Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential hopeful, says he has learned his lesson on immigration. His vision of a “comprehensive reform” in which at least some illegal aliens would be rewarded with legal status must, he now knows, await major deposits in the credibility bank by a government Americans do not trust to enforce the law. He says it’s time to get serious, and that the way to do that is “Border Enforcement First.”
Unfortunately, that’s not very serious.
Long before September 11, 2001, the government well knew that smuggling across the border from Mexico or Canada is not the preferred route for millions of illegals. Instead, these aliens first enter by simply walking through a port of entry inside our country thanks to one of the various kinds of American government-issued visas — visas whose terms those aliens then overstay or otherwise violate. Indeed, some reputable studies put the visa-overstay figure at upwards of 40 percent of the illegal-alien population.
That aside, we now know that
all the 9/11 terrorists entered with visas. So have several other foreign terrorists, Ramzi Yousef and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman of 1993 World Trade Center bombing infamy being but two examples.
After 9/11, Congress and the executive branch finally decided it was time to make better use of electronic technology to track who enters and departs — or, more to the point,
fails to depart. “US VISIT,” the shorthand name for the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology system, is the post-9/11 computerized biometric database established toward that end.
The entry part of US VISIT began to come on line, in fits and starts, circa 2004. It tracks the entrance of many, though not all, foreign nationals who enter the United States through ports of entry. (Most Canadians and Mexicans, diplomats, and certain others are exempt.)
But US VISIT’s all important exit part has never been implemented.
The system basically works this way. When aliens present themselves at a port of entry, an inspector from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (or “CBP,” an agency of the Department of Homeland Security) queries each person’s identity, documents, and fingerprints in the computerized lookout system that cross-references numerous law-enforcement, terrorism, and security databases. The document information, photographs, and fingerprints are digitized and entered into the US VISIT database along with a record of the alien’s entry.
Eventually, the entry tracking capabilities of US VISIT evolved to the point where things work fairly well. It took several years to get there, equipment, policy, funding, and training issues being what they were. The system initially utilized only a two-fingerprint process. It took until 2007 for DHS to begin shifting to a full ten-fingerprint system to match the FBI’s database. That transition is still in progress and the results are yet to be fully evaluated.
Nevertheless, as noted above, the departure control half of US VISIT was never implemented (beyond a few pilot test sites at seaports). Departure control is a critical aspect of the system. It is the part of the equation that would give us a firm read on which aliens have overstayed their visas and thus should not be in our country.
To put it mildly, efforts to establish departure tracking have been lackluster. Although the 2004 Intelligence Reform Act ostensibly required departure control, it provided no deadline for implementation. Frustrated by the predictable inaction and mindful of the public mood, Congress finally provided an impetus: It linked implementation of departure control by June 2009 to the Bush administration’s controversial request to expand the Visa Waiver program.
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