In yesterday’s Washington Post, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) echoes some of what I’ve been saying for the past two years:

Astonishingly, even after the Sept. 11 attacks the State Department adamantly refused to tighten visa procedures, waiting 10 months to begin interviewing all nonimmigrant applicants between the ages of 12 and 70, including Saudi citizens. Even today consular officers receive only a day or two of law enforcement training — hardly enough to even begin to learn the art of identifying security risks. Nearly three years later, it’s still far too easy for a terrorist to get a visa to enter the United States.

As important as it was for the Sept. 11 commission to examine the intelligence and air defense failures before the attacks, it is equally imperative to recognize that simple enforcement of immigration law might have prevented at least some of the attacks of that tragic day, and could stop new ones, if only a stubborn bureaucracy would admit its mistakes and fix them.

But let’s not be too hard on the State Department. The Department of Homeland Security, after all, is led by a man who supports exempting millions from immigration enforcement–a disastrous plan spearheaded by President Bush himself.

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