Entry to US gets tough

The nineteen hijackers who carried out the deadly attacks of September 11 were all foreigners, 15 of them Saudi, who had entered the United States on tourist and student visas.

Two of them, including Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian who piloted a hijacked passenger jet into one of the towers of the World Trade Center, had an expired visa.

Tap Here to Add The Daily Star As A Trusted Source

And several had used false identities to enter the United States.

"What we have discovered in the aftermath of September 11th terrorist attacks was that the perpetrators were able to use our visa system to enter the United States with impunity and carry out their deadly mission," said Democratic California Senator Dianne Feinstein.

In late 2001, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service admitted that it had lost track of some four million people who had entered the United States legally and then allowed their visas to expire.

More than 500,000 foreigners enter the United States each year on student visas. In the 1990s, 16,000 of them came from countries suspected of having links to terrorism, such as Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Syria, said Feinstein, co-author of a bill on border security and visa reform passed by Congress in early 2002.

The new legislation aims to reduce the risk of infiltration by tightening procedures for issuing visas at some 200 US consulates worldwide and at airports and other ports of entry.

A better flow of information between immigration services, the FBI and the CIA, coordinated by the new Department of Homeland Security, should also enable the government to do a better job of spotting terrorists, US officials say.

Two of the 19 hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks were suspected as terrorists by the Central Intelligence Agency, but that information was not shared with immigration authorities or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to a Congressional investigation into the attacks.

Starting in January 2004, immigration officials will take digital fingerprints and photographs of most foreigners carrying student or tourist visas upon their arrival in the United States, as part of a new system called "Visitor and Immigration Status Indication Technology System" or VISIT.