. Furthermore, their duty seems particularly unsuited for the State Department, with its understandable bias toward accommodation and diplomacy; the administration of the law ought to be reserved for people whose top concern is enforcement. It would therefore make sense to remove this responsibility from the State Department entirely and give it to another agency that can operate through the embassies and employ a different set of incentives and priorities.

This is no surefire way to keep out all terrorists, but it will lighten the load at the border. Border agents can point to some impressive accomplishments in recent years; in 1999, for example, they arrested Ahmed Ressam as he tried to enter Washington State with 130 pounds of explosives and several timing devices in his car (he was planning to strike at Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the new millennium). Yet there was also something troubling about Ressam's apprehension: He previously had passed between Canada and the U.S. many times without incident, and apparently did not see a risk in hauling his trunk full of bomb-making equipment across the border at a popular checkpoint.

Nearly half a billion foreigners enter the U.S. each year, and the most stringent demand many of them will face is filling out a form asking where they're headed; the forms are then shipped off to storage, where they probably won't ever be seen again. What the country needs is a high-tech method of tracking foreigners as they enter and leave. Right now, the federal government doesn't even know how many people are in the country with expired visas, let alone who they are or where they live. Five years ago, Congress passed a law to create such a monitoring system, but last year it essentially reversed its decision. This effort now should be revived, and the system it creates should have robust, real-time capabilities. When foreigners come to the U.S., the government ought to open a file on them using biometric technology, such as digital thumbprints. This will confound people who try to enter with false identification (which at least some of the hijackers seem to have done) and also overcome technical problems such as the uncertain spelling of names ("Is that Osama with an 'O' or Usama with a 'U,' Mr. bin Laden?").

This is in some ways a dicey proposition: More hoops at the Canadian border will cause longer lines at the Windsor Tunnel, which will hurt commerce. Yet it might also be possible to accommodate frequent travelers with something like the speed-pass lanes on toll roads. More troubling, however, is the prospect of a national ID system that covers not just aliens but citizens as well. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican-along with several others -has started calling for this, and if their efforts pick up steam they will split conservatives between those who believe security interests trump everything else, and those who worry that national ID cards will become an instrument of big government.

Congress will definitely want to improve federal supervision of the roughly half-million people who are in the U.S. on student visas. It's not clear whether the hijackers had such visas, though it's reasonable to assume that at least a few of them obtained vocational-training permits called "M visas" that would have allowed them to enroll at aviation academies. In 1996, Congress passed a law that would have allowed instant access to information on student-visa holders-but now, five years later, the program still hasn't been fully implemented because of opposition from universities and foreign-student organizations. Congress should demand that it move online rapidly- surely before the current 2003 deadline-so that the government can keep better tabs not only on who attends flight school but also who switches majors from literature to nuclear engineering.

There are plenty of other necessary steps. The FBI must do a better job of sharing its counterterrorism information with the INS. The bureaucratic culture of the INS itself must change to appreciate its role in fighting terrorism. The Canadians, too, must tighten their own admission procedures: There's a reason why so many terrorists, including five of the September 11 hijackers, enter Canada before attempting to come here.

None of these measures will be a panacea against terrorism, though each would serve as an inhibitor by making the act of terrorism more difficult and the capture of conspirators more likely. In a way, immigrants and foreign visitors are a secret asset against the likes of suicide bombers. Just as many people send remittances to relatives abroad and thereby enrich foreign economies, they also send back ideas- a kind of political remittance that promotes freedom in places that don't know it well. By pursuing a modest agenda on immigration, conservatives can make it harder for the villains to get in, and continue to strengthen those people, worldwide, who are on this country's side.