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June
11, 2002 10:50 a.m. |
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do you mean — you're establishing a special department for it?"
Mrs. Thatcher is supposed to have shouted at some hapless cabinet minister
in the days of her glory. "I told you to deal with the problem, not
to make it worse. Once we have an entire government department whose size,
pay, and perquisites depend upon the existence of the problem, we'll never
get rid of it."
One need not go so far as to argue that President Bush's creation of a homeland-security department will necessarily promote national insecurity. Bureaucrats will not want to make it easier for terrorists to blow up Washington — if for no better reason than that is where their offices are located.
But merging existing agencies such as Customs and the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) into one grand new department will do nothing whatever to defeat terrorism — unless it accompanied by changes in policy, in underlying bureaucratic attitudes, and in personnel. And of that there is no sign.
Take, for instance, foreign-student programs and student-visa tracking. These might seem minor concerns until you remember that several of the World Trade Center hijackers entered the U.S. on student visas, rarely or never attended their classes, had travel schedules hard to reconcile with full-time scholarship, and behaved in numerous ways to attract the attention of the authorities.
Except that they didn't. The authorities paid so little attention to them in fact that two of the hijackers, including the now famous Mohammed Atta, received their visa approvals by mail six months after they had flown into the World Trade Center.
As if that were not bad enough, these abuses continue. Two recent investigative articles — written from Left and Right respectively — reveal that INS bureaucrats and college administrators have systematically derailed attempts to reform them.
In National Review, Harvard professor George Borjas points out that the main step to a student visa is getting an I-20 form signifying acceptance at a U.S. college. These are issued, with little or no official oversight, by 73,000 U.S. schools and colleges, including such unlikely institutions as the San Diego Golf Academy. Fraud is rife. And an entire industry of "fixers" has grown up in the U.S. and outside to provide students with false credentials — the cost is a mere $800 on one Indian website — for colleges and consular officials.
As a result of this porous system 315,000 foreign students were being admitted annually by 2000 — up from 65,000 30 years earlier. Three million foreign students in all have come to the U.S. in this way. Their actions are effectively unmonitored, as we know to our cost. And many of them overstay their visas and remain in America after completing their courses.
If the U.S. derived major economic benefits from the foreign-student program, that might partly justify it. But Borjas establishes that its modest economic benefit to native-born Americans of $1 billion annually is more than outweighed by its annual taxpayer subsidy of $2.5 billion.
And then there are the foreign-student program's non-economic costs — namely, the threats to homeland security it imposes. In addition to providing cover for terrorists, it has enabled students from Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen to receive 111 doctorates in nuclear and organic chemistry, 434 doctorates in chemical and nuclear engineering, and 112 doctorates in atomic and nuclear physics between 1981 and 1999.
No cause for concern? Well, consider simply one case from Britain. Dr. Rihan Tashida Taha obtained a British Ph.D. for research on plant poisons, returned to Iraq, became head of Saddam Hussein's bioterrorism program, and is now known to the British tabloids as "Dr. Germ."
At the very least some areas of research might reasonably be placed off-limits to students from countries deemed hostile such as Iraq.
Yet when California senator Dianne Feinstein, defying political correctness, proposed a six-month moratorium on student visas to help the INS get the program under some sort of control, she was bullied by U.S. universities that benefit from the cheap academic labor they provide into withdrawing her proposal.
Such a proposal was only necessary, however, because an earlier attempt to reform the foreign-student visa program had been sabotaged. As Nicholas Confessore details in the May issue of the liberal Washington Monthly, President Clinton's Department of Justice established a task force to examine the program in 1993 after a Palestinian, who had overstayed his student visa by two years, drove a truck filled with explosives into the World Trade Center.
The task force found gaping holes in the system (see above), and proposed various commonsense reforms: a computerized student tracking system that would share information with other official databases; a tamper-proof "biometric identifier;" and regular checking on students' educational progress. Congress duly mandated these changes; the INS introduced CIPRIS — the Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating International Students in 1996; and its pilot program was succeeding beyond expectations by 1999.
Whereupon it was first delayed and then derailed by a curious bipartisan coalition of foreign-student-program lobbyists, INS bureaucrats, and "open borders" activists in Congress who were ideologically opposed to computerized tracking on the grounds that it would facilitate control of all immigration.
By degrees CIPRIS was stripped of its antiterrorist features — information-sharing with law-enforcement agencies, the "biometric identifier" — and became the modest Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS.) With the results we all saw on September 11.
Nor have policies, attitudes, or personnel changed since then. INS officials responsible for blocking CIPRIS have been promoted; Bush's senior INS appointees include at least one "open borders" activist who had helped them block it; and the White House (unsuccessfully) lobbied to have tamper-proof "biometric identifiers" removed from a post-Sept. 11 border-security bill. Indeed, as Confessore argues, it is an open secret that the Bush administration is more concerned to woo Hispanic voters by going easy on illegal immigrants than to institute an effective visa-tracking system that would protect national security — though the Hispanic voters exposed to greater risk along with other Americans might not agree with this prioritization.
Unless these attitudes change — and heads roll — a Department of Homeland Security will simply mean a larger bureaucracy presiding over greater national insecurity.
— John O'Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review. This first appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and is reprinted with the author's permission.