The National Review’s John O’Sullivan — no fan of bureaucracies — argues that a Department of Homeland Security won’t really do much to secure the homeland. For Sullivan,
[…] 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.
[…] 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