| Illegal immigrants are flooding into the USA, with an estimated 12 million calling this country home. Congress and the president are struggling to craft meaningful reform; in an age of terrorism, a porous border is a clear vulnerability. Another danger on the horizon: hurricane season. The federal government has acknowledged that last year's response to Hurricane Katrina was largely a failure. What lessons have we learned, and what changes can we expect for the next big storm? Immigration and disaster preparedness fall under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. Its secretary, Michael Chertoff, discussed these and other issues with USA TODAY editors and reporters. His visit came just before President Bush announced plans to send Guard troops to the southern border. Chertoff's comments were edited for length and clarity.
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Question: Immigration reform is high on the president's agenda. Where can this administration be successful where others have not?
Answer: You've got to use three elements to have a successful strategy. One is increased border security, including the use of more agents, enhanced technology and some fencing along the border where it makes sense. Also, making sure the people we catch are returned. The second piece is interior enforcement. That's part of a philosophical change. This will yield the best results because that's where you can really get deterrence. Third, you've got to give people a clear path to following the law, and that's why a sensible temporary worker program is something we have to have.
Q: Do you have the means to seal the border, track people coming in legally and find them when their visas run out? And can you put pressure on employers to deter illegal immigration?
A: Sealing the border is a tall order. What we can do is control the border, which means ultimately detecting everybody who crosses the border in enough time to intercept them. A whole separate issue is our ability to track people who overstay visas or who get smuggled in through the ports of entry.
Q: How much progress has been made on this overstay issue since the 9/11 attacks? Because terrorists aren't here for jobs, going after employers wouldn't be the way to get these people, would it?
A: The optimal thing is to keep people out because frankly, if a terrorist comes in, they could act within the period of time allotted to their visa. So the overstay visa doesn't necessarily deal with that issue. Our US-VISIT program, which is at all of our permanent ports of entry, is a terrific tool for screening out terrorists based on names and on biometric-based fingerprints. We've added considerably to the resources for tracking down overstays and fugitives.
Q: Have you caught any known or suspected terrorists under the US-VISIT program?
A: We have sent people back who have connections to terrorism. It's rare you have a card-carrying terrorist because most of the ones we know about are either dead or in jail. But when you see somebody who has links to al-Qaeda, the evidence may not be sufficient to convict them of a crime, but it is sufficient to say this is a person we should be worried about for terrorism. We have certainly sent back people with such links.
Q: Employer enforcement of immigration laws has been declining. What will change this?
A: There was a time when enforcement was focused on meager civil sanctions. Now, part of the goal is to move to a more powerful enforcement with real sanctions. Criminal law is one. We've also been talking to Congress about beefing up civil sanctions.
Q: How would you measure success in purging the workforce of illegal immigrants?
A: I don't want to measure based simply on the number of actions. As a prosecutor in the '70s, we measured success by the number of informants and number of arrests. We retooled the strategy against organized crime. We said, let's do high-impact cases. What I want to do is introduce a level of uncertainty in the minds of employers who are thinking of building a business based on illegal workers.
Q: A reader recently wrote a letter about his experience in the construction trade. He had a job, but said because of illegal immigrants, his employer lowered wages. He ultimately lost his job. Would cleaning up the construction trade, for instance, be a realistic objective?
A: Anytime you're dealing with large-scale illegality, 100% is a difficult point to reach. I do think we can have a significant impact on the trade. Frankly, you've got to start with the larger entities. We've invited economists and other experts to talk about (identifying) large markets of illegality. We're trying to understand what is the business model of the lawbreaker, which can tell us something about what is the most cost-effective way to enforce the law.
Q: Have you and these experts devised any new approaches to enforcement that might be more effective than those attempted in years past?
A: There are all kinds of creative things I'm open to doing in terms of people who violate the law, and ways we might use our leverage as a government contractor to drive best practices into the industry. So if you want to do business with the government, we're going to write down certain standards, and maybe even make you drive those standards into your subcontractors. My commitment is to put into the interior enforcement the same kind of discipline and a little bit out-of-the-box thinking about how to break this business apart as we did with border enforcement. But it all comes back to a temporary worker program. Without it, some employers will feel they can't find an alternative to illegal workers and are going to want to try to save their business by breaking the law.
Q: Any chance we'll see meaningful reform?
A: Now there is real attention being paid to this issue. Probably no one will like everything (in an immigration reform law), but everyone will like something. That's what a comprehensive solution is.
Q: Let's switch to one of your other jobs: disaster relief. In retrospect, do you blame yourself for any of the Katrina failings?
A: In hindsight, I can't say that relying on the then-director of FEMA (Michael Brown) to use the tools I'd given him turned out to be a good decision. But when I look back, I want to underscore the rescuers. A lot of lives were saved. What was the least well done was getting people out of the Superdome and convention center. There was not a sufficient plan for how to get buses into an area, and that's precisely the kind of contingency plan we've spent the last six months doing.
Q: If there were to be a repeat of Katrina this year, can you paint a picture of how the government would operate this time?
A: We're still adhering to the traditional model that state and local government has the principal responsibility to be the first responder for two reasons. First, that's the way our legal system is set up in terms of the authority. Second, they know their people and their geography best. But all of this begins with the presumption that individuals take personal responsibility.
Q: Why are you certain things will be better the next time around?
A: Let me conclude by saying one thing. There is something that could be done that would really, really screw us up this hurricane season. Congress could decide it wants to take FEMA ( Federal Emergency Management Agency) out of DHS (Department of Homeland Security). I could guarantee that will give us a much worse hurricane season than we had because historically, the stuff that worked well in Katrina worked well because of elements in DHS that were able immediately to come and fill in gaps that FEMA wasn't able to do. If someone were to pull FEMA out, you'd have to rebuild that system.
Q: Are you concerned that the government may be seen as overreacting this season?
A: We may have some false alarms. But you're either too early and you have a false alarm, or you're too late and you're dead.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060524/ts_usatoday/sealingtheborderisatallorder
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