Launched even as the imperatives of globalization, which are at the center of America’s external economic policies, prompted the United States to facilitate the entry of foreign nationals, the attack provoked an abrupt reversal, manifested in immediate calls for draconian measures to police the country’s territorial borders in response to the imperatives of national security. These contradictory stances arise from the peculiar structure of the contemporary world system, characterized by steadily more important transnational economic and cultural processes, but a still largely “Westphalian” political framework, founded on mutually exclusive, territorially-based, sovereign states, with a putative monopoly on the use of organized violence.  Whereas globalization, as well as commitment to civil liberties, fosters an expansion of the international movement of persons, extending across all social strata and poor as well as affluent countries, national security calls for the imposition of restrictive controls that impede movement.
   Further complicated by the proliferation of non-state actors with a significance capacity for violence, this configuration places the United States before a dilemma. As one experienced analyst has commented, “Building a Fortress America will not work. It will be incredibly expensive, disrupt commerce, and infringe civil liberties.”  However, as the spokesman for an anti-immigrant organization pointed out early on,  “it seems clear that the 19 terrorists of September 11 were all foreign citizens and entered the United States legally, as tourists, business travelers, or students. This was also true of the perpetrators of previous terrorist acts . . . While it is absolutely essential that we not scapegoat immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, we also must not overlook the most obvious fact: the current terrorist threat to the United States comes almost exclusively from individuals who arrive from abroad.”
    On the eve of the events, immigration issues had largely receded from the political arena, as the settlement elaborated from the mid-1980s onward appeared quite stable.  Overall, immigration is largely driven by persistent economic necessity in Third World countries that are linked to the United States by way of family networks, with Mexico and the Philippines as the leading sources. Following the exhaustion of the refugee flow from Southeast Asia and the resolution of political crises in Central America, the United States reduced its annual quota of refugees admitted for resettlement, while concurrently deterring asylum-seekers by toughening conditions. In the face of charges that ongoing policy fostered heavy welfare costs, admission requirements were raised in 1996 and legal immigrants denied federal transfer payments –a policy that shifted the burden to states and localities, and was subsequently softened at their behest. Concurrently, in the face of growing labor demand in the boom years,  particularly from politically weighty sectors such as the information industry, additional admissions were provided for more skilled immigrants, as well as temporary worker programs.  Overall, following three extraordinarily high years, attributable to the legalization program of 1986, admissions in the 1990s stabilized to an average of about 825,000 a year.  However, the immigration system also includes a substantial illegal but in effect tolerated segment, made up of illegal border-crossers and overstayers. Supplying low-skilled, inexpensive labor to a variety of sectors from agriculture to retail, this pool doubled in size in the 1990s to reach 8.7 million in 2000 --amounted to about 2.5 percent of the total U.S. population-- suggesting an addition of about 430,000 a year, increasingly more male and Mexican.  Together, legal and illegal immigration made for an average intake of 1.3 million a year in the 1990s, an historical record with regard to both numbers and diversity.  As a result, the United States is once again a “nation of immigrants,” with an estimated 31.1 million foreign residents as of March 2000, constituting about 11 percent of the population –an approximate doubling since 1960, when the proportion reached its lowest level since Tocqueville visited a country he characterized as “Anglo-American.”
    Although the high levels of legal and especially illegal immigration evoked mixed reactions among the general public, as recorded in opinion polls, on the eve of the events there was little or no restrictionist fervor in Congress. Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton administration assuaged perennial demands for greater control over illegal immigration by doubling the size of the U.S. Border Patrol and building showcase walls in Texas and California, but as one shrewd assessment puts it, this was “less about achieving the stated instrumental goal of deterring illegal  border crossers and more about politically recrafting the image of the border and symbolically reaffirming the state’s territorial authority.”  While Republicans traditionally favored labor immigration, notably in the form of “guest worker” programs for agriculture, they simultaneously leaned toward restrictionism on cultural grounds; however, from the very outset of his presidential campaign, George W. Bush firmly opposed the anti-Hispanic leanings that had recently cost his party dearly in California.
    Concurrently, south of the border, “free market” candidate Vicente Fox called for a new immigration relationship with the United States, involving possibly an enlargement of the annual  quota, as well as a temporary workers program of some sort.  Seriously taken up by Washington, Fox’s proposals prompted the formation of a bi-national planning team and were brought to public attention in the course of his state visit just days before the attack, evoking a warm response from his American counterpart.
    Lying in wait for opportunities, anti-immigration advocates quickly turned the attack into a demonstration of the soundness of their cause. The spokesman cited earlier concluded by pointing out to the Senate, “Thus, our immigration policy, including temporary and permanent visas issuance, border control, and efforts to deal with illegal immigration are all critical to reducing the chance of an attack in the future.” In a more extreme vein, Pat Buchanan urged an immediate moratorium on all immigration, an expansion of the Border Patrol to 20,000, a radical reduction of visas issued to nationals of states that harbor terrorists, and the expedited deportation of “the eight-to-11 million illegal aliens, beginnings with those from rogue nations.” Moreover, “President Bush’s amnesty proposal” –a provocatively selective reference to the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Mexico--  “should be quietly interred”.  The tragedy undoubtedly helped propel Buchanan’s latest dose of vitriol, The Death of the West, which purports to demonstrate “How dying populations and immigrant invasions imperil our country and civilization,” onto the New York Times best-seller list in early 2002.
    Overall, however, reactions were more mixed. In the absence of a timely survey of public opinion focused on the subject, it is obviously impossible to ascertain how the events affected general American attitudes toward immigration and immigrants.  On an impressionistic level, in the immediate aftermath there was a spate of scattered aggressions against people who were seen as resembling the terrorists or believed to sympathize with them, occasionally with tragic consequences; but there were also reports of Americans going out of their way to reassure their immigrant neighbors and acquaintances, with no way of assessing the balance between the two kinds of incidents.
    In contrast with previous surges of securitarian nationalism provoked by international conflicts, most notoriously in the wake of Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. government treated all ethnic Japanese as suspects, including American citizens, governmental responses were restrained. Not only were there no wholesale denunciations of particular groups, but instead, the President pointedly visited a mosque and the Mayor of New York explicitly admonished the city’s residents not to seek revenge on Arabs or Muslims. Again in contrast with the past, while the events stimulated considerable talk of the need to modify American immigration policy, in practice the proposed changes were almost entirely circumscribed to matters of “border control,” and there were no widespread calls to reduce immigration.  Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, insisted that “Immigrants are not the problem, terrorists are the problem, ” and  President Bush declared in the same vein, “We welcome legal immigrants but we don’t welcome people who come to hurt Americans.”
    However, the president then went on to announce immediate measures to enhance security by tightening admission procedures as well as to search for the enemy within, which led to the targeting of Muslims and Middle Easterners for interrogation and, in many cases, their incarceration and subsequent deportation.  Moreover, the administration asked for a much enlarged arsenal of legal weapons to fight terrorism, which included an array of measures targeting the alien population as well as a comprehensive system of border control. As will be seen, despite some demurrers from civil liberty organizations, its proposals evoked broad bipartisan support and it speedily obtained most of what it sought.
    The following week he named a Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force to recommend specific changes in laws and admission procedures, including those covering student visas, in order to deter would-be terrorists from entering. Concurrently, bipartisan proposals got under way in Congress to give the State Department and INS electronic access to FBI and CIA “lookout lists” of potential criminals and terrorists, as well as to establish sophisticated identification technology at all ports of entry. This would in turn require tightening identification requirements for visa applicants by subjecting them to biometrics such as fingerprints. There was also considerable talk of creating a centralized system for keeping track of the whereabouts and activities of alien residents and visitors, including students. Perennially criticized by both the anti- and pro-immigration camps for its mismanagement of the border, the INS came under acute fire and appeared to be not much longer for this world.
    The heightened prominence of “border control” in American policy discourse highlights the fact that immigration properly speaking constitutes a sub-category of a more comprehensive and much vaster phemomenon, the movement of people across international borders.  Yet while the study of international migration is a well-established field within the social sciences, international movement has evoked little analytic interest.  The distinction is not merely a matter of legal regulation but reflects tangible social realities involving duration of the stay in the foreign country and the activities carried out during that period. It is reflected in census enumerations, which do not count visitors as “residents,” and consequently in demographic analyses, which do not consider them as “population.” Whereas all international migrants start out as border-crossers, most border-crossers do not become migrants but remain visitors. The events of 9/11 provide a case in point: not a single one of the known hijackers, nor any of the other suspects subsequently identified, qualified as an “immigrant,” in the sense of someone who was legally admitted to the United States for permanent settlement or had lived there illegally for an extended period. As it happens, they had all entered the country legally as duly authorized visitors, although some subsequently overstayed the allowed period and hence had become “illegal aliens” by the time they committed their crimes.
    Border control has long been recognized, in theory as well as in practice, as a vital operational feature of the “Westphalian” state system.  As Emerich de Vattel reasoned in his foundational mid-eighteenth century treatise of international law, control of the entry of foreigners into the realm is a sine qua non of sovereignty, since in its absence, hostile armies could just walk in. In the intervening centuries, the vast expansion of travel and the proliferation of regulations pertaining to movement gave rise to elaborate institutions involving physical barriers and designated administrative checkpoints, coupled with standardized official documents identifying the nationality –more precisely expressed by the German version of the term, “state belongingness”--  of the border-crossers.
    Successive revolutions in transportation which radically lowered the cost of travel and rendered it accessible world-wide, together with the rise of international tensions at the turn of the twentieth century, rendered refoulement at the border increasingly inconvenient and risky, and prompted tne institutionalization of “remote control,” i.e., the requirement of obtaining permission to enter before embarking on the journey, by way of a visa entered in the passport by an official of the state of destination.  The generalization of what amounts to a projection of the country of destination’s borders into the world at large was vastly facilitated by the advent of air travel and has become a routine procedure in international airports world-wide.  Harnessed to its implementation, transportation companies function in effect as ancillary border police.
    A vast increase in international migration in the final decades of the twentieth century, attributable to generic world inequality, enhanced accessibility of long-distance transportation, the proliferation of human transnational networks,  as well as to a loosening of controls on exit in the ex-colonial and ex-Communist worlds, precipitated widespread calls throughout the world of affluent societies for the modernization and tightening of traditional border controls.  In response, the United States enacted the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), which mandates the elaboration by the federal government of an “Integrated Entry and Exit Data System.” In this perspective, it is evident that the attack merely had the effect of raising border control’s priority somewhat higher on the policy-makers’ agenda.
    Under contemporary conditions, border control entails a staggering task. In a given year, the INS inspects some 450 million persons entering by land and another 100 million entering by air or by sea, amounting altogether to approximately twice the entire population of the United States.   Leaving aside returning U.S. citizens and foreign daily commuters with multi-entry passes --for example, Canadian nurses in Detroit area hospitals and Mexicans factory hands in El Paso— the number of foreign entrants is in the neighborhood of 60 million. In 2001, the United States issued 7 million new visas to foreign nationals, of which some 800,000 were awarded to immigrants proper, about 600,000 to students, and most of the remainder to tourists or business visitors. About half of all documented entries consist of visitors covered by the Visa Waiver Program, currently including 29 countries –among them all of Western Europe and Canada-- whose nationals are considered unlikely to overstay or to engage in criminal activity.
    These considerations help place the security challenge in perspective. Overall, approximately 1 of every 500,000 visas awarded in the two-year period preceding 9/11 went to a hijacker or one of their suspected associates.  More precisely, some 120,000 visas issued to Saudi nationals, of which 15 went to future hijackers  –i.e., approximately 1 per 8,000, or .0001 percent. The one suspect in detention on charges related to the 9/11 affair is a Morocco-born individual who had acquired French nationality, and hence was admitted without a visa, making for an infinitesimal ratio of dangerous individuals among the millions of entrants who were visa-exempt.
    The difficulty of redesigning border control to provide greater security is exacerbated by the fact that the task is divided between two disparate segments of the American state, leading to protracted turf wars. Since visas must be awarded abroad, the function naturally devolves upon the Department of State, which elaborated a bureaucracy to that effect in the 1920s; however, control of entry at the border proper falls within the sphere of domestic policing, conducted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Consular officers who issue visas have very limited information about applicants, other than what the latter provide; although in recent years they gained access to an INS database with 5.7 million names of individuals with past immigration problems, this does not cover first-time applicants. The FBI has refused to open its own database to the INS or to the Department of State; but even if this were to change, it would prove of little assistance in detecting foreign terrorists since they are unlikely to have accumulated criminal records in the United States. Moreover, neither of the agencies that regulate admissions has access to data from intelligence agencies that monitor threats emanating in the outside world.
    The first legislative measure explicitly designed to offset the vulnerability exposed by the attack was the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” an unwieldy title elaborated to produce the bombastic acronym, USA PATRIOT Act. Signed by President Bush on October 26, it was initiated by Attorney General John Ashcroft one week after the attack in the form of a “Mobilization Against Terrorism Act” (MATA), which allowed for the deportation without a hearing or presentation of evidence, of any alien whom the attorney general had “reason to believe” would “commit, further, or facilitate” acts of terrorism.  While the proposal was being circulated, on September 17 Ashcroft published, without Congressional consultation or approval, an interim regulation that extended from 24 to 48 hours the amount of time for charging an alien in custody with an immigration violation, and deciding whether or not to release the person in question.  Two days later, he circulated a revised version of his proposal, which went further by mandating detention for any alien certified as a terrorist, even if the indidividual was granted relief from deportation.  The Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights warned that this would constitute a major change in immigration law.  Although both Democratic and Republican congressional leaders generally supported the proposals and indicated their eagerness to quickly enact adequate legislation, Senator Kennedy expressed concern about the limits placed on judicial review of detention and deportation, as well as about the loose standard for detention.  Some Republicans also voiced unease over the act’s impact on civil liberties. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy then introduced an alternative legislative package which did not include indefinite detention, to which he objected on the ground that it evoked the treatment accorded Japanese-Americans during World War II.
    Indefinite detention subsequently emerged as the central issue in both houses.  On October 3, the House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved (36-0) a compromise “PATRIOT” bill, which restricted indefinite detention and provided compensation for victims of 9/11 and their families.  The full House vote was scheduled for October 12. In the intervening period, the Senate passed its own compromise by a vote of 91-1, without formal consideration by any committee; the lone dissenter was Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.). Known as the “United and Strengthening America (USA) Act of 2001,” the Senate bill did not impose restrictions on indefinite detention and provided for more limited judicial review than the House’s. In addition, it proposed to increase patrolling of the U.S.-Canada border. The administration immediately began lobbying on behalf of the Senate version and persuaded Congress to negotiate a compromise between the two bills before the House vote, so as to avoid a possibly contentious conference session later on.  In the course of informal discussions, the House version was largely modified to conform with the Senate’s, except for retaining a six-month review of the detention of certified terrorists as well as the relief clause. This was approved on October 12 by a vote of 337-39. Speaking on behalf of a broad coalition of  humanitarian, religious, human rights and civil liberties organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union urged Congress to reject the measure altogether, charging that it was “based upon a false dichotomy: that safety must come at the expense of civil liberties.” Nevertheless, the two versions were quickly reconciled and overwhemingly approved, by 357-66 in the House and 98-1 in the Senate.
    Albeit beginning with an “expression of the sense of Congress” condemning discrimination against Arab and Muslim Americans, the new act expands the definition of terrorism, which was already a ground for denying admission and for deportation, to include use of any “weapon or dangerous device” with the intent to endanger persons or cause damage to property.  It gives law-enforcement agencies broader powers to pursue terrorists through search warrants and eavesdropping and provides for the possibility of holding aliens without charges for up to six months, with the possibility of renewal, subject to a review that put the burden of proof on the government to demonstrate that the alien’s release will threaten national security, or the safety of the community, or any person.  Judicial review is limited to habeas corpus review. With regard to border control, “USA Patriot” authorizes a tripling of the number of Border Patrol personnel, customs personnel, and immigration inspectors along the northern border,  as well as improvement in monitoring technology. It also grants INS and State Department personnel access to FBI files for the purpose of checking the criminal history of visa applicants.  Most important, it sets a two-year deadline for full implementation of the “Integrated Entry and Exit Data System” called for in 1996.
    While the process of elaborating new instruments of control got under way, immediate efforts to achieve greater security focused more narrowly on nationals of Arab and Muslim countries. On November 9, the State Department announced it would subject male visa applicants aged 16 to 45 from 26 nations in the Middle East, South Asia,  Southeast Asia, and Africa, to special scrutiny. Reflecting the administration’s determination to avoid closing the door more generally, this decision was criticized by advocates of tighter immigration on the holier-than-thou grounds that “There should be a consensus in the United States that we don’t want an ethnic- or religious-based immigration system.”  Concurrently, the State Department accelerated its pending review of six of the 29 countries whose citizens are exempt from visas, notably Argentina, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, and Uruguay, on the grounds that these countries reportedly have problems ranging from economic crises to passport fraud and theft.
    Student visas were singled out for special concern in the light of reports that most the terrorists were “intellectuals,” and of the by now notorious fact that such visas can be obtained by registering in a wide range of institutions, including proprietary schools that teach English –whose use in obtaining a visa is widely advertised in the New York subway-- or flying, and that at least one of the terrorists never registered at the school that certified him as a student. Despite early talk of suspending student visas altogether for an extended period of time, subsequent proposals were much more limited; however, institutions that certify foreign students will henceforth be required to report on their attendance. Although this does not entail new regulations, because as a condition of most education visas, foreign students sign a waiver permitting the institutions in which they register to provide to immigration officials the particulars of their course of study and their whereabouts, years ago the government asked administrators “to stop sending this information to Washington years ago because the I.N.S. could not scale the mountain of paperwork.” In the wake of 9/11, however, 220 institutions reported having been contacted by F.B.I. and I.N.S. agents to collect information about students from Middle Eastern countries. In late November, Senator Dianne Feinstein and three colleagues introduced a comprehensive visa-reform bill that would close “loopholes” for student and other temporary visas by imposing tight ntofication and reporting requirements; however, difficulties of implementation even existing controls made it unlikely that the situation would substantially change in the near future.
    As noted earlier, however, even if more effective visa screening procedures were to be successfully implemented, this would not resolve border leakage, whose order of magnitude can be inferred from the fact that in 2000, the Border Patrol arrested roughly one million people trying to sneak into the United States from Mexico, and 12,000 from Canada, including among the latter 254 persons from 16 Middle Eastern countries. That same year, U.S. agents also detained or turned back some 4,000 people at Canadian checkpoints alone. Estimates of the number of undocumented entries range very widely, but a reasonable suggestion is that, together with equally undocumented exits, they result in a net increment of about 200,000 illegal aliens a year. In the light of 9/11, the Census Bureau’s earlier cited estimates of the illegal population, released in late October, made for screaming headlines.  Although a subsequent breakdown by nationality indicated that half of them originated in North and Central America, with Mexico alone providing 44 percent, many headlines chose to emphasize that “115,000 Middle Eastern Immigrants Are in the U.S. Illegally.”
    While unauthorized entry from the south is an old story, initial announcements –subsequently disconfirmed-- that several of the hijackers entered surreptitiously across the Canadian border came as an especially frightening revelation, as that line hardly figures in American consciousness as an international divide: albeit twice as long as its Mexican counterpart, with 115 official entry points as against 41, the Canadian border is guarded by only 334 agents, as against some 9,000 in the south.  Although there is little illegal penetration into Canada itself, since its geographical configuration makes it nearly impossible to enter by land (except from the United States side), Canada maintains a generous visitor policy, much like its American counterpart, and in contrast with U.S. practice since 1996, does not detain asylum seekers, of whom some 10,000 disappear every year. Initial moves by the United States to tighten the border with existing federal personnel wreaked havoc with the regional economy, which depends on the comings and goings of hundreds of thousands of daily commuters and shoppers. To enhance security without creating unacceptable delays, the Michigan National Guard was assigned to patrol the U.S.-Canadian border on the Detroit side of the Ambassador Bridge.
    In its quest for a more permanent solution, the United States faces a choice between two approaches: either to elaborate a draconian apparatus of physical and administrative barriers along the longest stretch of relatively open international boundary in the entire world, or to incorporate the two countries into a jointly managed “security perimeter.” The first alternative not only runs counter a long tradition of trust and friendship, but is likely to be strongly opposed by powerful economic interests on both sides. However, the “joint security perimeter,” which is welcome by the Canadian security establishment including its present Minister of Immigration, raises the hackles of nationalists, notably Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, as yet another infringement on its sovereignty. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that if security concerns persist, as they are likely to do, the two countries will elaborate a North American counterpart of the European “Schengen” system, which originated as an underaking by the northern tier of European Union members plus Switzerland against the “leaky” Mediterranean South.  It is noteworthy that in the wake of 9/11, the Canadian government itself fast-tracked legislation to tighten security at points of entry, and it was reported that the courts would authorize racial profiling for this purpose.
    Although none of the identified terrorists is thought to have entered by way of the southern border, this is hardly comforting: for example, prosecution documents filed in a Federal conspiracy trial in El Paso in October 2001 provide evidence of the smuggling of 132 Middle Easterners into the United States from 1996 to 1998 by an organization headed by an Iraqi-born naturalized Mexican, and estimate that over 1,000 of them were brought in since the organization was launched in 1980.
    Overall, U.S. policy might be characterized as one of “draconian laxity,” involving routine enforcement known by all to be ineffective, punctuated by intermitent highly visible demonstrations of effective control of a circumscribed sector. This peculiar mix has been fostered by the protracted face-off between an economically-grounded laissez-faire alliance that encompasses a wide range of American employers –down to individual households eager to hire gardeners-- as well as the Mexican state and Mexican workers, arrayed against a politically-grounded regulatory camp driven by the identitarian concerns of non-Hispanic whites, championed by the California Republican party. One of the most surprising developments of the 2000 presidential campaign was the determination of George W. Bush to move away from his party’s traditional position on this matter.  Consequently, despite evidence of a worsening economic downturn, on the very eve of the attacks, the United States and Mexico were engaged in unprecedented high-level bilateral negotiations toward an innovative immigration program.
    Choices with regard to the southern border are similar to those facing the United States in the north. In the wake of 9/11, negotiations over immigration reform were variously announced to be “dead in the water” or “on the back burner”; however, in early November it was announced that they would resume at the end of the month. In addition, President Vicente Fox proposed the inclusion of Mexico along with Canada into a security perimeter that covers all NAFTA territory, and his national security official subsequently traveled to Washington prior to the discussions on immigration to meet with homeland security chief Tom Ridge on this matter.  Overall, former I.N.S. Commissioner Doris Meissner has suggested that while the creation of a “North American safety perimeter” is “the best answer to the difficulty of defending thousands of miles of remote territory,” this will take considerable time.  In the short term, she suggests differential priorities: on the Mexican side, steps to weaken migrant trafficking organizations that facilitate illicit entry by third-country nationals, on the Canadian side, broad information sharing extending to intelligence, as well as accelerating strategies and technologies for joint border enforcement.
    Beyond this, the events also triggered a spate of proposals to make the United States more secure against the enemy within by subjecting foreign residents to systematic verification.  This entails no mean undertaking, given a target population that amounts to 11 percent of the total, not including millions of temporary visitors.  Given the apparent source of the aggression, for many Americans, the distinction that matters most is between putatively safe immigrants and dangerous ones, identified as “Arabs” or “Muslims,” or “Middle Easterns” more diffusely –including South Asians. The size of these groups has itself become an object of controversy. It should be noted at the outset that “Arabs” and “Muslims” overlap only in part: until recently, the U.S. population of Arab origin was overwhelmingly Christian, as illustrated by former White House Chief of Staff John Sununu and current Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, as well as the scholar and public intellectual Edward Said. In keeping with the common practice of inflating numbers for purposes of ethnic representation, the Arab-American Institute claims that persons of Arabic ancestry total over three million; but ancestry responses on a recent census survey indicate just over one million, of whom the largest groups are Lebanese, Egyptian, and Syrian, most of whom live in the Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles metropollitan areas.  Since Islam is a religion and not a nationality or an ethnicity, “Muslim” does not figure among the origin categories recorded by the census, any more than does “Jew.” An April 2001 report issued by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C., states that 2 million are associated with a mosque, and estimates on that basis a total Muslim population of 6-7 million, of whom 33 percent are South Asian, 30 percent African-American, and 25 percent Arab.  However, the American Jewish Committee expressed concern that this would mean Muslims outnumber Jews, and that “it would buttress calls for a redefinition of America’s heritage as ‘Judeo-Christian-Muslim, a stated goal of some Muslim leaders.” It then commissioned a report of its own, which criticized the Mosque Report for unsound methodology and  concluded that there are at most 2.8 million Muslims in the United States.
    Interpretations of the current conflict as a confrontation between a purified Islam and a decadent Judeo-Christianity that corrupts Muslims creates an uncomfortable dilemma for some American Muslims, as the special relationship between the United States and Israel has long done for most Arab-Americans. In the present climate, opinions that deviate from the accepted range might be construed as tacit or even active support for terrorist undetakings, as indicated by news that Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha, imam of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York’s main mosque, who left for his Egyptian home two weeks after the attack, reportedly because his family was threatened, characterized the attacks as a Zionist plot. In the event, despite repeated injunctions by President Bush and other elected officials to avoid blaming groups wholesale, security measures taken by U.S. agents self-evidently entailed ethnic profiling. Under pressure from the press and civil liberties groups, Justice Department officials revealed in early November that they had detained 1,147 people in connection with the attacks, of whom over half had been released by the beginning of November; some were identified on the basis of circumstantial links with the attack, but many “were picked up based on tips or were people of MiddleEastern or South Asian descent who had been stopped for traffic violations of for acting suspiciously”. The total included 235 people detained for immigration violations, mostly Arab or Muslim men, of whom 185 were still in custody. One tragic case involved a 55-year old Pakistani overstayer, dismissed by the FBI as of no interest, who died of coronary disease while in jail awaiting deportation.
    On November 13, the Justice Department announced it would further pick up and question some 5,000 Middle Eastern men 18 to 33 who entered the country legally on student, visitor, or business visas since January 1, 2000. Although officials said the interviews were intended to be voluntary and the people sought are not considered suspects, the move was sharply criticized by civil liberties organizations as a “dragnet approach that is likely to magnify concerns of racial and ethnic profiling.”  In the face of mixed reactions by local police forces and halting implementation, the December 4 deadline was extended until the 10th; but subsequent reports indicated further lagging.  Although throughout the proceedings, the Justice Department resisted providing public information on its actions and their results, there were some indications that established procedural guarantees began to enter into play. For example, on December 19, a Philadelphia federal appeals court ruled that the government’s mandatory detention policy was unconstitutional and that each detainee was entitled to an individualized bond hearing, and civil rights organizations increasingly entered into the fray as well.   Although the round-up resulted in the incarcertation of many Middle Easterners for violations of immigration regulations,  mostly by way of overstaying, which was likely to lead to their
deportation, there were no indications that it produced any suspects related to the 9/11 events.  In January, the Justice Department announced a new effort to find and deport people who have ignored deportation orders, to begin with the tracking down of several thousand men from Muslim and Middle Eastern countries.
    Last but not least, the attacks have also triggered a spate of proposals to subject foreigners to some sort of mandatory identity documentation. Somewhat paradoxically, in the American situation, the absence of such documents for the general population, which is repeatedly hailed as an indication of the regime’s superiority over many of its European counterparts in the sphere of individual liberty, renders the imposition of such a requirement on aliens especially individious. Moreover, how is an agent setting out to verify identity and status to know whether the person in question is a U.S. citizen or a foreign national? Since “aliens” as a whole are not phenotypically distinct from “Americans,” we can anticipate the grossest sort of ethnic profiling, which would inevitably lead to numerous “mistakes,” provoking outraged reactions on the part of citizens, and hence negative political feedback.  The alternative would be to institute a universal state-issued identity document requirement.  While this is accepted as routine in a number of European democracies, and even viewed as a positive good from a civil liberties perspective because it provides some degree of protection against arbitrary police behavior, within the American context it would be perceived as profoundly altering the established balance between freedom and control.  Issuance of such a document by the federal government would be absolutely unacceptable to conservatives, and viewed with considerable suspicion by the mainstream.  In practice, the nearest thing to such a document is the state-issued driver’s licence, which might be expanded to non-drivers; however, this is based on proof of legal residence, often loosely established, rather than on citizenship, and would require the establishment of country-wide uniform standards.  Yet despite the normative and political difficulties involved, it is likely that some form of reliable biometrically-based identification will emerge in practice, probably on a voluntary basis, to speed up processing through the country’s proliferating public and private security checkpoints.
    In conclusion, the attack on the United States confirms what had already been evident from less spectacular manifestations of international terrorism, the growing importance of non-state actors in the contemporary world system.  Nevertheless, American responses are being cast primarily within a classically Westphalian framework: calls for a crash program to enhance each state’s capacity to police its territorial borders, to identify and neutralize foreign-origin enemies within, and to improve intelligence abroad.  Not only does the elaboration of obstacles to international movement clash with the objectives of economic globalization, but globalization in turn provides negative feedback for national security, since it brings about greater population diversity so that, whoever the dangerous group turns out to be, the targeted society is likely to have such people in its midst.  Evidence of vulnerability to such attacks enhances the value of protection while downgrading the social costs heightened protection imposes, notably on residents who share an ethnic origin with the putative terrorists or are thought to resemble them.  Moreover, interpretations of the conflict as an essentially cultural one, opposing Islamic fundamentalism to Western civilization, foster suspicion of Muslims of any kind, much as in the initial years of the Cold War, interpretations of the conflict as an essentially ideological one led many to impugn the loyalty of every left-winger.
    Nevertheless, a murderous attack did take place, and it is hardly unique; nor is the United States the only target. Moreover, while the military response it provoked disrupted the source network, it is evident that other such networks already exist and that others are likely to come into being.  Although over the long term, terrorism is subject to reduction by structural change, and containment of particular manifestations can be achieved by local intervention, overall, the danger will persist for the indefinite future.  Under the circumstances, the Westphalian approach still has a lot going for it, despite is archaic character; but it must be up-dated in the light of contemporary conditions.  Effective protection is not only desirable in itself, but its reality will reduce the appeal of blunt and counter-productive Buchanan-like solutions.
    To be fully effective, security must not be focused on geographical borders or on the home territory, but projected outward.  If there is to be a crash program, it should be directed at the improvement of America’s capacity to identify dangerous operations in the making abroad.  Contrary to the tendency of going it alone, the development of the appropriate intelligence capability requires cooperation with friendly states that have greater experience in the sphere under consideration. Such intelligence is in turn a prerequisite for the implementation of a more effective screening system for foreign visitors, which is fully possible under existing law. Much can be done to overcome turf wars and to improve the accessibility of relevant information.  Beyond this, rather than the border patrol, which has been the major beneficiary of recent investment in border control, priority should be given to consular staffing.  As Doris Meissner has pointed out, “Consular work –more a rite of passage than a job requiring substantive expertise—does not enjoy high standing in the hierarchy of responsibilities for U.S. diplomats. Expert senior officers are in short supply and are spread too thin. This model is not tolerable in the face of terrorism. Instead, visa work must be treated as a career specialty . . . If this work is not suited to Foreign Service careers and rewards, it should be done by a new civil service cadre dedicated to this mission . . .”.  In the same vein, more can be done to provide advance passenger information so as to improve the security of flights without jeopardizing processing speed.
    While vigilance is called for internally as well, nothing has emerged so far to suggest that extraordinary measures are required for this purpose.  For the time being the more urgent internal security task is to provide acequate protection to minorities victimized by the diffuse anger of the uninformed and insure that in their encounters with American law they are accorded the full benefit of the procedural rights that constitute one of the major foundations of democracy.  Immigrants who feel welcome rarely set out to destroy their new home.