Visa Reform: Just Say Atta

On Monday, the day before the House of Representatives passed an important bill to make life a bit easier for some immigrants and the people who hire them, the Immigration and Naturalization Service notified a Florida flight school that it had approved student visas for Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi. Unfortunately, six months earlier the two killed themselves and thousands of others by hijacking airplanes and crashing them into the World Trade Center.

Sorting the good guys from the bad will never be easy for immigration officials, but the tragedy of Sept. 11 makes all the more urgent the need to fix a system that rubber-stamps visas for aspiring mass murderers while making getting visas all but impossible for tens of thousands of immigrants who want only to earn a living.

The House bill addresses the latter part of that equation by temporarily extending a provision of federal law allowing some noncitizens to remain here while courts decide their immigration status. The probable beneficiaries are men, women and children who may have come here illegally or overstayed their visa but have since applied for permanent visas, sponsored by close relatives or employers in the United States.

If the new provision becomes law it will impose a $1,000 fine on these applicants, rather than forcing them to return to their native countries and risk being barred from the U.S. for 10 years.

The White House says as many as 640,000 people would benefit from the bill. Immigration advocates estimate the final figure at about 200,000. Either way, President Bush would no doubt be delighted to take the change in policy with him as a friendship gesture when he visits Mexico, El Salvador and Peru next week. And it looks as if Congress will help him. The House bill barely got the two-thirds majority vote needed for passage, but the Senate passed a similar bill without dissent Sept. 6.

Included in the House bill is a provision that requires immigration officials to track foreign students more closely and to make visas more tamper-resistant by including “biometric” data such as images of the retina or facial geometry. It would also order the creation of a database of suspected terrorists. These and other immigration security measures are expected to cost $300 million. No one’s complaining about the price.

The problem, however, is that the INS is still in charge of immigration. Granting posthumous visas to two of the most infamous terrorists in history is a monumental error, but sadly reflective of the slapdash record-keeping and bad management that plague the agency. So, along with the small steps it is making toward immigration reform, Congress should also push to reform the INS.