| REAL ID NOT THE REAL DEAL |
| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Wednesday, February 23 2005 |
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| Those legislators are at it again, making people believe they are doing something to make the country safer, when in reality all they're doing is trying to cover up the federal government's incompetence and hiding behind the alleged war against terrorism in order to push through their anti-
immigrant agenda.
The House of Representatives approved the so-called REAL ID Act with a vote of 262 in favor and 161 against. Among other things, the measure would create federal standards for issuing driver's licenses in which the applicant must show proof of legal immigration status. It would increase requirements for asylum-seekers and give judges more authority to evaluate their qualifications. It would also allocate funds to continue the construction of a wall along the California-Mexico border.
Once again, immigration is proving to be one of the most divisive issues in the United States, and once again, it is being unfairly jumbled into the
national-security debate. Denying driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants is not going to make the country safer; it's going to make the roads and highways of our cities more dangerous. Increasing the requirements for asylum-seekers is not going to keep terrorists away; it's going to hurt legitimate victims of tyranny and abuse by exposing them to more hardship, many of the same tyrannies that President Bush has vowed to defeat.
And adding another three and a half miles to a wall on the Mexican border is not going to stop those who really want to hurt this country from doing so. It's not only a waste of taxpayers' money; it's an absurd idea. What are we going to do next -- build a wall around the whole country, then a dome with a special opening for overseas flights?
More than securing our borders, the REAL ID Act seems to be a sneaky effort to find a quick and dirty solution to the very complex immigration problem the country is facing. It doesn't help that the Bush administration is sending mixed messages, first urging legislators to eliminate the anti-
immigrant provisions from the so-called 9/11 laws approved last year, and now giving its full support to a bill that includes those very provisions.
What Congress should be focusing on is how to make our institutions more responsive to their own intelligence. Newly declassified information from the 9-11 Commission report says that between April and Sept. 10, 2001, the Federal Aviation Administration received 52 warnings about the threat of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. Five of those warnings specifically mentioned al-Qaida's training to conduct hijackings. Two even mentioned suicide operations. Not only should Congress be asking why no one did anything about those warnings, but it should be asking why the Bush administration blocked the public release of the full classified version of the report for more than five months.
Also recently released is a memo from former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, dated Jan. 25, 2001, in which he requests an immediate meeting of top-level national-security officials to discuss the al-Qaida threat. That meeting did not take place until Sept. 4, 2001 -- just one week before the Sept. 11 attacks. But according to then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, "no al-Qaida threat was turned over to the new administration." We now know that Clarke was telling the truth when he said the Bush administration ignored his warnings. But instead, he was discredited and accused of playing politics.
Nothing assures us that acting on those warnings would have prevented the attacks of Sept. 11, but cracking down on immigrants and victims of tyrannies and building useless walls are not going to diminish any future threat. The United States should focus on rebuilding broken diplomatic alliances to renew the international coalition against terrorism that was in place before the war in Iraq. And, once and for all, this country should begin an open debate to create a fair, wide-ranging, comprehensive immigration reform that addresses the concerns on both sides of the issue. |
