Absinthe & Cookies (a bit bitter, a bit sweet)

Failure

I was sent a link to a preview of Dick Morris' book "Off With Their Heads - Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists In American Politics, Media, Business."

I'm on a quick lunch break, so can't really comment right now, but here's an excerpt that fits into my illegal alien tangent this week. (Lots of interesting stuff in the preview.)

The Crackdown That Didn't Happen-Clinton Refuses to Act to Deport Illegal Immigrants

"Make states issue driver's licenses [to immigrants] which expire when [their] visas do," I suggested to President Clinton on March 16, 1995, during a strategy meeting in the White House's East Wing. Noting that half of the nation's illegal aliens had evaded the system by overstaying their visas, I proposed a system providing for "automatic referral from motor-vehicles agencies to the INS" for deportation when routine traffic stops revealed drivers without licenses who were here illegally.

Raising these two issues-immigration and terrorism-with the president for the first time, I commented that, after all, it is through motor-vehicle law enforcement that most people come into contact with the police. If we could use that interface to catch illegal aliens, we could add mightily to the deportation lists. By interfacing the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and motor-vehicle computers, we could determine, immediately, if an unlicensed driver was just a minor scofflaw or in active violation of immigration laws.

The INS had no organized way of identifying and deporting the 150,000 foreigners who overstay their legal visas each year. Of the thirty-nine thousand deported each year during the mid-1990s, only six hundred were ordered to leave for having overstayed their visas. It seemed like an excellent idea to use motor-vehicle enforcement to identify and arrest those who were here illegally. But Clinton refused to pursue the idea. The idea ran into a solid wall of resistance led by White House adviser George Stephanopoulos. I pushed the proposal again at a meeting with Clinton on April 5, 1995, calling once more for "driver's licenses [to] expire when visas do." But no action was ever taken.

Stephanopoulos explained why in his 1999 memoir All Too Human:

Next on his [Morris's] list of potential presidential targets was immigrants. Basically, he wanted to create a background-check system that would turn your average traffic cop into a member of the U.S. Border Patrol. If, say, a police office spotted a suspiciously brown-skinned person driving a car with a busted tail-light, Dick's scheme would give him the ability to dial into a computer and order immediate deportation if the driver's papers weren't in order. Though he brushed off my fears of potential abuse and political harm to our Hispanic base, I persuaded him to hold off on the practical grounds of prohibitive cost.

The real story is a bit more complicated. White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes was charged with "vetting" the proposal through INS and the Justice Department. His answer was both decisive and shocking. "We can't deport the people we are already finding," he said. "If we expand the list of deportees without being able to act against them, the result would be a major scandal."

Even though I renewed the proposal at four subsequent meetings with the president, it was never adopted.

What a shame!

Three of the 9/11 hijackers had been pulled over by traffic cops in the months before 9/11. Had the drivers' license proposal been accepted, we might have sent them packing to the Middle East before they had their chance to fly airplanes into our buildings. In April 2001-five months before 9/11-Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, was stopped by police near Miami for driving without a license. He was summoned to appear in court, never showed up, a bench warrant was issued, and the matter ended. Had the motor vehicle/ INS/FBI interface been functioning at that time, the traffic cop would have discovered that Atta was in the country illegally, his visa having expired in January 2001. Atta would have been arrested on the spot and bound over to the INS for deportation. He might not have been in the United States to lead the 9/11 hijackers on their grisly mission.

That same month, Nawaf Alhazmi, one of the hijackers who later seized control of American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon, got a ticket (in Oklahoma City, of all places) for speeding.

And Ziad Samir Jarrah, one of the four hijackers of United Airlines 93, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, was pulled over on September 9, just two days before the attacks, for driving between ninety and ninety-five miles per hour on Interstate 95. As CNN correspondent Jonathan Aiken observed, "Before 9/11 there really was no terrorist wanted list that a state trooper or anyone in the state agency could turn to indicate that there was any federal interest in this individual. As far as the state police in Maryland knew, Jarrah was a law-abiding citizen. . . ."

Had such a list existed, or had the INS and FBI been interfaced with the motor-vehicle computers, things might have been different.

Something always came before fighting terrorism. Some other policy or political consideration always had priority. In this case, Stephanopoulos was likely close to the mark when he warned of the harm to Clinton's "Hispanic base." Since the vast majority of illegal immigrants-although not terrorists-came from Mexico and other Hispanic countries, any program of this sort might be stereotyped as encouraging racial profiling by traffic cops.

To the Clinton White House, it was just more important to be friendly to Hispanic voters in the short term than to hasten deportations, and thus protect Americans of all races, in the longer term.

Posted by Ithildin at June 20, 2003 12:04 PM | PROCURE FINE OLD WORLD ABSINTHE