INS reaches for high-tech silver bullet

So far, America's embattled immigration agency has taken two steps toward reform since raising the ire of President Bush and others last week by mailing student-visa extensions for two dead Sept. 11 terrorists to a Florida flight school.

First, the Immigration and Naturalization Service reassigned four top officials. Second, it's proposing a new version of its old high-tech solution for tracking foreign students – an Internet-based system that keeps real-time tabs on them as they get their visas, step off the plane in the US, and register at school.

The reassignments – in an agency known for its bureaucratic ineptness – were a show of public penance for a hugely embarrassing incident. The impact of any restructuring is yet to be known.

But turning to technology is common practice for anotoriously low-tech, paper-driven agency. It's also instituting, for instance, a new EZ-pass system on the Canadian border.

And it raises a fundamental question: Can technology help track the country's 32 million annual foreign visitors – and save the beleaguered INS?

It does seem plausible. After all, Wal-Mart traces hundreds of millions of products from warehouse to check-out counter – and Wall Streetblastsbillions of dollars around the planet daily.

But current and former INS officials say technology is a complicated blessing.

It does help the agency balance between the two roles it has to play with foreign visitors: efficient, helpful host, and tough, skeptical law enforcer.

But technology can also get short-circuited by politics – for instance when university groups lobbied Congress to delay a previous foreign-student tracking system.

And there's the INS's spotty technology record. One 1999 Justice Department probe concluded the agency " ... continued to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on automation initiatives without being able to explain how the money was spent or what was accomplished."

CONSIDER the saga of the foreign-student tracking system the agency is now touting.

Originally called CIPRIS – the Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating International Students – it was seen as a grand solution to the long-vexing problem of being able to track foreign students. During the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979, the INS caught flak for being unable to account for 9,000 of the 50,000 Iranian students in the US.

In 1997, the pilot computer data base was deemed a success.

But then the agency imposed a $95 fee on students, which sparked a lobbying campaign by foreign-student advocates, who said the program was expensive and unwieldy. The system sat in limbo until Sept. 11, 2001

Then, after several of the Sept. 11 terrorists used student visas, the idea was dusted off and revamped. Now called SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System), it uses the Internet to connect US embassy staff with border agents with academic registrars. Each inputs data on students, who are closely tracked.

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