Immigration Reform and National Security

Just over a year ago, President Vicente Fox of Mexico visited Washington to press forward with a deal he and President George W. Bush were hatching on immigration reform. Today, that deal is all but dead.

Yet the problems of immigration policy cannot be put on hold forever. The nation needs to think again about the changes under consideration a year ago: a package of reforms that would have increased the number of visas for Mexican workers and legalized the status of many of the undocumented migrants already here in the United States.

That plan may sound unwise today—after all, many Americans are more suspicious now than ever of new immigrants. But the truth is, a more liberal immigration policy is not antithetical to greater security. On the contrary, creating legal channels for migrant workers and registering the millions already here offers the best hope for homing in the few foreigners who have indeed come to this country to do us harm.

In the past 12 months, Congress and the administration have implemented dozens of measures aimed at getting more control of the borders and the foreigners living in this country.

The most important is the border security bill that was approved by Congress in May. Recognizing that it's possible to distinguish terrorists from immigrants, the new law mandates better intelligence-gathering and information-sharing among government agencies. Most critically, it provides for a layered screening system that uses technology and linked databases to identify those with criminal or terrorist ties before they enter the United States.

Other measures enacted in the past year look sensible on paper but given the size of the immigrant population, may be all but impossible to implement. It makes sense in theory, for example, to track whether those who come here as students are actually studying. It sounds reasonable in the abstract to check that all those who enter the country on temporary visas leave when they say they will, to ask that non-citizens report to the government when they change their addresses, and to make sure that aliens without proper papers do not get drivers' licenses. It's also hard to see what's wrong with the federal government enlisting local police departments to enforce immigration law. The problem is that the Immigration and Naturalization Service can't hope to follow through on many of these measures. (Imagine it trying to process change of address cards from the millions of foreign-born who move each year, for example.) Not only do several of these initiatives place undue burdens on hardworking, law-abiding immigrants, but if they were enforced across the board, all would run aground among the vast illegal population—an estimated eight million people—who would only clog the enforcement process, draining precious resources that ought to be directed at tracking down terrorists. What's the solution to this dilemma? The quick and dirty answer is profiling: rather than asking that every foreigner who enters the country be registered, fingerprinted and required to report regularly to authorities, for example, we could apply the law only to those from terror-sponsoring nations like Iraq and Syria. (In fact, that's more or less the compromise the Justice Department began implementing this week.)

There's an argument that can be made for this kind of discretionary approach—after all, most immigrants, including the millions who are illegal, pose no threat. But surely, rather than implement the law selectively, it would be preferable to reduce the number of foreigners living here illicitly. And since we can't send them home—most are doing jobs essential to the economy—it only makes sense to bring them in out of the shadows with some sort of legalization or regularization process.

Not only would legalization eliminate a vast population of second-class non-citizens—in itself, an affront to our democratic values—it would also allow us to identify and keep track of these millions of undocumented immigrants without resort to law enforcement. It would help reduce the market for forged documents—social security cards, drivers licenses and the like—that make deceit so easy for would-be terrorists. And it would increase the chances that foreign-born workers would cooperate with local police, contributing to the fight against America's enemies.

Even in the safest of times, surely there is cause for concern when millions of well-intentioned people are forced by a bad law to view authorities with suspicion and to regard breaking the law as the accepted norm. In times like these, it is arguably suicidal.

The changes Mr. Bush and Mr. Fox discussed last year would address this problem and create a legal path for future migrants who will be needed when the economy improves. But in the past twelve months, the administration has largely lost sight of these goals. Though the president and his spokesmen still pay lip service to immigration reform, they have done little to move a plan forward, and negotiations with Mexico are all but stalled.

Posted in: Immigration Reform, National Security, new immigrants