Nick Jimenez

Chasing the wrong illegal immigrants

Each day, each week and each month the United States rounds up thousands of illegal immigrants, desperate people hungry for work, many of them willing to risk their very lives, not to snuff out other peoples' lives, but for a chance to better their own.
   Against these Mexican, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Honduran and other immigrants we have spent millions of dollars to hire Border Patrol agents, tracking dogs, electronic listening and sensing devices, erected fences and steel walls.
   And yet the 19 hijackers who last week murdered thousands of Americans and killed themselves, plunging the United States, and possibly a large part of their world, into war did not come through that heavily defended border.
   They didn't cross a river. They didn't have to endure searing heat, or risk death due to thirst in a burning desert. Or even suffer so much as a cramped ride, stuffed into a van or truck, with dozens of other poor wretches trying to get jobs as chicken pluckers in Arkansas, or maids in Chicago hotels.
   The hijackers didn't carry all their worldly goods in a sack slung over their shoulder. They weren't at the mercy of scurrilous smugglers who were as likely to abandon them as to rob them. They weren't likely to die alone, exhausted and lost, their only shelter from a killer sun the scrawny shade of a mesquite tree in South Texas. No, the hijackers had nice clothes, spoke English, and had enough money to live in middle-class neighborhoods. They had money to take, God help us, flying lessons at Florida aviation schools.
   What an outrage it is to know now that we have spent millions in tax dollars to create a barrier against hemispheric neighbors, made criminals out of breadwinners, and called them threats to the nation while the real threat was somewhere else.
   We believed we were stopping the threat at the Sarita checkpoint, yet at the same time Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian who piloted one of the two airliners into the World Trade Center, was entering the nation twice on visas and disappearing into the interior.
   How did we get our priorities so wrong? We have known that for the most part the immigrants who enter the country across the Rio Grande are not national threats. We know that the problem is, at its base, economic. These are people who don't want to topple our way of life; they want to share in it. If there are religious fanatics, it's for the "Virgen de Guadalupe." Heck, every poor Mexican alien has more riding on the future of America than most Americans, simply because they have nothing else to fall back on.
   Does that mean we open the borders? No, but it means we start getting our priorities straight about who our friends are and where we are going to devote our resources.
   Recognizing friends and enemies
   We've long known that the easiest way to get into the country is on an airline, with a temporary visa. Why should the plotters have worried when most of our immigration resources are committed to chasing down some poor devils in the South Texas brush country, instead of the infinitely more difficult job of tracking down all those who overstay their visas?
   Atta, according to press reports, already was suspected by German authorities of having some ties with some terrorist activity when he got his first visa from the U.S. consulate in Berlin; that alone should have gotten him a denial. But he entered the United States, said he was going to stay at a New York City hotel, but never showed up. He then promptly overstayed his visa by 30 days.
   We need to beef up our efforts to track visas. We need to reshuffle the Immigration and Naturalization Service to untangle its multiple missions. We need one agency to welcome visitors and another to make sure they are doing what they said they were going to do. And we need to create one agency to help people who want to join us as citizens.
   We know who our friends are. Let's work with Mexico to solve a difficult problem. And we know, searingly, who our enemies are. This, like so much else, has become so much clearer since Sept. 11.
  
   Editorial Page Editor Nick Jimenez can be reached by phone at 886-3787 or by e-mail at jimenezn@caller.com.M
  
  
  
  

 
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