Ashcroft says crackdown is essential for U.S. security
By Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle

Washington -- The Justice Department's new plan to fingerprint and periodically register an estimated 100,000 visa holders mainly from the Middle East is but the beginning of a major tightening of immigration rules spawned by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The sweeping plan, announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft on Wednesday, reinstates procedures that the United States used for foreign visitors from the 1950s through the early 1980s and that are in wide use throughout Europe today. But they drew an outcry from national and Bay Area civil rights advocates who contend that the procedures will unfairly target law-abiding Muslims and do little to stop terrorists.

Other groups praised the effort as a small step toward tightening lax borders -- and as a precursor of coming legal requirements for biometric identifiers such as eye scan on all visas, passports and other travel documents.

But even these groups questioned whether the Immigration and Naturalization Service, already overwhelmed by paperwork and lacking sophisticated computer technology, is up to the task.

Nonetheless, Ashcroft contended that the government has the technological capacity to implement the plan -- according to pilot fingerprinting currently conducted at some ports of entry -- and that the post-Sept. 11 era demands it.

"On Sept. 11, the American definition of national security changed and changed forever," Ashcroft said. "A band of men entered our country under false pretenses in order to plan and execute murderous acts of war. . . . Once inside the United States, they were easily able to avoid contact with authorities and to violate the terms of their visas with impunity."
1,400 ARRESTS ALREADY

Stating that "fingerprints don't lie," Ashcroft said the pilot fingerprinting program has led to the arrest of about 1,400 wanted criminals trying to enter the country in the past five months.

The new plan, called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, is provided for in a law passed in 1952 and will initially require aliens "who fall into categories of elevated national security concern" to be fingerprinted and photographed as they cross the border.

Fingerprints will be checked against a database of suspected terrorists or other criminals, collected in part by the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

If these foreigners stay more than 30 days, they must register with the INS and register again every 12 months thereafter.

The Justice Department said all citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria must meet the new requirements.

As the plan is phased in, Ashcroft said the number of countries will be expanded but that the list will remain fluid depending on intelligence information. Eventually the list is expected to include all 26 nations on the State Department's list of nations suspected of harboring terrorists, but Ashcroft said "no country is totally exempt."

Other "risk factors" such as age and gender will be used, but the Justice Department will keep those criteria secret.

TRACKING 35 MILLION PEOPLE

Under the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act, signed by President Bush last month, the government is required to add biometric identifiers to all official travel documents by Oct. 26, 2004. By 2005, it must put in place an automated entry-exit system that will track nearly all of the 35 million tourists, students, business travelers and other foreign visitors.

But immigrant advocates blasted the new fingerprinting plan as a witch-hunt and a law enforcement diversion that eventually will target as many as 1 million mainly Middle Eastern visitors.

The National Immigration Forum, an immigrant lobbying group, said the plan will "undermine core democratic values, will waste and divert local, state and federal law enforcement resources, and is out of step with a White House that enjoys a well-deserved reputation for targeting terrorists, rather than targeting Muslims and/or immigrants."

Ameena Jandali, a board member of Islamic Networks Group, a San Francisco nonprofit that aims to eliminate stereotypes against Muslims, said the rules are a step down a very slippery slope.

"What's going to be next? Are all Muslims going to have to wear a yellow or green crescent or something?' said Jandali, 41, of El Cerrito. "This 'Let's go out and track all Muslims and Arabs' isn't going to bring about the necessary results and it may harm or at least humiliate some innocent people. We didn't do the same thing with the Timothy McVeighs of the world and target all white males."

Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the reason the government stopped registering aliens in the early 1980s was because it created a useless information glut and will do the same now.

"To imagine that, with that glut of information, that we're somehow going to be able to take that and correlate all that and figure out who among those people are the ones we should be concerned about, and go and locate them when they don't register, I think is ludicrous."
FEINSTEIN ON RACIAL PROFILING

California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both Democrats, could not be reached for comment. Feinstein had said on national news shows Sunday that concerns over racial profiling have been partly to blame for the failure of the FBI to use information it had to more aggressively pursue suspected terrorists before Sept. 11.

Feinstein, a chief sponsor of the new border security bill, said that to stop terrorists, "one isn't going to look for blonde Norwegians. . . . I think the racial profiling debate has . . . had a chilling impact."

Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank calling for tighter immigration laws, called the new plan "a kind of triage, maybe the sort of thing we have to do in an emergency, but the long-term solution is of course that we should have been doing it for everyone all along. The technology exists. There is no impediment to taking photographs and fingerprints."

Noting that two recent suspected terrorists were carrying European passports -- Zacarias Moussaoui held a French passport and suspected shoe- bomber Richard Reid a British passport -- Camarota added, "Whenever you single out one ethnic group for enforcement, it should make us uncomfortable. The solution is you should do it for everyone. Many terrorists in Kashmir are holding Indian passports, Chechnya terrorists hold Russian passports, there's the whole separatist movement in the Philippines. We want to be gathering as much data as possible from every visa applicant from every country."

Chronicle staff writer Heather Knight contributed to this report. / E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle

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