President George W. Bush moved to tighten immigration controls Monday in light of the fact that two of the Sept. 11 suicide attackers were in the United States beyond the terms of their visas.
Bush announced the planned formation of a governmental department that will find and deport people who are in the country illegally. Additionally, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has announced that they are developing a computer system to track visitors in the states on student visas. The system will verify students' arrival, enrollment and curriculum.
In addition to taking steps to better enforce existing immigration laws, curtailing visa approvals is appropriate in our current state of war. But we must be cautious not to restrict the long-term exchange of people and ideas in our nation, which is as critical, if not more so, than ever. Additionally, we must not neglect America's vulnerabilities that have yet to be exploited by terrorists.
Our borders should be highly regulated during any time of war, and especially against the shadowy foe that attacks from within. One of the Sept. 11 hijackers was here on a student visa, but he never attended a single class - a fact that should have been suspect, but apparently went undetected by the INS. Until this conflict concludes, we must carefully control who we allow through our borders.
The degree to which visitors are screened and tracked must be increased, but the flow of other peoples and cultures into the melting pot must be restored as quickly as possible. The restriction of ideas is likely to hurt the economy and further degrade the already weak understanding between Americans and other cultures, particularly Arabic culture.
While we must address the points of vulnerability we have recently become painfully aware of - immigration control, airline security and mail handling - we must also work to anticipate our other weaknesses. The government's current ad-hoc, retrospective response to the targets of terrorism leaves America on the defensive. In order to take control of the game, the United States must take precautionary measures in all aspects of national security. Preventive measures should be taken to guarantee that our water sources, power plants, electrical systems and other physical facilities are not used as weapons against us the way our offices, airlines and mail systems have been. As the old adage goes, prevention is far less costly than injury.
In this time of continual threats to the safety of our nation we have no choice but to limit the influx of people into our country, but we must not wholly close our borders. Such a measure would isolate the United States and limit it economically and culturally. We cannot afford to shut ourselves off from the rest of the world, but we can afford to better monitor our nation's facilities, and we must do so.
