Borderline insanity: President Bush wants the INS to stop granting visas to terrorists. The biggest obstacle? His own administration.

• Author: Confessore, Nicholas

EXACTLY SIX MONTHS AFTER MOHAMMED Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi had flown planes into the World Trade Center, letters from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) arrived at a Florida flight school informing these two late--very late--students that their visas had been approved. The incident seemed to capture perfectly the unfathomable ineptitude of an agency long unable to control illegal immigration but now supposed to be the front line of the domestic war on terrorism.

Among those most furious was President George W. Bush. "I was stunned and not happy," the president told reporters at a press conference. "I could barely get my coffee down." Within days, Bush's anger cascaded down through the federal bureaucracy. Attorney General John Ashcroft blasted "professional incompetence" for the "disturbing failure" INS commissioner James Ziglar called it an "inexcusable blunder" and promptly reassigned four top INS officials to "begin the process of accountability." And the Department of Justice Inspector General promised to report exactly what had happened. But why wait? Insiders already know what happened, and the president ought to hear the truth right away, though probably not while he's sipping hot coffee.

The good news for Bush--who loves nothing more than to blame Bill Clinton for everything--is that at least half the responsibility for the screw-up lies with the previous administration. In the mid 1990s, the Clinton administration initiated, then let die, a revolutionary computer visa system that could have prevented Atta and Al-Shehhi from getting their student visas, and might even have uncovered their conspiracy before September 11 came to pass. The bad news for Bush (and the rest of us) is that some of the people most responsible for killing the computer system are now running the INS--put there by none other than George W. Bush. And since September 11, these officials have been operating below the media radar to make sure that a broken immigration-security system stays broken.

Why would members of the Bush administration want to do such a thing, given the president's firm commitment to fight terrorism? Because of the president's other firm commitment to courting Hispanic voters. Key Bush officials know that an effective system of tracking immigrants is the last thing Hispanic and other immigration lobbyists want to see. Indeed, a fundamental tension operates within the Bush administration itself, and the GOP generally, between national-security conservatives, who want a strong INS capable of keeping terrorists out, and libertarian conservatives, who want a weak INS incapable of stopping the free flow of labor. It's no exaggeration to say that the future security of the country may depend upon which side wins.

The University Lobby

Student tracking has been on the drawing board since 1993, when a Palestinian immigrant named Eyad Ismoil drove a truck filled with explosives into the World Trade Center's underground parking garage. Ismoil had entered the United States on a student visa in 1989 and attended Wichita State University for three semesters before dropping out to live and work--illegally--in Texas for the next two years. When the details of Ismoil's history emerged in 1994, the Department of Justice put together an inter-agency task force to take a hard look at the foreign-student visa program.

Led by an INS official named Maurice Berez, the task force quickly discovered gaping holes. Foreign students, Berez wrote in its December 1995 final report, are "not subject to continuing scrutiny, tracking or monitoring when they depart, drop out, transfer, interrupt their education, violate status, or otherwise violate the law." To fix the problems, Berez and his colleagues envisioned a transformed student tracking system that would collect far more information than the old paper forms and filter that information automatically through numerous law enforcement databases, such as the FBI's terrorist-look-out lists. Detailed data on the "funding source" for an applicant's tuition, for instance, would be checked against the Treasury Department's money-laundering database. Sophisticated software would flag potential fraud and, where necessary, bump up the records for further analysis.

Applicants who passed the computer check would be issued a machine-readable "smart card," which would encode all the collected information, incorporate a so-called "biometric identifier" like a digital fingerprint, and serve as a tamper-proof visa. Updates on a student's educational status--like whether or not he or she had shown up for classes--would be collected automatically via computer, instead of manually via paper forms. Not only would the new system cut down on fraud--such as the use of endlessly renewable student visas as de facto green cards--but it would make...