Ins And Outs
How to improve Ashcroft’s INS reform plan.

By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
November 15, 2001 12:40 p.m.

ttorney General John Ashcroft has announced a sensible plan to split the Immigration and Naturalization Service into two halves, one half dealing with services and another with enforcement. The Bureau of Immigration Services would handle naturalization, green cards, and asylum. The Bureau of Immigration Enforcement would police the border, conduct investigations and inspections, and gather intelligence.

President Bush promised a reform along these lines during his campaign, but the idea has a much older pedigree. The basic rationale is that the current INS functions of service and enforcement require two rather different and often incompatible mindsets; trying to combine them has created a culture of failure at the agency. So splitting the INS is a good idea.

Conservatives in Congress now should encourage the administration to take additional steps. The first is to replace the name "Bureau of Immigration Services" with the name "Bureau of Americanization." Its employees should be reminded every day that it is not their job merely to process as many forms as possible, but to ensure that the fundamental purpose of immigration and naturalization policy is to strengthen the United States. It is possible to disagree about how many immigrants the country should admit, but not that our common purpose in admitting them is to make the United States stronger — which is possible only if immigrants assimilate. Without a newfound appreciation for Americanization, immigration services simply become a DMV for the foreign-born. Citizenship is not a "service," and naturalization papers are not driver licenses. The federal government should recognize this when it picks names for agencies. (Read John Fonte's recent article on Americanization here.)

Additionally, the Bureau of Immigration Enforcement should be merged with the Customs Service, the other major division of government charged with border security. Right now, there is too much duplication of work and too much petty turf rivalry. In a Center for Equal Opportunity policy paper published in 1996 Daniel Sutherland described an incident in which the INS deployed drug-sniffing dogs to a certain location only to have Customs agents rush over with their own dogs. Their purpose was to make sure the INS didn't get sole credit for any drug busts. "At some point it must have been clear that the dogs and inspectors were snarling more at one another than at potential drug smugglers," noted Sutherland.

Whether or not BIS merges with Customs, it should take on at least one more responsibility: the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs. The people who issue visas from U.S. consular offices overseas are America's first line of defense against illegal immigration. Yet they're stuck inside a State Department whose own incentives lean toward diplomacy and accommodation rather than hard-headed enforcement. Issuing visas should be seen as an enforcement function, and it should come under the agency charged with immigration enforcement.

In neither of these cases should the perfect become the enemy of the good — and Ashcroft's proposal is a good one that would permit future improvement. But the best time for reform is during reform, before the inertia of bureaucracy sets in. INS reformers should try to make as many improvements as possible right now, before this moment passes.

Sly Sy, Part 2
Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker recently reported that the October 20 raid on Mullah Omar's compound near Kandahar was "a near-disaster" that resulted in 12 casualties, including three serious ones — directly contradicting generals who said the mission was successful and made no mention of injuries, let alone serious ones. In the forthcoming issue of National Review, one of your correspondents assesses Hersh's claim:

"It is difficult to double-check Hersh's work because of its heavy reliance on anonymous sources. Perhaps in time the full truth of October 20 will come out. For now, though, there is a single assertion in Hersh's story whose truth can be independently assessed. Hersh writes: 'The mission was initiated by sixteen AC-130 gunships, which poured thousands of rounds into the surrounding area but deliberately left the Mullah's house unscathed.'

"The Pentagon won't discuss operational details, but it's extremely unlikely that the mission involved 16 AC-130 planes. The Air Force has only 21 of them, and a number of these are set aside for training in Florida. More important is the fact that these big planes, full of firepower, don't fly in such large clusters. During the invasion of Panama in 1989, the Air Force used only seven of them at once. In the Gulf War, only a few were in the air at a time. Would 16 of them lead a relatively small special-forces operation in Afghanistan? 'It makes zero sense,' one Air Force officer told me.

"When I asked Hersh about this apparent discrepancy, he was dismissive. 'I wasn't there. Somebody could have misspoke. I could have misheard. It's possible there weren't 16,' he said. 'If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.' He did admit that he had made an error during his November 5 interview on CNN, when he said the mission involved 'sixteen helicopter gunships' rather than 16 AC-130s. 'That time I did misspeak,' he said.

"Although The New Yorker says it assigned several fact-checkers to Hersh's article, it would seem that Hersh is once again playing fast and loose with the facts. And what does that say about his central claim of twelve men wounded, three of them seriously? 'That's what my source told me,' he says."

A story by Vernon Loeb and Bradley Graham in today's Washington Post may shed some light on the matter: "The Pentagon is also sending three AC-130 gunships to Uzbekistan for use against Taliban and al Qaeda terrorist forces, a senior military officer said. The gunships would complement six AC-130s that have flown missions over Afghanistan from Oman."

Will The New Yorker, which regularly boasts about its fact-checking prowess, now print a correction?

(For another critical take on Hersh, see Scott Shuger's recent piece in Slate.)