Strip Terrorists of Their Legal Cover
Tuesday, January 22, 2002
By: Dan Stein

Los Angeles Times

One of the first orders of important business for Congress in 2002 will be to approve the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act, a bipartisan bill that would greatly improve our ability to identify potential terrorists before they reach our country. The bill, which is sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), would require more extensive background checks on visa applicants from terrorist sponsoring countries, the use of machine-readable travel documents and visas, and better reporting procedures for people granted permission to reside temporarily in the United States.

As crucial as the border security and visa reform measure would be to making our nation less vulnerable to the infiltration of foreign terrorists, it must be augmented by reforms that will make it easier to flag those who manage to slip through the visa net. As the cases of Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid have taught us, terrorists do not only hail from terrorist sponsoring nations, or even fit a particular ethnic profile.

A lax visa issuance and tracking system let the September 11th terrorists gain entry to the U.S., but it was a lax domestic documentation system that allowed them to take flying lessons, rent apartments and safe houses, and blend in to America’s vast and diverse population. The two most important pieces of identification that allow Americans to live, work, obtain credit, rent apartments, attend school, get on an airplane, and do virtually everything else they need and want to do, were easily acquired by the 19 terrorists and millions of other people who are in the United States illegally.

Every one of the terrorists involved in the attacks had a valid Social Security number issued by the Federal Government and a valid drivers’ license issued by a state government. With these documents, people intent on inflicting the most grievous harm and murdering the greatest number of people were able to become inconspicuous needles in an enormous haystack.

There are some obvious and basic document reforms that must be enacted along with visa reform measures. To begin with, any adult applicant for a Social Security number should be required to undergo a thorough background check to verify that he or she is legally present in the United States. If the individual has been admitted temporarily, the Social Security document should be visually distinct from the permanent ones and should expire on the last date that the person’s visa is valid. The Social Security document itself should be made more secure and include features that allow it to be as easily verified as a credit card.

All states should be mandated to require a valid Social Security number before issuing a drivers’ license. Like Social Security numbers, drivers’ licenses for people on temporary visas should expire concurrently with the visa, or sooner. Moreover, a common DMV database must be established to ensure that multiple drivers’ licenses are not issued to the same Social Security number. And, because all drivers’ license applicants are adults, and because driving is a privilege, not a right, all states should have minimum uniform security standards to mitigate against identity theft.

With any secure and reliable form of identification, citizens should be entitled to live, work and move about the United States easily and with a full expectation of privacy. With secure travel documents and visas, legitimate visitors to our country could do those things that visitors are entitled to do, but would find it difficult to do things like getting a job, renting an apartment, or taking flying lessons.

Given this fast-paced world we now live in, we must have a system to distinguish between those who are lawful members of our society and those who are just visiting or illegally present. With secure identity documents, available only to lawful residents of the United States, those who are here illegally or on nonimmigrant visas will find that the camouflage of our vast and diverse country has disappeared. We cannot stop every potential terrorists from getting into the country, but we can certainly take away their cover by denying them the documents they need to live and operate here.