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A Times Editorial
The agency's belated visa approvals for two Sept. 11 hijackers should produce enough embarrassment to spur long-needed immigration reforms.
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 15, 2002
Six months after terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon, Americans paid tearful tribute to the victims. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, on the other hand, unwittingly marked the occasion with a humiliating admission of its own incompetence. It mailed out written approval of student visas for Mohamed Atta, the apparent leader of the hijackers, and Marwan al-Shehhi, one of his accomplices.
By March 11, when the Florida flight school that trained Atta and al-Shehhi got the INS letter, the terrorists were dead and their infamous deed already avenged in military strikes against al-Qaida in Afghanistan. In fact, the terrorists had completed their flight training at Huffman Aviation in Venice months before the INS even began to consider its approval for them to do so.
Condemnation of the INS was swift and warranted. "This shows once again the complete incompetence of the immigration service to enforce our laws and protect our borders," said U.S. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., who has written legislation to split the agency in two (border enforcement and immigration services) and start anew.
It may be too early to say precisely how a new immigration service would be reorganized, but the flaws in the current system are obvious. The INS has become an arrogant bureaucracy that is resistant to change, and its resources are inadequate to meet its contradictory responsibilities. Yet it is not the only federal agency that failed to stop the terrorist attacks. The CIA and FBI, also under congressional scrutiny, performed no better.
Lax visa controls have suited U.S. colleges and trade schools that depend on billions of dollars in tuition from foreign students. When the INS was forced to account for those students earlier this year, it had to admit it had little idea where to find more than 500,000 of them. A computer network to keep track of those visas is not even scheduled to come on line until next year.
The challenge for the INS, or an agency that replaces it, is enormous. In addition to accounting for foreign students, it must protect the country's borders and control its ports of entry. Hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors enter the country each day, and at least 7-million illegal aliens remain here, far outnumbering the 2,000 immigration enforcement agents. Under pressure from Congress, the INS had diverted resources to patrol the Mexican border, which proved not to be a factor in keeping out the terrorists who perpetrated the Sept. 11 attacks.
So Congress deserves some of the blame for the agency's inadequacies. Yet it is hard to imagine how anyone could have damaged the INS' reputation more than it did itself with the current visa mistake.
On Sept. 12, a day after the attack, Atta and others were widely identified as likely suspects, their names forever linked to the crime. Yet on Oct. 1, an INS clerk mindlessly issued Atta and al-Shehhi their student visas. This month, the agency belatedly but blithely mailed out the official visa approval.
Americans are left to suspect that human intervention and critical judgment are absent at the INS, as the bureaucracy's gears automatically crank out visas to nearly any foreign visitor who applies. Couldn't even one alert INS clerk have flagged the names of Atta and the other suspects so that their records were removed from the production line?
Apparently not, and that is as damning a case against the INS as any that has been made. Now, the question should not be whether the INS deserves to survive as currently configured, but how quickly we can fix a broken agency.