Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Edward Alden spoke about his recent book The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11.

“Within two hours of 9/11 customs had succeeded in finding and naming the nineteen hijackers,” Alden began. From the attacks, he suggested, two primary schools of though emerged.

First was the idea that the process Customs undertook after the attacks -- looking at names, ticket purchase information, and seating patterns -- could likely be done proactively, rather than retroactively. 

Second, stemming from the discovery that several hijackers had been pulled over by police in the weeks and even hours before 9/11, was the notion that better enforcement of existing immigration law could prevent further attacks of such scale. “If only we could have enforced our immigration laws…maybe (Ziad) Jarrah would have been arrested, maybe 9/11 never would have happened.”

Alden said that the message sent “down through the Customs bureaucracy was that there’d be no penalty for keeping good people out, but that could be for letting bad people in.” 

Alden suggested one of the interviews he expected to have great difficulty getting, with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, was actually quit easy to land. “It caused him a number of headaches during his time at the State Department.” Nearly every meeting with foreign officials, Alden said, often came around to discussing US immigration policy. “Our immigration policy was damaging foreign relations.”

“What we saw after 9/11 was a sharp fall on in travel to the United States. We went form issuing 8 million visas per year to less than 5 million.” 

“Boeing, for instance, every time they sell an aircraft internationally,” Alden explained, “they have pilots come over to train…suddenly Boeing found that they couldn’t get visas for pilots to come train.”

“I would not in anyway dismantle the whole panoply of post 9/11 changes. What I would like to see is the next administration stop talking about immigration and terrorism in the same breath,” Alden said 

He also suggested we do away with invasive, second tier customs inspections, “but the FBI insists they get useful information from stopping people and jotting down every name and number in their wallets.”

“The line between punishment and administrative procedure is very thin,” Alden explained. “When we deport people, they’re often held in jail for two, three, four months.” 

“There’s enough other systems in place that things like this remain needless and self destructive,” Alden said.

He concluded: “All we do all the time is respond to the last crisis; we do nothing to forestall the next threat. We have a very had time getting past just responding to the last crisis.”