The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11

By Edward Alden

On September 10, 2001, the United States was the most open country in the world. But in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil, the U.S. government began to close its borders in an effort to fight terrorism. The Bush administration's goal was to build new lines of defense without stifling the flow of people and ideas from abroad that has helped build the world's most dynamic economy. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way.

Based on extensive interviews with the administration officials who were charged with securing the border after 9/11, and with many innocent people whose lives have been upended by the new security regulations, The Closing of the American Border is a striking and compelling assessment of the dangers faced by a nation that cuts itself off from the rest of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 3, 2008
• ISBN: 9780061982408

Book preview

The Closing of the American Border

Terrorism, Immigration and Security Since 9/11

Edward Alden

To Franz Schurmann and Jutta Hennig,

for their guidance and inspiration

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Borders

2 The President

3 The Cops

4 The Technocrats

5 The Scapegoat

6 The Consequences

7 The Triage

8 The Fence

Conclusion

Sources

Searchable Terms

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Acknowledgments

ALTHOUGH I DIDN’T KNOW IT at the time, this book began in a way most reporters would be slightly embarrassed to acknowledge—with a call from a public-relations firm. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I would have ignored such a call amid the crush of my daily deadlines, but this one was especially intriguing. It came in early 2003 from Josh Shuman, who now runs his own PR shop in Jerusalem. He was calling on behalf of Liam Schwartz, a prominent Israeli immigration attorney who was suddenly seeing a surge in cases in which Israelis could not obtain visas to travel to the United States. I was working in Washington for the Financial Times, and I saw immediately that the story had the sort of ironic twist that made it compelling—the United States’ closest ally in the Middle East, and one that had itself been the target of so many terrorist attacks, had unexpectedly found itself in the crosshairs of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism. Schwartz quickly made me recognize that the Israeli angle was only a tiny part of a broader global story. In its effort to keep terrorists out of the country, the U.S. government was making it far more difficult for almost everyone to get into the United States. Outside of certain institutions such as the universities, however, the issue had received almost no media attention because no one wanted to raise complaints and look soft on the terrorist threat. Shuman’s call led me to write a full-page story on the issue (one he tells me he still has framed in his office). That story, in turn, led me to another immigration attorney, Bernard Wolfsdorff of Los Angeles, who told me about a young Pakistani client of his—an outstanding doctor who had been unable to return from Karachi to his job as a cardiothoracic surgeon at UCLA Medical Center. A few days later, I was speaking by telephone with Faiz Bhora, who had been waiting nearly eight months for the visa that would allow him to come back to the United States.

While I would write many other newspaper stories on visas and other post-9/11 border security issues, the idea of writing a book on the subject did not occur to me until I left the FT in October 2006 and joined the Council on Foreign Relations (thanks to a tip from my friend Greg Ip, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and now of The Economist). Doug Holtz-Eakin brought me on to work primarily on trade and international economic issues, but he was also enthusiastic about my interest in the economic and political impact of the post-9/11 border security measures. Sadly for me, though happily for John McCain, Doug left the council to join the eventual Republican nominee’s presidential campaign before I arrived for my first day on the job. The colleagues he left behind, particularly Gary Samore, the director of studies, and Janine Hill, the deputy director, immediately encouraged me to turn what was still a vague set of ideas into a book proposal. I got tremendous support and guidance as well from Sebastian Mallaby, who replaced Doug as the director of the council’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies, and who has created an energetic and congenial environment in which to explore big questions about the intersection of economics and foreign policy.

I could not have landed in a better place to pursue this project. The council’s president, Richard Haass, fosters an atmosphere in which fellows are not only encouraged to do important work but also able to draw on the immense resources and prestige of the council. For a journalist who’s usually happy just to get his phone calls returned, it has been a luxurious place to work. The council’s greatest single asset is its research assistants, who are far brighter, better read, better traveled, and more accomplished than most people twice their age. I had the good fortune of having two supremely talented research assistants to help with the book. Divya Reddy, who is now with the Eurasia Group, carried out copious research on nearly every issue, produced detailed backgrounders on individuals and events, and conducted a number of interviews. Andrew Rottas provided superb research for some of the later chapters and was instrumental in nursing the book from early drafts to final publication. This book would not have happened without them. I also received valuable research help from Swetha Sridharan, Heather Rehm, and Leigh Gusts.

Many others at the council contributed directly. Aimee Carter invited me to speak about early drafts of the book to a meeting of corporate members, and Irina Faskianos did the same for a meeting of younger council members known as term members. Both those sessions produced valuable feedback and important contacts. The council also puts tremendous emphasis on making the work of its fellows available to the widest possible audience. I want to thank in particular Lisa Shields, Anya Schmemann, Patricia Dorff, and Leigh-Ann Krapf for their efforts on that front.

This book would not have been possible without the generous support for the council provided by Bernard Schwartz. The fellowship that he created, and which I inherited, was set up to focus on issues of American competitiveness and the relationship between business and foreign policy. For Bernard, many of the crucial questions about the future of the American economy center on domestic policy, particularly investment in infrastructure and education. But he has been enthusiastic about my work on the foreign dimensions of competitiveness, especially trade and immigration. The U.S. economy will not thrive if we do not educate and train Americans and give them the most advanced tools to work with, but it also depends on attracting and retaining the best that the rest of the world has to offer. I also want to thank Jeanette Clonan of BLS Investments, who has been similarly supportive of my work throughout.

One of the things that have repeatedly amazed me during my years covering government in Washington and elsewhere is the willingness of many government officials to talk candidly about their work. While I suspect this puts me in a small minority, I do not share the prevailing journalistic view that the actions of government have been wholly debased by partisan maneuvering and self-interested corporate lobbyists. This may be because most of my experience has been covering the agencies in Washington that are responsible for implementing policy rather than watching the high-level political machinations of the White House or Congress. In the agencies I have found, with only rare exceptions, decent people struggling with extremely hard problems. They are buffeted by the political winds, and sometimes led astray by lobbyists or by their own desires to join the lucrative lobbying ranks, but for the most part they are smart and dedicated people serving their country under trying circumstances. And few circumstances in recent history have been more trying than those brought about by the 9/11 attacks.

I received help from too many individuals to acknowledge every one by name, and some, particularly those still serving in government, preferred to remain anonymous. Steve Fischel, who spent three decades in the State Department writing many of the rules and regulations for implementing U.S. visa policies, was the first to put me on to the tragic story of the late Mary Ryan, the State Department assistant secretary who was the only government official fired as a result of the 9/11 attacks. Sadly, Steve’s own life ended tragically in June 2008 after he was stricken by an aortic aneurysm in Vancouver, my hometown, where he was attending a meeting of immigration lawyers. He had would have been sixty in July, and he is greatly missed. Dennis Murphy, who spent three decades in the Customs Service and the Department of Homeland Security, was tremendously helpful throughout the project, as were Randy Beardsworth and Stewart Verdery, two other former senior DHS officials.

I am also immensely grateful to Faiz Bhora, Dia Elnaiem, Imad Daou, Benamar Benatta, and others for sharing what were often quite painful personal stories. Some of their cases remain unresolved. I know they all hope that by sharing their experiences, they have played some small role in sparing others similar ordeals. I hope I have done justice to their sagas.

Outside the government, Ed Rice of the Coalition for Employment Through Exports generously shared a large packet of information he assembled in 2002 and 2003, when American businesses first faced visa problems and began quietly, and mostly unsuccessfully, to lobby for changes.

One of the requirements for council fellows producing a book is that they assemble a study group composed of council members and others to review chapter drafts and offer suggestions on research and writing. I want to thank in particular Susan Ginsburg of the Migration Policy Institute, who served as a senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and was the commission’s team leader on the portion of the report investigating how the nineteen hijackers entered the United States. The commission’s monograph, 9/11 and Terrorist Travel, which was published shortly after the main report, remains the most important single source on terrorism and border security, and it was invaluable for this book. I was honored that Susan agreed to chair my study group, and her knowledge, wisdom, and insight throughout the project were invaluable. Other members of the study group who sharpened my work immensely were Cris Arcos, Steve Flynn, Clark Kent Ervin, Peter Andreas, Kevin Nealer, Jess Ford, Theo Gemelas, Elisa Massimino, Tom Pickering, Susan Martin, Alan Platt, Bill Sweeney, Shaarik Zafar, Rose Mary Valencia, Steve Clemons, Kristin Roesser, and Paul Blustein,

Outside of the study group, several other colleagues read part or all of the manuscript and provided valuable feedback, suggestions, and correctives. These included Richard Haass, Peter Spiegel, Randy Beardsworth, Scott Moyers, Dennis Murphy, Sebastian Mallaby, Ben Bain, Divya Reddy, Louise Alden, and Tom Sandborn.

Some of the reporting for the book was done during my six years in Washington working for the Financial Times, from 2000 to 2006. The FT is the world’s paper of record on globalization and its discontents, and in many ways this book is just a smaller part of that larger story. While in Washington, I worked with many remarkable journalists, including James Harding, Gerry Baker, Patti Waldmeir, Stephen Fidler, Peter Spiegel, Richard Wolffe, Deborah McGregor, Alan Beattie, Guy Dinmore, Demetri Sevastopulo, Andrew Balls, Chris Swann, Holly Yeager, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Perry Despeignes, Josh Chaffin, Jeremy Grant, Caroline Daniel, and Ed Luce. Ed also generously shared with me some of the lessons he had learned in writing his superb book on India, In Spite of the Gods. I want to thank Philipp Dermann and Nancy McCord as well for all their work in making a hectic bureau function a little more smoothly. My editors and others in London were also unfailingly encouraging of my reporting on the impact of the post-9/11 U.S. border measures, a story that often had more resonance for overseas readers than for American ones. I’d like to thank in particular Ed Carr, John Thornhill, James Montgomery, James Lamont, Pat Ferguson, Hal Weitzman, Annie Counsel, Leyla Boulton, Guy de Jonquieres, Quentin Peel, Chrystia Freeland, Andrew Gowers, and Lionel Barber.

I owe James Harding another debt of gratitude for introducing me to his book agent, Andrew Wylie. Although Andrew has handled many of the best nonfiction writers in the world, he patiently walked a novice book writer through the process of refining his often vague ideas into a workable book proposal. I am immensely grateful for his counsel. Tim Duggan at HarperCollins was a superb editor, always offering exactly the right mix of encouragement, criticism, and prodding. He improved and sharpened the book in immeasurable ways. I also want to thank Allison Lorentzen and Campbell Wharton at HarperCollins.

I can trace at least some of my interest in borders to the decision by my parents, Tom and Louise Alden, to move with their four small children from Schenectady, New York, to Vancouver, British Columbia. Vancouver is a long way from anywhere else in Canada, but it is very close to the United States, and I remember many childhood car trips traveling back and forth across the border at Blaine, Washington, while my father admonished me to stay quiet and look serious while he answered the border inspector’s questions. Even between such close neighbors as the United States and Canada, those crossings were an early and powerful lesson to me that we do not live, and never have lived, in a world of open borders.

Finally, this book has been just one small chapter in my journey with the love of my life, my wife, Fiona James, and our beautiful children, Callum and Charlotte, who have already written many books between them. They would often greet me when I arrived home with the puzzled question, Daddy, aren’t you finished with your book yet? I thank them for everything that truly matters.

Introduction

DR. FAIZ BHORA SHOULD HAVE been operating on babies’ hearts. Instead, in the spring of 2003 he had been waiting almost nine months for some word from the American consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, that he would be allowed to return to the United States. Since coming to the States nearly a decade before on a training program for foreign doctors, the diminutive Pakistani had climbed to a stature reserved for the most talented of American surgeons. He had studied for five years in general surgery at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., finishing his term as chief resident. In 2000, he had become one of just 120 surgeons in the United States selected each year to train in cardiothoracic surgery, which involves the most delicate and life-threatening operations on the heart and lungs. He was one of only two chosen for residencies at the prestigious UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, one of the country’s top programs.

It was no accidental appointment. Years earlier, Bhora had identified the man he wanted to be his mentor—Hillel Laks, a globally renowned pediatric heart surgeon who had saved, among countless others, the life of actor Sylvester Stallone’s baby daughter Sophia Rose by performing open-heart surgery to repair a hole in her heart. Only half a dozen hospitals in North America were doing such surgeries, and UCLA’s was widely regarded as the best. Laks, a South African–born Orthodox Jew who first came to the United States to train at Harvard, had pioneered a host of new surgical techniques, from transplants with artificial hearts to delicate procedures for operating on infants. He was the first to experiment with repairing damaged hearts for transplants in elderly patients who were not eligible to receive healthier hearts. In more than two decades as the chief of cardiothoracic surgery, he had built UCLA’s transplant program into the world’s largest, working fifteen hours a day, six days a week, save only Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, when his religion forbade him to drive or work. For Laks, medicine was not just a profession but a religious calling. According to the Jewish religion, a doctor is a messenger, he said in a speech in 2002. It’s a God-given gift that human beings are able to treat disease and therefore one has to be the best messenger that one can.

Bhora himself seemed to be on a similar path. A Muslim born to two doctors in Karachi, Pakistan, he was seized from a very early age with the conviction that following his parents into medicine was a moral obligation. He was sent to England for his high school studies, and by the age of twenty-one had graduated from Pakistan’s best medical school, the Aga Khan University in Karachi. Like most ambitious young Pakistani doctors, he had come to the United States to do medical research, hoping to gain a residency position in a U.S. hospital. Six months as a researcher at the University of Michigan were followed by a year at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. By 1995, he had been offered a surgical residency at George Washington, a challenging urban hospital just a five-minute walk from the U.S. State Department. In early 2000, by which time he had become the hospital’s chief resident, he invited Laks to come and speak at the hospital, hoping to increase his chances of winning one of the coveted residencies at UCLA. Before Laks’s arrival, Bhora called the surgeon’s secretary in Los Angeles to try to find something memorable he could offer during his visit to Washington. She told him that Laks, who is an avid amateur photographer, was a fan of Annie Leibovitz’s portraits. Following the talk, Bhora took Laks to an exhibition of her photographs that had just opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art near the White House. I really buttered him up, Bhora admits.

His two years under Laks at UCLA were the final steps in an exhausting fifteen-year training. When he finished his surgical residency, he was offered the opportunity to join the faculty at the UCLA hospital. Before he could take up his new post, however, Bhora needed to return home to Pakistan to apply to the State Department for a new work visa to remain in the United States. Under U.S. immigration law, most foreign doctors arrive on a special training visa, and they must leave the country after their studies are finished. To hire Bhora as a member of the hospital faculty, UCLA had to persuade the U.S. government to allow him to remain on an O visa reserved for individuals of extraordinary ability who had risen to the very top of the field of endeavor. It would have been hard to write a resume that better fit the criterion.

In July 2002, Bhora flew back to Karachi, expecting it would take him no more than thirty days to receive a new visa and return to Los Angeles to take up his position. One of Los Angeles’s top immigration lawyers, who had been hired by the university to ensure it would not be without the services of such a valuable surgeon, had assured him the process would take a month, perhaps two at the outside. Seven months later, he was still at his parents’ home in Pakistan, waiting to hear back from the U.S. embassy. Since August, I’ve been waiting for the phone to ring, he said by telephone from Karachi in February 2003. My life is on hold.

Dr. Bhora’s brilliant career was an unlikely casualty of the September 11 terrorist attacks. In January 2002, at the instigation of Attorney General John Ashcroft and with the acquiescence of the State Department, the United States had created a new security review mechanism under the code name Condor. Fearing that another wave of terrorists might be planning additional attacks, Ashcroft’s Justice Department had forced an end to the pre-9/11 process for reviewing visa applications from citizens of Muslim countries. Normally, like any visa application, Dr. Bhora’s request would have gone to a State Department consular official at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, and the decision would have been made by that official after a personal interview and a brief review. But following 9/11, the Justice Department had asserted its power to scrutinize visa applications back in Washington on national security grounds. State Department officials feared the move would cause international repercussions, alienating countries like Pakistan that were seen as critical U.S. allies in the war that was raging in neighboring Afghanistan against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But after a bitter interagency struggle, the State Department acquiesced to the new procedures. As a result, every visa application for men between the ages of sixteen and forty-five from Muslim nations—regardless of their past history—would be sent back to Washington to be scrutinized by the FBI and the CIA. The visa could not be approved until those security scrubs were completed.

Though he had lived most of his adult life in the United States, and had gone from one prestigious job to another, Bhora fell into the Condor net. He met with a U.S. consular officer at the embassy in Islamabad in August who was prepared to approve his visa on the spot. But under the new regulations, the officer had no choice but to send the application to Washington for a security review. And there—along with tens of thousands of other visa applications from around the world—it sat, and sat, and sat.

ON SEPTEMBER 10, 2001, THE United States was the most open, and some might have said most naïve, country in the world. When nineteen hijackers flew commercial jets into the World Trade Center skyscrapers and the Pentagon, there were millions of foreigners in the country whom the U.S. government knew almost nothing about. Many had arrived legally—including the hijackers themselves—but there was no way to know what they had done since they had set foot on U.S. soil. Others were here illegally, either by overstaying tourist visas—as had five of the hijackers—or by crossing the thousands of miles of lightly defended land borders with Mexico and Canada. Government scrutiny for the more than 7 million visas granted each year to foreign visitors was cursory, while another 11 million travelers from Europe and nearly 25 million visitors from Canada and Mexico crossed with virtually no scrutiny at all. U.S. policy was explicitly to facilitate and promote travel, believing it could only bring economic, social, and cultural benefits to the country. In a strong economy where openness had ushered in a golden age of globalization—the kind that had brought together an Orthodox Jew from South Africa and a Muslim from Pakistan to repair the hearts of American babies in a hospital in Los Angeles—such casualness had seemed inconsequential. But in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, which had left nearly three thousand people dead and their grieving families behind, the risks suddenly appeared vastly to outweigh the benefits.

This book tells the story of how, since the trauma of 9/11, the United States has been turning its back on that openness. The nineteen men who had inflicted such catastrophic damage all came from outside the country and had turned America’s welcome mat into a weapon that could be used against the United States. At every level of the administration and Congress in Washington, there was a desperate desire to do everything that could be done to prevent another attack. The immediate reaction was swift—a virtual closing of the borders right after the attacks, followed by a series of harsh measures targeted primarily at immigrants from Arab or Muslim countries. Even as some of those controls have been eased, however, the United States has been making it harder and harder for people from across the world to travel to, study, or work in the United States. And the enormous economic benefits and global goodwill that once flowed from the country’s openness are now gradually being choked off.

DIA ELNAIEM WAS BORN AND raised in rural Sudan, the youngest boy of eleven children, three of whom died early in childhood. His father had been wounded twice in World War II, including in the epic battle of El Alamein, fighting alongside the British against the Nazis in North Africa. A brilliant student, he was able to attend the University of Khartoum in the Sudanese capital on a full scholarship, and he graduated at the top of his class with an honors degree in zoology and a mission to rid his country of leishmaniasis, a disease that had tormented its people for centuries.

Leishmaniasis is one of the most insidious diseases of the developing world, afflicting about 12 million people in some ninety countries, but nowhere more so than in Sudan. Spread by the bite of a common sand fly, which is smaller than a mosquito, it creates painful skin lesions on a victim’s face, hands, and arms that take months to heal, often leaving behind ugly scars. In more serious cases, which are common in countries like Sudan where many suffer from malnutrition, the disease can lead to infections that enlarge the liver and spleen, and to anemia. Some ten thousand people in Sudan, most of them children, die each year from complications related to the disease.

Following his graduation, Elnaiem went to work as a teaching assistant at the University of Khartoum, and then won a fellowship in molecular entomology at the University of Liverpool School of Tropical Disease, specializing in vector-borne diseases, particularly leishmaniasis. After completing his doctorate, he was offered a research position at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, working with Gregory Lanzaro, one of the world’s leading experts on insect-borne tropical diseases. Soon after his arrival, Lanzaro moved his Texas lab to the University of California in Davis, just outside Sacramento, and Elnaiem followed, bringing his wife and two children over at the end of July 2002.

Just before his family was set to arrive in California, however, his supervisor urged him to attend an academic conference in Brazil as a representative of the UC Davis lab. Most of Lanzaro’s research involved sand flies from South and Central America, and Elnaiem believed research on these insects held the key to developing a vaccine for leishmaniasis. But Elnaiem was wary—he had seen reports in the news about visa problems facing foreign researchers and students. So he contacted the U.S. embassy in Rio de Janeiro and explained his situation. Officials there assured him that he would need only a stamp on his visa, a straightforward and quick process. He sent a second e-mail to be sure and received the same answer. With those responses in hand, in August 2002 he left his family for the five-day conference in Brazil. They had arrived in California just three days before, coming to an empty apartment he had rented. But he had no time to add his wife to the bank account or introduce her to any of his colleagues. He left her cash for ten days, which seemed more than sufficient since the Brazilian conference was scheduled to last less than a week.

When the conference concluded in Salvador Bahia in northern Brazil, he flew back to Rio and went to the U.S. consulate first thing the next morning to get the stamp on his visa that would allow him to return to the United States. As Elnaiem still vividly recalls, the consular officer saw his Sudanese passport, picked it up with two fingers and his face changed. Before he could return to the United States, the officer informed him, he would have to undergo a security review in Washington. The assurances he had received in advance were worthless.

For the next six months his home would be a student hostel in Rio, sleeping on a cot in a room with eight other beds and sharing a common bathroom down the hall. It was two months before he heard anything from the embassy; they asked him to provide his full curriculum vitae and to fill out an additional form with questions such as Do you know how to fly a plane? and Do you have knowledge of nuclear technology? He often considered returning to Sudan but kept talking himself out of it, hopeful that the next day would bring a response from the embassy and fearful that if he abandoned the security review it would be like an admission of guilt and would bar him from ever returning to the United States. By January 2003, his Brazilian visa had expired as well, and he had decided there was no choice but to return to Sudan. He wrote to the University of California telling them he would be forced to leave his research position.

As a final gesture, he sent a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who had been one of the most aggressive members of Congress in pushing for tighter rules on visas for students and researchers after 9/11. Surely, he wrote, his ordeal could not have been an intended consequence of the measures she supported. Just before he was set to return to Sudan, he received a response from her office promising to investigate. The next day he got a call from the U.S. consular officer in Rio telling him that his approval had finally arrived from Washington. On February 11, more than six months after coming to Brazil, he was on a flight back to California.

Apart from the personal ordeal for Elnaiem and his family, the actions of the U.S. government are likely to prolong the suffering for millions of victims of leishmaniasis. His research was unique, and he had spent an entire year collecting samples of sand flies that needed to be stored under controlled temperatures and monitored regularly. They could be left alone for a week, but not for months. There was no one at his lab in California who knew how to care for the breeding colonies, and when he returned to Davis all of them, including new samples he had collected and shipped from Brazil, had died. He estimates that the six months he was stuck in Brazil set back his research by at least two to three years.

THE CLAMPDOWN AT THE U.S. borders after 9/11 was never intended to have the effects it did on people like Faiz Bhora and Dia Elnaiem. Top American officials, the most important of them President George W. Bush, insisted they wanted to avoid shutting out people the country needed in the name of security. Bush came to the White House from the governor’s mansion in Texas caring deeply about encouraging immigration. One of his first major policy initiatives was to launch talks with Mexico on a migration pact to permit new legal ways for Mexicans to live and work in the United States. Among his last was a failed attempt in 2007 to push a bill through a divided Congress that would have granted legal status to many illegal immigrants in the United States and offered new legal channels for future immigrants. He brought in Tom Ridge, another border governor, as his first homeland security adviser, and later made him the first secretary of Homeland Security. Like the president, Ridge believed strongly in open borders and constantly talked about balancing the new security requirements with openness.

Yet the way Bush defined the post-9/11 war on terrorism—as a global struggle for survival with a foe he deemed as menacing as Nazi Germany or the nuclear-armed Soviet Union—made a nuanced and proportionate response all but impossible. When he came to office, Bush wanted to leave a legacy as the president who had built new bridges across the Rio Grande and shored up those to the rest of the world; instead, he will leave behind nearly seven hundred miles of steel fence on the Mexican border and a world that has grown much warier about coming to the United States. His administration’s response to the terrorist attacks did not mesh easily with the president’s pro-migration convictions, and indeed there is no evidence in any of his public statements that he has ever grappled with the contradiction. Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, he had made prevention of another terrorist attack the single, unequivocal, overriding priority of his presidency. For the officials charged with carrying out that task, immigration and visa laws were the most powerful tools they had. It gave them the unquestioned authority to carry out exhaustive screenings of travelers or immigrants who fit any profile that caused concern and to bar from the country anyone who raised the smallest of red flags. It allowed them to arrest and detain on minor transgressions those already in the United States who came under suspicion. The result was that, while the administration talked about balancing security and openness, almost all of its resources and effort went into time-consuming background checks on foreigners, new controls at the borders, and aggressive enforcement against anyone caught committing even the most minor infraction of the labyrinthine immigration regulations.

It’s always a question of how much security is enough, said General Bruce Lawlor, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran who was in charge of the U.S. Army’s civil defense preparations against a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil when he was plucked to help lead the White House response after 9/11. You had to make a risk-based assessment. Everybody said that, but when you asked them to do it, their tolerance for risk was zero.

The conception of risk changed completely after the attacks. Over and over again, as I talked with government officials about the post-9/11 world, I heard the same refrain: no one wanted to be hauled before Congress or another national commission after the next attack and be forced to explain why he hadn’t done absolutely everything in his power to prevent it from happening. No one was going to get punished for saying no to a foreigner, but the penalties for saying yes could be enormous.

In increments, and with many setbacks, the U.S. government has tried to develop what experts call a risk management approach to border security, in which the benefits of new security measures—reducing the likelihood of another terrorist attack, keeping out criminals, or slowing the flow of illegal migrants—are balanced against the economic and diplomatic costs that such measures have for the country. But it has taken hold very slowly even within the professional bureaucracy, and in the political debate it is utterly drowned out by the constant drumbeat of demands to enforce immigration law and seal the border against illegal entry. Admiral James Loy, a U.S. Coast Guard veteran who became one of the first and closest advisers to Ridge, thinks the government is gradually developing the skills needed to manage risk in its efforts to improve homeland security, what he called the post-9/11 skill set and competency to cope with the world. But he acknowledged it has been a difficult concept to sell. We as a nation had always sort of insisted on 100 percent solutions, said Loy. We even named it things like ‘unconditional surrender’ and ‘zero tolerance.’

THIS IS THE NEW REALITY that zero tolerance has brought us.

If you live outside of Canada, western Europe, Japan, and a handful of other countries, you now need a personal interview with a U.S. embassy official to get your visa to come to the United States, whether it’s for four years of study or a week’s vacation to Disneyland. Before 9/11, the State Department had broad discretion to grant visas to travelers without interviews, on the reasonable assumption that most people traveling to the United States posed no risk and that it was better to spend more time interviewing those who raised some concerns. But following the firing of the State Department’s top consular official in 2002 over the issuing of visas to the hijackers, and the passage of a new law by Congress in 2004, virtually all visa applicants must now come in person to be fingerprinted and interviewed. If you live in Brazil, it will take you three to four months just to schedule the interview and, since there are only three U.S. consulates in the country, you may have to take a plane to appear for your two minutes of questioning. In 2006 in India, the maximum wait time for interviews was five months or more; delays have been reduced only through a massive redeployment of consular officers by the State Department that is probably not sustainable. In China, it takes more than a month just to get through that first stage; in Dubai, it takes two months.

If you are a young male from a predominantly Muslim country—whether you yourself are a Muslim or not—in addition to being interviewed, fingerprinted, and photographed, you will be required to fill out a detailed questionnaire before coming to the United States, including information on relatives, bank accounts, and contacts in the United States. Every time you travel back to the United States—even if you are already living here with a green card or a work visa and are returning from a trip abroad—you will be pulled aside for secondary screening, where you could face a lengthy delay. The officer will probably rifle through your wallet or purse, writing down calling card numbers or any other scraps of information. You will also be required to check out from specific airports or land border crossings when leaving the country by informing U.S. border inspectors of your departure; failure to do so could result in your being barred from returning to the United States for five years or more.

      For sixteen months, between September 2002 and January 2004, most men from predominantly Muslim countries were also required to re-register thirty days after they arrived in the country. Imad Daou, a Christian from Lebanon, came to the United States in July 2003 to begin postgraduate studies in computer science at Texas A&M International University (TAMIU), which is near the Mexican border in Laredo. He checked carefully with the university’s international office to make sure he had met all the requirements of his student visa, and was assured he had. During his first weekend at the school, he was standing at a bus stop when he met Maria Guadelupe Garcia, a Mexican American who was studying for her master’s in international business at TAMIU and teaching at a Laredo high school. He seemed, as she later put it, lost and in great need of help; the bus he was waiting for did not run on the weekends. She later invited him to