Reforms Can’t Make the INS Terrorist-Proof

The bad news is that two Al Qaeda terrorists got their student visas this week, permitting them to attend flight school in Florida. The worse news is that they won’t be needing such training, because they already figured out how to fly airplanes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

President Bush says that he is “plenty hot” over the case and vows reform of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But the enduring problem of controlling the flow of people into the U.S. is deeper than organizational chart-tinkering, because it involves two realities of American life: first, the problem of making bureaucracies responsive to fast-moving circumstance; and second, Americans’ deep ambivalence about immigration itself.

No doubt the INS will try harder. Despite the stereotype of unresponsive bureaucrats, most senior-level officials are acutely sensitive to public opinion and to bad press. Indeed, the INS has already issued a statement shifting the blame onto a contractor; it reports that it approved the visas in July and August--having received no warning from other federal officials that the two aspiring students might also be aspiring killers--and then turned over the forms to a private-sector contractor for mailing.

Part of the problem is that the INS has been trying harder--that is, trying harder to keep up with past mandates then superseded by newer mandates.

The INS has been pressured to increase enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border, and this boundary monitoring has come at the expense of monitoring the resident-alien population.

And that’s the way of bureaucracies; they’re designed to routinely produce certain predictable outcomes. But to achieve those outcomes, they must develop an internal culture of norms and procedures, and over time, standard operating procedure becomes a religion.

In other words, the strength of a bureaucracy--the industrial-style mass production of vital functions, from collecting taxes to writing checks--can become its weakness, when suddenly an order comes down to change everything.

And of course, the weakness of a bureaucracy--the stultification that comes from unquestioned orthodoxy--can become paralysis.

What any bureaucracy lacks is nuance. Bureaucrats are good at imposing one-size-fits-all solutions on a big population over a long period of time.

But what if the goal is to get away from the arbitrary idiocy of, say, zero-tolerance policies in which obviously harmless items, such as nail files and prescription drugs, are regarded as lethal contraband?

What if the mission is to achieve nonbinary solutions, carefully granulated so that each case is handled according to its unique characteristics? Forget it.

First, it would take an enormous number of people, and second, the outcomes achieved by such customization would be hugely unequal--or at least regarded that way by many.

So can the INS be reformed? Maybe, although the Bush administration’s favored solution--the separation of the paperwork side of the INS from the enforcement side--gives one pause.

If the problem is that the INS doesn’t have adequate internal communications, such that visas are issued to dead terrorists, will the problem be solved by dividing this incompetent agency into two fiefdoms?

No doubt some improvements through “reinvention of government” can be made; in many parts of the country, such essential services as the issuance of driver’s licenses have been improved markedly.

But no bureaucracy can succeed for long in the absence of a strong political consensus behind its actions. And that’s the problem with immigration. Americans want to clamp down on illegal immigrants, but also they see the economic argument for more workers and the humanitarian argument for family unification.

So even as the INS is supposed to get tough, Congress is going soft. On Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted by a 2-1 margin to make visa policy toward Mexico still more lenient. Yes, of course, there’s a difference between lightening up on Mexican families and cracking down on terrorists. But if the immigration bureaucracy is ever to be effective, the American people must decide what they want to do about would-be good citizens as well as would-be terrorists.