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Pakistan Link – May 16, 2003
Special Registration Needs Closer Look
By Lisa Troshinsky
The Department of Homeland Security’s Special Registration program, which requires adult male foreign visitors from specified countries to register with immigration offices, is receiving mixed reviews from both conservative and liberal think tanks.
Panel members at a briefing last week sponsored by the liberal-centrist Migration Policy Institute, both praised and condemned the controversial post-Sept. 11,2001, regulation.
Officially launched in December 2002, the Special Registration program, also known as Domestic Call-in Registration, has received public criticism, mostly from immigration advocates, members of ethnic communities and civil rights activists, and is already under review by Congress. The Senate and House Appropriations Committees asked the Justice Department to deliver a demonstration of the program’s efficacy by March 1, but as of April 1, no such documents had been submitted.
The Special Registration program is part of the larger National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, known as NSEERS, or port-of-entry registration which, as of October 2002, requires all foreign visitors who are identified as an elevated national security concern, or who are from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan or Syria, to provide identifying information.
The good news is that, through both components of NSEERS, US authorities have apprehended 11 people they suspect are terrorists, including several known members of al-Qaida, said Kris Kobach, counsel to the US Attorney General. A total of 733 aliens have been apprehended for law enforcement reasons -- 108 of those felons who were identified through the call-in program, he said.
“Since the late 1990s, fingerprinting at the borders hasn’t been run against any database,” Kobach said. “Now we can keep track of suspicious travel patterns, like repeated trips to Afghanistan. We have registered133,000 people at the port-of-entry program from more than 150 countries.
“That is a significant number, a massive step forward for immigration and law enforcement. One hundred thousand a year at point-of-entry is our goal.”
The bad news is that the call-in system has been less than perfect -- detaining innocent people and intimidating and inconveniencing citizens who feel they are being racially and nationally profiled, said Kareem Shora, legal adviser at the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. The call-in program, after four phases, includes visitors from 25 countries; except for North Korea, nearly all of the countries targeted are predominantly Arab and Muslim.
The program was especially criticized after Ejaz Haider, a Pakistani journalist and a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, was detained by the Justice Department for not registering, and when hundreds of Iranians were detained in Los Angeles in December after waiting in long lines to register.
Kobach called the Los Angeles incident a “logistical nightmare.”
“Only three computer terminals were up and running,” he said. “It takes only 18 minutes on average for the call-in registration and 15 minutes at the port-of-entry.”
Regarding the issue of racial profiling, Kobach said the call-in program is just the first step of a more comprehensive system that will be in place by 2005.
“It’s appropriate for the Special Registration program to start with Middle Easterners, since that’s where the immediate security concerns are,” agreed Mark Krikorian, executive director of the conservative Center for Immigration Studies. “But they can’t stop there, it has to be applied in a more comprehensive way.
“But the program probably won’t be expanded in the same way; we don’t have the capacity to deal with those kinds of numbers. There are interests who want to limit tightening the immigration law to Middle Easterners, so that Mexicans and Chinese can continue to come through, for cheap labor.”
Krikorian pointed out that some 3,000 illegal Pakistani aliens have applied for asylum in Canada and many others have returned to Pakistan, in lieu of registering.
“The program sends a clear message that the US immigration system is back in business,” he said.
“I think there is a lot of wisdom in the whole registration program,” said Peter Skerry, senior fellow at the liberal-centrist Brookings Institution. “We should have been registering aliens before Sept. 11. The fact that we are singling out Muslims right now is unfortunate -- our intention is to register all aliens.
“I don’t have a problem with the program, but we have to recognize there are costs associated with it.”
The question isn’t the intention of the Special Registration program, it is how people are being treated when they are detained, said the AAADC’s Shora.
“This is a destructive approach,” Shora said. “They’re placed in custody at local or state jails and treated as convicted criminals. Some people are detained for over a week, handcuffed to chairs, held without food, transferred long distances, treated in a rough manner. At the port of entry, we have a right to scrutinize people, but once they are already here as visitors, they should have already gone through that process.
“Al-Qaida has cells all over the world, not just in Muslim countries. And the effects on these communities? People are afraid of their government. We’re not at war against the Arab world,” he said.
“I think the port-of-entry is an important first step, but there are implementation issues with the call-in program -- it offends people, it is a violation of civil rights,” agreed Muzaffar Chishti, a senior policy analyst at MPI.
Another major issue is a lack of outreach, notice, or consistent information given to foreign visitors, Shora said. It takes a day, not 18 minutes, to register, including standing in long lines, he said.
Chishti agreed there was no outreach given to aliens (“they had to read the Federal Register to find out about the requirement,” he said); that the INS and DHS bureaucrats had no training and no resources, were taken away from their normal jobs to conduct these investigations, and were confused and panic-ridden.
And the immigration site in New York isn’t much of an improvement over the Los Angeles disaster, he said.
“There also are foreign policy implications,” Chishti said. “Aliens went to Canada, and this has been a godsend for the press of the Islamic world, saying we have targeted Muslims as our enemies.”
“Over time, the call-in program will lose importance if we keep doing port-of-entry, but if we continue the call-in, it must be universal, and not based on nationality. We also need different outreach and not to treat aliens like criminals, and possibly give them an incentive for coming in,” he said.
To improve the program, Krikorian recommends that US State Department officials fingerprint and photograph every visa applicant overseas and check that information when they enter the United States.
“I don’t see that happening though; Congress hasn’t suggested it,” he said.
(Courtesy United Press International. From the Think Tanks & Research Desk. Published 4/29/2003)
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