Part 6: Security locks up the immigration

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- Mexican President Vicente Fox strode on to the U.S. House floor Sept. 6 to address a joint meeting of Congress and delivered a simple message: a new era of trust should mark relations between Mexico and the United States, punctuated by a marked relaxation in immigration law.

"I am sure that many on both sides of the border would rather stick to the old saying that 'good fences make good neighbors,'" Fox told a packed House chamber. "But circumstances have changed. We are now bound closely together."

At the time, Fox had behind him the tacit support of President Bush, who that day had announced he was "willing to consider" a plan for millions of Mexican workers already in the United States to become permanent residents, though they had entered the country illegally.

Fox said the two countries should agree on that plan by the end of the year.

Five days later, three airliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and one crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside. Three of the 19 terrorists involved were illegal aliens, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

On Jan. 25, just four months after the attacks, Bush announced that he would seek to double the number of Immigration and Naturalization Service agents patrolling the borders from 9,000 to 18,000 and increase the INS enforcement budget by $1.2 billion.

Congress is also quickly moving a bill that would create "biometric" student visas to match students' physical characteristics, like eye scans, to their true identity by October 2003. The administration has already pledged to have up and running by the beginning of next year a system that will require educational institutions to keep better track of the 547,000 individuals inside the U.S. on student visas.

(The government admits it knows little about where those students are or what they are doing. The government also says that Hani Hanjour, who allegedly flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, entered the country using a student visa.)

According to CIS, a non-profit think tank in favor of strong enforcement of immigration laws, new census data indicates that 115,000 people from Middle Eastern countries live in the United States illegally.

The attacks have galvanized proponents of limited immigration and tight borders who are using them to fuel a much more aggressive agenda to crack down on illegal immigration and establish a new army of INS agents to track and hunt down law breakers who abuse U.S. visa or immigration policies.

"After Sept. 11, people in Washington began to think about the need for borders and what we need to do in order to protect American lives and property," Rep. Thomas Tancredo, R-Colo., told United Press International. "That is the thing that the Constitution establishes as our primary responsibility."

Tancredo leads a congressional delegation opposed to broad-scale relaxation of immigration law and in support of spirited enforcement instead.

"If you think we need a border, then you have to think about what that means in terms of enforcement," Tancredo argued. "That means, determine how many people come into the United States, for what purpose and how long they will stay."

Some of Tancredo's supporters envision a high-tech system that accurately tracks the identity of all individuals entering and leaving the country, a de-facto national identification card patched together by standardized state drivers' licenses and placing new requirements on employers to verify the legal status of potential employees in order to make the U.S. labor market particularly inhospitable to illegal aliens.

Immigration advocates are on their heels as their opponents, like Tancredo, ride a swell of concern over national security. Immigration advocates worry that their opponents will ride that swell too far and use steps ostensibly designed to isolate terrorists for a broad-scale crackdown on immigrants, mostly from Mexico or Latin America, who simply seek gainful employment.

"That has always been our greatest fear," said Lawrence F. Gonzalez, Washington office director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. "Guys like Tom Tancredo are saying, 'Let's round them all up.'"

Advocates of tight borders said the immigration debate has now reached a pivotal moment: the government must decide whether security threats will push politicians to tackle the politically prickly, complicated and expensive security challenges posed by immigration policy.

"It might be harder in the future to sneak into the United States or stay past your (visa) due date, but it is hard to tell," Krikorian said.

"Experience has shown us that Congress boosts enforcement to respond to a particular political situation, corporate and ethnic interests flex their muscles and Congress backs off."

For example, the administration now says it will establish an electronic entry and exit system and move forward with plans to track student visas. President Bush has proposed spending $380 million next year to establish that high-tech system that would track people entering and exiting the United States. Bush has said he wants that system in place by 2004.

But Canadian Deputy Prime Minister John Manley is pressing the United States to make sure that system does not apply to any Canadians in the 200,000 vehicles crossing that border every day.

At a Feb. 2 meeting between Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and Manley at the World Economic Forum in New York, Ridge pledged to exempt Canadians from that system.

"I assured him that we understand we've got a very unique relationship with them," Ridge told reporters later the next week. "I think this is geared - this is not geared to Canada, but basically the balance of the world."

Both leaders are worried about upsetting $1.3 billion in trade on that border every day -- but exempting Canadians has angered administration critics, who said exempting Canadians from that system opens an obvious vulnerability.

Congress passed legislation to set up a similar system in 1996 in a bill that would also require colleges to track student visas, but later put the plan on the back burner because of inordinate cost and political pressure from colleges and pro-immigration groups, immigration experts said. And even if the administration establishes the student visa-tracking program, there are no plans to put together the army of INS enforcement officials needed to enforce it.

The biometric visa bill now in Congress would also establish biometric passports to attach an international traveler's identity to his physical characteristics, such as fingerprints or eye-scans. That bill would also create a massive database to help those key agencies cooperate on tracking and identifying potentially nefarious individuals.

But the bill relies heavily on technology that has never been used on such a grand scale, assumes that the government will spend billions to put it in place and requires the cooperation of governments around the world to follow suit and begin issuing biometric identifications. It also would not apply to Canadians.

"The practical question is, 'Can we do a better job of monitoring and controlling our borders?'" said CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian. "The answer is 'yes.'"

"The other question is political," Krikorian said. "Is having 3,000 people buried in Manhattan enough to get Congress to do something about that?"

The scattered plans reflect that after Sept. 11, security is the focus of immigration policy. But experts disagree on what the United States should do about it. In the uncertain political playing field, opponents and proponents of immigration worry how the war on terror will affect their cause.

"I know there is a lot of opportunism going on this town," Frank Sherry, executive director of the pro-immigration National Immigration Forum agreed. The discussion in Congress of a national identification system is one development that has startled immigration advocates and civil libertarians alike. A national I.D. card system, those advocates worry, might isolate illegal immigrants, cut them off from work and drive them into the light where INS agents could apprehend them -- or simply make the United States an inhospitable place to function without that card.

The concepts are anathema to immigration advocates but on the agenda for border control advocates.

Prior to Bush's funding announcement, the White House had tossed around more aggressive plans. The White House briefly considered a revolutionary plan that would combine and boost the enforcement capabilities of the INS, U.S. Customs Service and even parts of the Agriculture Department and Coast Guard. The goal would be enforcement of immigration law.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill said the plan to combine enforcement duties, drafted by Ridge, has now been torpedoed by Bush's own deputes scrambling to keep hold of their own departmental turf.

"Ridge got his teeth knocked in," one House GOP member said.

Instead, the Bush administration has been mostly focusing on making trade safer.

The government has been scrambling to establish short and long-term plans designed to weave a high-tech security apparatus into the torrent of trade humming in and out of U.S. ports, bridges and airports, after decades of trying mainly just to facilitate trade. Now, government experts want to improve security without grinding the economy to a halt.

"We are working with Canada and Mexico to institute smart borders that will keep terrorists out, while letting the flow of commerce in," Ridge told the U.S. Conference of Mayors Jan. 23.

"Mayors on bordering communities ... to Mexico and Canada understand it's not only about making your borders more secure, but we have to facilitate the flow of goods and services, and people across those borders, because it has economic implications."

Advocates of tighter borders predict that the government will not do enough for security for political reasons, including the Hispanic vote.

"The reason why there has not been a full exploration of the connection between security and immigration is because everybody is afraid of it," Krikorian said. "They are actively doing the old, 'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.'"

Next: Passengers and freight are security threats above our heads