The 9/11 Legacy for Immigration.

• Author: Bier, David J.

On September 11, 2001 (9/11), the U.S. House of Representatives had scheduled a vote on legislation to allow immigrants without legal status to adjust to legal permanent residence if a U.S. citizen family member or employer had filed a petition on their behalf (Andorra 2003, 7). The Senate had already passed it, and President George W. Bush had specifically asked for the change. On the other side of Capitol Hill, Senate staffers were planning for a hearing the very next day on another bipartisan bill known as the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act, a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants who came to the United States as children (U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary 2011, with a quote stating the date of the original hearing).

Across the National Mall, the White House convened a morning meeting between its officials and representatives of the Mexican government who had stayed behind after President Vicente Fox met with President Bush the previous week (Alden [2009] 2014, 79). The two sides were negotiating a cross-border migration deal that would involve a large guest-worker program for Mexicans to legally travel north to fill jobs in agriculture and other low-skilled sectors.

These three simultaneous efforts to address important aspects of America's immigration system exploded moments after four hijacked airplanes were deliberately crashed that same morning. Congress postponed all activities. The White House U.S.-Mexico working group adjourned. The efforts would not recover. As emergency personnel sorted through the rubble in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, U.S. customs officials quickly learned the identities of all nineteen hijackers. The three most important facts about the 9/11 hijackers turned out to be that they were not Americans, that all had legally traveled to the United States, and that some had violated the terms of their visas (Eldridge et al. 2004, 6).

The immigration bureaucracy's response to the attacks made legal immigration and travel much more difficult and made even minimal violations of immigration law the highest priority for federal law enforcement. Although the better use of intelligence in immigration adjudications had some beneficial effects for security, most policies simply reduced immigration with no plausible security benefit. At first, the consequences were felt most strongly by legal visitors and travelers to the United States, but the enforcement surge ultimately targeted almost all immigrants.

As important as the changes made were those not made. Exemplified by the three simultaneous meetings on the day of the attack, the direction of U.S. legal-immigration policy was leaning strongly toward openness in 2001. Congress and the past several administrations intentionally wanted to make it easier to travel and immigrate legally. Two decades after the attacks, the restoration of this focus toward openness is still not complete, despite increasing evidence that the risk from terrorism is very small (Nowrasteh 2019) and that more immigration is not associated with greater risk of terrorism (Forrester et al. 2019).

Since 9/11, the United States has never experienced--or even been threatened by--a similar attack (Mueller 2020). Moreover, the vetting agencies following the attacks have almost never permitted the admission of immigrants or travelers who intended to come in order to commit any kind of terrorism offense--whether supporting terrorist groups abroad or planning an attack here (Bier 2018). Despite this fact, Congress has made no effort to permit more legal immigration to the United States. Instead, the heightened attention that terrorism has received since 9/11 has turned the exceedingly rare threat occurrences, which have produced no plots remotely similar to the 9/11 attacks, into reasons for further restricting legal immigration. (1)

Legal immigration's "lost decade" after 9/11 appears to have permanently pushed immigrants away from the United States to other developed countries. Tourists have increasingly flown to more hospitable countries. Businesses have relocated their operations outside U.S. borders to take advantage of other countries' more open policies, and foreign direct investment to the United States has suffered. The economic and social disruptions from the restrictions and deportations are still being felt. The Trump administration's efforts to reenergize the post-9/11 anti-immigration agenda under the same guise of combatting terrorism reinforced these trends. From 2017 to 2019, the United States accounted for just 6 percent of the increase in the worldwide immigrant population--down from 52 percent from 1995 to 2000 (Bier 2021). Perhaps no event has ever had such a profound effect on America's immigration system.

9/11's Effects on Legal Immigration

Former Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rob Bonner has recounted that on 9/11 the port inspectors in Canada and Mexico moved to closely examine and interview every single person crossing legally, which he estimated ballooned wait times to cross from ten minutes to more than twelve hours (Los Angeles Business Journal 2006). President George Bush came to him and told him, "You've got to secure our borders against a terrorist threat, Bonner. But you have to do it without shutting down the U.S. economy." By focusing on efforts that sought to screen out terrorists rather than to reduce immigration generally, President Bush's belief in a freer immigration system may have saved it from collapse, but his dual mandate would still produce an extremely painful decade for those seeking to come to the United States.

The State Department initially simply suspended visa issuances to all prime-age men from Muslim-majority countries for a month to review their applications. The 9/11 Commission's staff report on terrorist travel found that these reviews "yielded no useful antiterrorist information and led to no visa denials" (Eldridge et al. 2004, 154). The plainly discriminatory policy was also an affront to the countries that the Bush administration wanted to solicit for help in combatting al Qaeda. The State Department replaced this policy with mandatory visa interviews and fingerprint collection of all visa applicants (Eldridge et al. 2004, 155).

For prime-age men in most Muslim-majority countries, the FBI would still conduct an individualized background check on each applicant (Eldridge et al. 2005, 157). The State Department had previously conducted all the checks and would waive interviews if no concerns were raised. In addition, the government imposed new lengthy reviews for scientific researchers and students involved in certain fields deemed sensitive (U.S. Government Accountability Office [GAO] 2005c). For the first time, every visitor to the United States would have to be fingerprinted upon entry, previously a process associated primarily with criminal investigations (U.S. GAO 2005b).

These procedural changes caused the wait times for visas to skyrocket mainly because the State Department lacked the manpower to conduct interviews. State Department consular officers were also often given redacted criminal records from the FBI that did not include the necessary information to determine visa eligibility (U.S. GAO 2005a). Wait times to get a visa stretched for months and in some cases more than a year (Alden 2008). For time-sensitive projects or student visas, visa interviews were sometimes scheduled so late as to be pointless. For Arab countries in particular, the FBI lacked both the manpower and the desire to conduct hundreds of thousands of time-intensive background checks and so effectively denied visas without a formal decision. The FBI reviews failed to identify a single terrorist (Fddridge et al. 2004, 157). In addition, the visa interview requirement meant that people often had to take unnecessary trips to cities with U.S. consulates just to spend two minutes in a visa interview, which drove up the costs to visit the United States.

For the decade from fiscal year 1992 to fiscal year 2001, the State Department had increased the issuance of tourist and business traveler visas from 4.3 million to nearly 6 million (U.S. Bureau of Consular Affairs 2021). After 9/11, the number nearly halved by 2003, falling by 2.6 million or 44 percent in two years. Certainly, concern about travel to the United States stemming from the terrorist attack played a role, but the wait times for visas and the increased costs to travel mattered a great deal as well. Denials also ratcheted up to previously unseen levels, with consular officers at least initially refusing 40 percent of all tourist and business traveler visa applicants in 2002, a rate that eventually declined to a low of 20 percent in 2012 (U.S. Bureau of Consular Affairs 2021).

Although the Bush administration eventually decreased the FBI's involvement in conducting individualized screenings, the reduced visa-issuance rate continued until the Obama administration made a concerted effort to speed processing and eliminate unnecessary obstacles to issuing visas. It hired hundreds of new consular officers and instituted the Visa Interview Waiver Program, which allowed the State Department to waive interviews for low-risk, repeat applicants (Embassy of the United States 2012). In 2012, President Barack Obama issued an executive order requiring the department to issue an average of 80 percent of visas within three weeks. (2) The initiative was successful, and the visa-issuance rate nearly reached the pre-9/11 trend. The success was short-lived, however. In 2017, President Donald Trump rescinded the Obama-era reforms and terminated the Visa Interview Waiver Program. (3)

Even from just 2002 to 2016, the State Department issued more than 31 million fewer tourist and business traveler visas than it would have had the upward trend in issuances continued after 9/11. Extending the analysis to after President Trump...