Why Were the Alien Hijackers
Allowed in the United States?

The United States is, de facto, "a country of open borders." That's what the National Commission on Terrorism stated in a report last year. But nobody did anything to close the borders or even the loopholes.

The criminals who were convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, of the murders in front of the CIA headquarters in 1993, and who were involved in a 1998 plot to bomb New York's subway system were Middle East aliens who should not have been in the United States. They either were granted a visa that should never have been issued or had overstayed a visa and should have been expelled.

But no mechanism was put in place to remedy these problems, even though the visa system was obviously broken and the World Trade Center was obviously a terrorist target.

After the 1993 bombing, Congress made a feeble effort to tighten the tracking of foreign visitors and students. It ordered the immigration service to systematically match visa entries into the United States with their exits, and to create an electronic databank of foreign students that would be accessible to law enforcement officials. But industry employers and colleges, which profit from thousands of work and student visas, put up such resistance that implementation was delayed until 2003.

When 9-11 rolled around this year, there was no mechanism in place to ensure that the same thing wouldn't happen again, and it did. The hijackers of the 9-11 tragedy knew a lot more about U.S. immigration laws and regulations, and how to exploit them, than most Americans.

The Washington Post reported that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11 were in this country illegally, most of them because they illegally stayed here after their visas expired. Some may have come illegally over our porous border with Canada. We don't yet know who issued the visas in the first place and whether existing laws and regulations were complied with. Since all the hijackers are dead, there is no reason to withhold information about them. It's not enough that FBI Director Robert Mueller says that most of them were "out of status," i.e., they lacked proper immigration documents.

All during the Clinton Administration and probably before, security precautions and compliance with the law have both taken a back seat to visa pressures from businesses that seek cheap and steady employees, colleges that seek foreign students, and U.S. State Department bureaucrats eager to show how friendly they are with foreign countries.

The State Department manual for consular officials states that a foreigner participating in the planning or execution of terrorist acts would be barred from getting a visa, but that "mere membership" in a recognized terrorist group would not automatically disqualify a person from entering the United States. Nor would "advocacy of terrorism" automatically be a basis for exclusion. How stupid can we be?

It is inexcusable that visa applicants aren't screened carefully, and that they are not tracked on a federal database so they can be expelled if they do not leave voluntarily when their visas expire.