Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
February 28, 2002
WASHINGTON -- With great fanfare, the Bush administration has pledged to fortify the nation's antiterrorism protections by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new computer systems to keep tabs on millions of foreign students and visitors.
But even if that complex effort succeeds, immigration officials say the strategy has a gaping hole: A shortage of investigators means few people can chase foreigners flagged by the computers for overstaying their visas or dropping out of school.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service has 2,000 agents to enforce immigration law inside U.S. borders. The enormous workload requires them to focus on the most serious cases, such as the deportation of immigrant felons, leaving no time to round up student no-shows and others who abuse the terms of their visas.
The nation's approximately 600,000 foreign students have come under particular scrutiny since the Sept. 11 attacks because one of the 19 alleged hijackers, Hani Hanjour, entered the country on a student visa. He never turned up for class.
One man convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing also arrived on a student visa but dropped out of Wichita State University.
Such revelations have outraged President Bush and Congress.
"If a person applies for a student visa and gets that visa, we are going to make sure that person actually goes to school," Bush said on Oct. 29. Days earlier, he had signed the USA Patriot Act, which provides $36.8-million to set up a computer system to collect current information on foreign students.
Last month, Bush said the government would intensify its efforts to track down tourists and business travelers who overstay their visas. The government is spending $13.3-million this year on the first phase of an "entry-exit" system to monitor foreigners' arrivals and departures, according to the INS. Bush has proposed an additional $362-million in the fiscal 2003 budget to continue building the system.
Two of the Sept. 11 hijackers had stayed on after their visitors' visas lapsed.
A look at one INS district office shows how ill-prepared the system is to follow up on the estimated 3-million foreign students, tourists and business travelers who remain here, often to take jobs, after their visas have expired.
On a recent morning, the suburban Alexandria, Va., office that houses INS investigators was nearly deserted. The office, authorized to have 25 special agents, has only 17 because of transfers and other personnel issues, said Bill Shaw, himself an investigator filling in as press officer because of personnel shortages. Of those, four are away working with other agencies on special details. A single agent fielded telephone tips and queries from the public and law enforcement agencies.
The staffing shortage might seem odd in an agency that has tripled its budget since 1993. But much of that increased spending went to beef up the Border Patrol, which now has about 10,000 agents, most on the Mexican border.
In recent years, as the economy boomed, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States soared to 7-million or more. Although there was political support for a border crackdown, there was no such enthusiasm for INS raids to root out illegal immigrants at workplaces nationwide.
With limited staff and facing a sometimes hostile public, the INS leadership focused its internal enforcement strategy on what it considered the most dangerous targets: immigrant smuggling gangs, fraud rings and foreign felons due to be deported.
Joseph Greene, INS assistant commissioner for investigations, acknowledged it will be hard to go after all the foreigners flagged via computer.
"There is a real problem in terms of resources," he said. "As these new responsibilities come down the pike, in an absence of new resources, we are going to have to make some very tough calls."
That doesn't mean the new computer systems are worthless, INS officials and experts say. The systems will automate handling of information that now is often incomplete and out of date. The student monitoring system, for example, currently relies on universities to maintain records on foreigners, and to provide them to the INS if asked; universities aren't required to tell the INS if a student fails to show up.
Still, it's unclear the new programs would have stopped Hanjour, the hijacking suspect. He wasn't on any watch list that would have set him apart from the thousands of other foreign students who don't report to school.