I never had the chance to respond to Ramesh’s request for my thoughts on an editorial by Steve Forbes about the visa hassles foreigners have been facing since 9/11. Forbes bewails the fact that, “this, the most technologically advanced of nations, can’t come up with software and hardware to expeditiously assist in determining who should and should not gain entrée.” This certainly sounds good, in a “they can put a man on the Moon, but they can’t [fill in the blank] ” sense. The problem is that the opponents of effective immigration control, people allied with Forbes on immigration, have conducted a scorched-earth campaign for decades against the very policies (technological and otherwise) that would allow us to expeditiously sort the wheat from the chaff among foreigners applying to visit our country. Now he, and others, are shocked, shocked, that we have an immigration-control system that doesn’t work – what did people expect?