The new jet set.

It's a slow day at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. Mondays usually are. "You should be here on a Friday or a Saturday, that's when the action is," says one of the uniformed immigration inspectors who deal with up to 1,300 political-asylum claimants a month.

At the secondary inspection area in the East Wing of JFK's International Arrivals Building, a Liberian national is entering a claim for political asylum. He is traveling on a British passport which he purchased for $300 in Bangkok. The flight that he arrived on several hours earlier originated in Tokyo.

The man, about 30, has his lines well rehearsed: "My uncle was killed in an attempted coup. He was a soldier in [Samuel] Doe's army."

"What would happen if you would go back?" asks a skeptical officer from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

"I'm afraid of the situation," replies the Liberian.

"What would happen?" insists the officer, a man who has clearly heard it all before.

"My father was killed," the Liberian states emphatically.

"When?"

A long pause. "February. February '92. My mother is in Ghana."

"When did she go?"

"I don't know."

"Did she go to Ghana alone?"

"I cannot say."

The interview drags on. Both men are going through the charade. The Liberian will be out on the street in a matter of hours--he knows it and so does the officer.

The political-asylum claimant left Liberia in 1988, stowing away by ship to Thailand. Two years later he moved on to Malaysia, then back to Bangkok, followed by a stint in Japan. Frustrated by poor earnings over the past four years, he's decided to try the land of opportunity: the United States.

He has a bogus passport, he's been out of Liberia for four years, but he knows the magic words that will get him past the harried officers at JFK. Once he utters "political asylum" his chances of remaining in the United States are 93 per cent.

"We're being deluged. It's scandalous," complains the officer filling out the papers on this case. "In a matter of hours he's going to be walking out onto the street joining the ranks of the unemployed. We don't know anything about him. We don't know if he has AIDS. We don't know if he's a murderer." In most cases immigration authorities don't even find out a real name. It's a complaint heard over and over again from any of the 360 immigration officers who work America's most unguarded border--JFK.

Last year 14,688 excludable aliens attempted to enter the United States through JFK, nearly triple the number just two years earlier. Of these, 9,194, or 63 per cent, asked for political asylum. All but 428 of them had either fraudulent documents or no documents at all.

The deck is stacked in favor of the aliens. The detention center at JFK airport has a maximum capacity of 100 beds and only 12 to 15 vacancies for some 1,300 new excludable aliens every month. For someone contemplating illegal immigration, it's difficult to find better odds. "During fiscal 1992, I detained only 1,169 of the 15,000 inadmissibles who came through JFK," says William Slattery, New York district director for the INS.

In total, only about 7 per cent of the inadmissible aliens who come in at JFK can be detained. The rest are simply released onto the street and asked to present themselves for a hearing at a future date. "We have no good, solid data" on how many ever show up for their hearings, says Duke Austin, an INS spokesman. "I know it sounds crazy, but it's just not collected." On background, other INS people concede that probably not more than 5 per cent of the airport asylum claimants are ever heard from again.

Records, Anyone?

Beginning last October, the INS started keeping computerized records of asylum seekers who come through Kennedy and other major airports. INS also no longer lets a claimant leave the airport before it has scheduled him for a preliminary hearing before an asylum judge. The first hearings under the new rules had been set for mid January, which means the INS will finally have some hard data about how many of these asylum seekers actually bother to show up. The new system won't make it any easier to apprehend and deport the no-shows, but at least INS will know how many people are scamming the system.

China and the Asian subcontinent are the prime sources of jet-set asylum seekers, accounting for more than two-thirds of the applicants at JFK. The remainder are from an assortment of countries in Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Caribbean. Though U.S. immigration authorities in recent months have moved to crack down on abuses through fines against the airlines and pre-boarding inspection of passengers in countries such as India and Pakistan, it has done little to slow down the flow.

By and large, the "jet people" phenomenon is well-orchestrated. Though some of the asylum seekers have made it to JFK on their own, most, particularly those from China, India, and Pakistan, rely on professional smugglers. For a fee, generally in the $30,000 range, the smuggler provides them with an airline ticket, a high-quality phony passport (which, if it's not destroyed en route to the United States, is often secretly turned over to the smuggler on the last leg of the voyage to be recycled for the next group of "refugees"), and a tale of persecution.

Veteran immigration officers at JFK say they can easily identify the smuggling  rings' local agents hanging around the International Arrivals terminal, waiting for their clients to finish up their paperwork and be on their way: they're the ones with the cellular telephones.

For some arrivals, particularly among the Pakistanis, the U.S. is not even the final objective--Canada is. Being admitted to Canada for political asylum is like hitting the lottery jackpot: the benefit package there--including welfare, education, resettlement assistance, and more--is worth considerably more than a similar package here. But Canada does a much better job of overseas screening of potential asylum-seekers, weeding out the ones with bad documents before they board Canada-bound planes--so Kennedy airport, it seems, has become a back door to Canada.

Regardless of whether the United States is the asylum-seeker's ultimate destination, or just a stop along the way, JFK's International Arrival terminal has become a virtual open door for anyone who pushes on it. The law says that anyone who requests political asylum in the U.S., regardless of the circumstances of his arrival, must be given a hearing. The system is so backed up that it takes a minimum of four months to bring a claimant before a judge for a preliminary hearing and 14 months before the actual facts of the claim are heard in court. A particularly sore point for the INS's Slattery is the length of time it can take to resolve even the most bogus asylum claim. The judges "have no standards they are supposed to meet, no work performance plans," he complains.

There are plans in the works to quadruple the number of detention spaces available at Kennedy by October of this year, but even that, Slattery points out, will be woefully inadequate. Even assuming that there isn't an increase in asylum claimants coming through JFK, 400 beds would still accommodate only 28 per cent of the current traffic.

If anyone is less pleased about the whole situation than the INS, it is the airlines. Each time someone shows up without proper documents, it costs the carrier $3,000 and the fine may soon be raised to $5,000. The U.S. Government fined the airlines $20 million last year for delivering undocumented or badly documented passengers to U.S. airports. Half of those fines were levied at JFK.

Jet People?

The West Wing of International Arrivals is a mirror image of the East Wing. In a room identical to the East Winds inspection area sit three Indian nationals with white sheets of paper stapled to their jackets bearing their names (aliases, most likely) and the name of the airline on which they arrived. All three have arrived without passports, asking political asylum. Confident the minor inconvenience of the airport waiting room will soon be behind them, they offer no more information and claim not to speak English.

Sitting in a row in front of the Indians are five Chinese nationals who have also arrived without documents. "The Chinese don't have to claim political asylum," says a Chinese-speaking agent who is handling the paper work. "They're all protected by the executive order" issued aftor the Tiananmen Square massacre. Though the order technically applies only to Chinese who were present in the U.S. prior to June 4, 1989, in practice it makes it virtually impossible to deport any Chinese national.

The five in the JFK inspection room arrived after an odyssey that would make anyone looking to pad a frequent-flyer account green with envy. Hong Kong to Paris. Paris to Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo to New York. The more indirect the route, the Chinese-speaking officer relates, the less scrutiny the travelers and their documents receive. There were seven people on their flight from the Dominican Republic: none had a visa to enter the United States, but all were planning to stay.

One well-dressed thirty-year-old woman was seeking political asylum based on China's single-child-per-family rule. "I'm afraid of forced sterilization if I return to China," reads her Q&A sheet, as filled out by the immigration officer. Her first child remains behind in China with the woman's mother. Her husband has been living in the U.S. since 1989. She doesn't know his address, but has a phone number for him in New Jersey.

A younger woman, in her late teens, stares shyly at the floor as she answers the questions posed in Chinese by Officer Catherine Bryant. The younger woman does not directly request asylum. When asked why she is here, she replies, "I heard life was better in the United States." She has no documents of her own, only the tattered business card of Bing Wong, a real-estate agent in the Elmhurst section of Queens who she describes vaguely as a distant relative.

Both women claim that they paid-or have promised to pay-- the smuggler $30,000. The older woman's husband may have been able to come up with the cash to smuggle his wife into the U.S. The younger one will almost assuredly be working off her passage for many years to come in the sweatshops or restaurants of Chinatown. Many of the Chinese being smuggled into the United States wind up in a state of indentured servitude or as foot soldiers in the Chinese underworld.

A Ghanian woman is sitting alone in the front row of the waiting room, sobbing uncontrollably. She has just disembarked from a KLM flight from Amsterdam. The Dutch passport she is carrying is a valid one, but it does not belong to her. The photo on the document bears a resemblance to her, but on close inspection it is clearly the photo of another woman.

The sobbing woman has been living in the Netherlands for the past two years. She has not requested political asylum there because she has an aunt in New York whom she wishes to join. Upon arrival in New York she claims political persecution, for the first time.

Overload

Political asylum was first codified into U.S. law in 1980, when Congress passed sweeping reforms of the refugee laws. At the time it was estimated that about 5,000 people a year would seek asylum in the U.S. In recent years, the number of asylum requests has exploded to about 100,000 annually. Because the system was never designed to handle anything approaching that volume, and because every claim must get a hearing, it can take years for the process to play itself out.

The system's Achilles' heel is the right granted to each person who presses a claim for political asylum to have his case heard by a judge. The more people who apply, the more the system becomes bogged down. The more bogged down the system becomes, the more inviting it becomes for those filing bogus claims.

Jonathan Fuchs, who represents Iceland Air and other Europe-based carriers, would like to see summary exclusion for obvious abusers of the process, particularly aliens who flush their documents down the airplane toilet and then ask for political asylum. "Flushers should not get an automatic right to go see a judge. Just because they get their feet on the ground in the U.S. doesn't mean they're entitled to a hearing," he claims.

The airlines would much rather put these people on the next flight back to wherever it is they came from, and not have to pay the $3,000 fine for delivering an inadmissible alien to the U.S. "When someone arrives at JFK or any other international airport, they are at the functional equivalent of a border," and if they lack adequate documentation, they ought to be turned around and sent back, Fuchs contends.

Slattery would like to see summary exclusion for applicants who have entered by way of a third, presumably safe, country. The majority of claimants at JFK fall into this category. "If I have someone from China who has been through six or seven countries before finally asking for asylum when they hit JFK, I don't see why I should have to admit them," he says.

In striking contrast to your typical illegal alien who sneaks across the border, an asylum claimant who arrives at an airport without documents or with phony documents is almost always rewarded not only with admission to the U.S., but also with authorization to hold employment for as long as he can manage to clog the court's docket. With work authorization, the asylum abuser can obtain a Social Security card and a driver's license, the de-facto identifiers used by most Americans to prove eligibility for everything from welfare benefits to the right to vote.

Although the casual way in which we hand out these documents usually amounts to nothing more than the government aiding and abetting violation of our immigration laws, the consequences can be more serious. In the case of Mir Aimal Kansi, the man alleged to have gone on a shooting spree outside CIA headquarters last month, that laxness led to two deaths and three other people being wounded.

Kansi, a Pakistani citizen, entered the United States through JFK in February 1991 using what the INS now believes was a phony business visa (which he overstayed anyway). A year later, Kansi applied for political asylum at the INS office in Arlington, Virginia. Using the work-authorization document issued to him by the INS, Kansi was able to obtain a Social Security card and a Virginia driver's license. With that license Kansi had all the documentation he needed to purchase the AK-47 rifle he allegedly used to go on his rampage. Ironically, although nearly a year had passed between the time he filed his asylum petition and the date of the shootings, his case had not been scheduled for a hearing.

Enter EMK 

Even when the results are not quite so tragic, the abuse of I asylum at JFK airport, though still relatively small, tends to have greater outrage value than other forms of illegal immigration. People sneaking past Border Patrol, even in much greater numbers, are less irritating than people who mock our humanitarianism. Senator Edward Kennedy, who chairs the Immigration and Refugee Affairs Subcommittee and who has traditionally worked for more liberal immigration and asylum laws, has dispatched two top aides, Jerry Tinker and Michael Meyers, to JFK to assess the situation.

After seeing the situation first-hand, Tinker, the subcommittee chief of staff, agrees that the asylum system is abused. Kennedy's subcommittee plans to hold hearings on the problem sometime in the spring. But Tinker believes the problem can be handled without requiring any new legislation. Additional detention facilities at the airport and quick hearings for asylum claimants, he believes, will deter people from abusing the system.

When Los Angeles International Airport boosted its detention capacity to 800 beds, asylum abuse all but stopped there. The addition of the extra detention space at LAX, however, also happened to coincide with the increase of asylum abuse at JFK. It seems likely, then, that simply building more detention facilities at JFK will not solve the problem; rather, it is likely to shift it to some other airport less well-equipped to hold inadmissible aliens.

While Tinker opposes summary exclusion as premature and unnecessary, he does favor a quick airport hearing for applicants and the immediate return of those whose claims have no merit. This is precisely what was being done in the case of Haitian boat people until last May. "While we agree this is a real problem that needs to be nipped in the bud, I would like to see them have a hearing and be put back on a plane. I don't think civil libertarians could have any problem with that," says Tinker.

But they do have a problem with it says Arthur C. Helton, director of the Refugee Project for the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. A quick airport hearing and a prompt return flight for those whose claims are deemed to be totally lacking in merit is wrong, in Helton's opinion. "Where would have to be a more substantial procedure" to ensure that an asylum claimant is guaranteed the full protection of the law.

Helton accuses Senator Kennedy and others of political grandstanding. The phenomenon of airport asylum seekers is "a relatively discrete problem, but it's one that policy-makers are quite tempted to fix because it's relatively controllable," says Helton. He points out that compared to the more than 5,000 illegal aliens who sneak across the U.S.-Mexico border every day, the 15,000 a year who brazenly march through JFK are a mere drop in the ocean.

The ideal solution would be to screen out the abusers before they ever set foot on American soil. Under the law, a person must have physically reached the United States in order to press a claim of political asylum. A mobile corps of just ten agents moving from airport to airport to keep smugglers off-guard, says Slattery, would have a greater deterrence potential than the 360 agents currently at JFK.

Oh, Canada

The Canadian Immigration Service tested a similar program for six weeks beginning in November, and their preliminary findings indicate a reduction in the number of bogus asylum claimants turning up at Canadian airports. Pre-screening of passengers before they board flights to the U.S. can work, but it is a somewhat dicey proposition for the INS and the airlines.

Neither the U.S. Government nor the airlines want to appear to be hassling legitimate visitors. Adding to the problem is the matter of racial and ethnic sensitivities. Inevitably, somebody is going to raise an objection if the only passengers whose documents are closely scrutinized happen to be wearing turbans. Moreover, refugeerights advocates have serious reservations about such screenings in countries whose human-rights records are suspect. Pulling someone with bad documents out of line in London or Paris is one thing. Pulling that person out of line in Karachi or Bombay is quite another matter, says Helton.

The number of people seeking political asylum will continue to grow as long as the odds of beating the system remain so high. Other democratic countries have concluded that the only way of dealing with asylum abuse is through summary exclusion of people they know are abusing the process. In some European countries, people who show up without documents, with phony documents, or who have traveled through other safe countries are simply presumed to be asylum abusers and are sent packing.

In a highly mobile world filled with billions of desperately poor people, some of the rules may have to be reconsidered. Our commitment to due process is admirable, but it has clearly become a magnet for abuse. Under such circumstances, blind obeisance to the notion that every human being on planet earth is entitled to a day in an American court, no matter how frivolous the claim to asylum, can only undermine our ability to protect the truly persecuted.

Applying to come to the United States as an immigrant or a refugee can entail years of waiting. Entering illegally means risking apprehension. Going the political-asylum route, however, means no waiting your turn, a set of documents entitling you to work, and a virtual assurance that you'll never be caught. The only thing that's surprising is that far more people haven't caught on.

Back in the East Wing of International Arrivals at JFK, a Dominican who has been sitting in the secondary inspection area for about 24 hours-- the immigration officers suspect he is a criminal--gives up and asks to be sent home. He's destined to be one of the unlucky 7 per cent who winds up in detention. A return flight home sounds like a much better option.

A victory of sorts-at least for now. "He'll try again," says the immigration officer as he begins filling out the inevitable forms.

Mr. Mehlman is director of media outreach for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). This article was written in his private capacity.