More history of visas

I was talking about America's bonkers immigration system on my last post and I want to go in more detail about how the current systems came to be this way.

American citizens have the 8th most powerful passport in the world. This is a wonderful thing. But travel freedom has been declining globally over the last 20 years as governments have created a new class of visa in a number of countries for citizens of their allies. This is an alarming trend which should concern us all.

Countries with such policies are Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the US, and next year the European Union will roll out a similar program. The claims these governments make is that such programs reduce crime. I addressed in my previous post that the US VWP was started in response to the 9/11 attackers, but the main problem with this claim is that no one who was even involved in the 9/11 attacks in any way would have been covered by the VWP because they were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and the UAE, all of which are most definitely NOT covered by the VWP.

So let's see the evidence that has caused so many governments to increase visa restrictions on other democracies, and which the EPP government of the European Union will follow through and copy next year.

Well, the first hit on Google Scholar is a little more broad and they studied whether increasing immigration enforcement in the United States reduces crime. Turns out that in fact, the Secure Communities program, an expensive system in the United States used to identify immigrants in jails, does not reduce crime and is a glorious waste of taxpayer money. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/680935

Do deportations reduce crime? Well, not according to FBI data which found no statistically significant relationship between deportations and crime rates. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/upshot/deportations-crime-study.html

Will new machine learning models reduce crime? Could we potentially use this to more selectively and accurately screen people crossing the border without the need for visas? Well, the evidence so far shows that such models which have been used rely on faulty data and usually create biased models which don't actually reduce crime. https://www.science.org/content/article/can-predictive-policing-prevent-crime-it-happens

All of these expensive policing and machine learning programs are less effective than just adding green space it appears, which is effective and relatively inexpensive. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972201097X

So make cities worth living in perhaps? That can't be right. That goes against the entire cultural norms of the United States today where we just need to spend more money, put more police on the streets, increase border security, and all of these other solutions the government has been putting into place since Nixon was President.

It is very difficult to find any evidence on why the ESTA program was created online, and even harder to track down proof that it actually reduces crime. There is a report by the Congressional Research Service where the author points out that the real reason the Visa Waiver Program was created not because there was a lot of crimes being created by European Tourists, she doesn't state their were not frequent crimes created by European tourists, but she doesn't state that there were. If there were frequent crimes done by European tourists in the United States, trust me, that reason would be stated, and the policy would be understandable. But she doesn't state it, because it wasn't a problem.

The reason the author points out is that there was a fear that terrorist organizations would use nationals of European Union countries to get into the United States and commit crimes here. It wasn't based on any actual evidence that the terrorist organizations were going to use Canadians to get into the US and commit crimes.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Visa_Waiver_Program/fYv5-cIBkBIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=visa+waiver+program+impact+on+crime+from+europe&pg=PA1&printsec=frontcover

Another, more recent report, with similar findings:

https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20200401_R46300_ba7d75b06ca2e23a0a39706b36e5dee8bce5a6cf.pdf

Oh yeah, meant to say Europeans there, but there is no reason why terrorist organizations can't just use Canadians and totally bypass the Visa Waiver Program. But they don't. That isn't a problem. So I don't believe there is any actual reality-land based reason on how the Visa Waiver Program actually makes America safer. If there was, it would have been mentioned in at least one of the several Congressional Research Service reports I have read while researching this. But it wasn't mentioned, because there is no evidence for it. I cannot find any solid evidence the program actually has a significant impact on crime. If the government could prove that it did, they would tell us.

This needs research from independent researchers from universities on whether ESTA is actually effective. If it is indeed ineffective, as I suspect, it needs to be abolished.

What actually would have stopped the terrorists?

So to analyze this we have to look into two things, 1. What was the visa status of terrorists who actually attacked the United States, and 2. how frequently are terrorist attacks done in Europe?

Well, if we look into the history of any of the 9/11 attackers we find that they had a few things in common:

1. None of them would have been caught by ESTA, because none of them were citizens of Visa Waiver Program countries.
2. All of the 9/11 attackers went through customs legally using valid visas which were granted to them by Colin Powell's State Department.

The only connection to any VWP country was the Hamburg Cell, but the United States and Germany had no evidence connecting them to al Qaeda when the terrorists lived there in 1998 and 1999. So we did nothing, because we couldn't. ESTA would not have caught these individuals because they did not possess German citizenship.

Abdulaziz al-Omari used the Visa Express program, which is a company which helps facilitate expedited visa processing into the United States. It still means you go through the same process as any other standard B-visa, it just means you get your appointment sooner. This process still exists, and the company still exists.

Hani Hanjuor was the only 9/11 attacker who had studied in the United States. He was a Saudi citizen which means the VWP would have done nothing to catch him.

The first thing which the US government and our allies could have done is that when the NSA intercepted a call between two known al Qaeda associates in 1999, and felt that something nefarious might be afoot, they could have followed up and worked with the Malaysian authorities to monitor those al-Qaeda members at the time. But the NSA, FBI, and other agencies who literally exist to do this job of monitoring dangerous international criminals decided it wasn't their job. But if the FBI's job isn't to monitor terrorist organizations which had already attacked the United States, what exactly is their job? Multiple participants of the 9/11 attacks could have been apprehended if the FBI and CIA were just competent and after seeing red flags had acted on them.

Data sharing between agencies, which is one of the good things the PATRIOT ACT does, would have worked. Or the State Department could just do their job and do a proper investigation when someone from a country like Saudi Arabia applies for a visa to make sure they aren't connected to terrorism, a country which already was known as a source of terrorists like Osama bin Laden. But is that really the job of the State Department?

It actually is their job and has been their job for over 200 years. Otherwise why bother having visas at all?

The actual solutions to stopping terrorism include:

1. Democratization is a long term effective strategy. Terrorists typically come from authoritarian countries which are either actively spreading extremist views or low income.
2. Properly vet people coming from countries which are known to have high levels of terrorist activity.
3. Properly vet tourists from countries which are not democracies.
4. When there is a legitimate concern or a tip off that an individual is tied to a terrorist organization, the government needs to followup and not grant them visas.

The expansion of visas to people from democracies however, is not an effective method at stopping terrorism, and needs to be independently audited, and if the audit finds it is ineffective, it needs to be abolished.