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CounterPunch
December
21, 2002
Big Brother
in a Shrinking World
INS Special Registration as Set Up
by A-A FARMAN-FARMAIAN
If this is homeland security, pity the homeland.
I went out to 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan
last Monday to meet a government deadline for 'Special Registration'.
This is a new program set up to track all aliens of dubious descent
in the US, with the first target group consisting of nationals
of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Sudan. Special Registration is
one incarnation of the new America, the America of big, centralized,
secretive data-mining. Everything about it is shamelessly Orwellian.
There are the usual euphemisms; what exactly is 'special' about
this registration? There are plenty of ominous acronyms; the
program is part of The National Security Entry-Exit Registration
System or NSEERS (get it? those who see?). There is the inescapable
drive towards a complete, chip-driven scrutiny of every detail
of your life: the information gathered about me during special
registration will eventually become part of the Total Information
Awareness program which seeks to develop massive database and
profiling technologies that could analyze things such as, well,
me. And whether I am dangerous or not. Finally, the whole thing
is supposed to be integrated into and managed by a faceless,
high-tech behemoth: the Department of Homeland Security, which
will swallow up 21 different federal agencies and run them all
on an initial budget of $35.5 billion. With all this, the mom-and-pop
civic organizations that built American democracy from the ground
up seem like figments of the quaint and idle imagination of French
counts. But does that mean Big Brother is really threatening?
The DHS is the kind of high-tech federal
mammoth that sends libertarians retreating into dim basements,
issuing alarms about 1984 in 2002. So naturally I walked into
Federal Plaza worried about robotic, unemotional officers using
cyber gear to plug into my DNA, parse my spiritual and political
beliefs, and track my browsing habits. I came out less worried
about Big Brother and more worried for Uncle Sam. It turns out
his bureaucratic mammoth is just wooly and clumsy and stumbling
about in the dark, even with Intel inside, an Oracle-driven database,
electronic fingerprinting and face recognition software.
At 8 a.m. Monday morning everything at
26 Federal Plaza is fine. We're greeted by a cordial staff. A
white liberal type uses a competent, practiced accent to call
us by our first names as though he's known us, or at least our
types, for years. The comforting nudge-nudge jokes come from
a kind blond woman with white skin and cheeks so red someone
must have smeared raspberries on them. The one South Asian and
one black Caribbean are the only employees wearing ties. In short,
this is the catalog image of multi-racial America, gentle and
smiling, quite different in essence from what you get at border
crossings.
There are a few give away signs that
this is a fledgling operation. The procedure is ad-hoc rather
than routine, there is no guard telling you to take a number,
some absentee names are called out three different times by three
different staff members. But all in all, there is room for optimism.
The seats are new. People enter with freshly ironed trousers
and crisp manila envelopes carrying their documents. The shining
silver web-cam style cameras on minipods seem both efficient
and unthreatening. Everyone sits and cranes their necks eagerly,
confident that they'll be called next and we'll all be done by
noon at the latest. After all, none of us in here have a record
to worry about.
In fact, most people in here are from
an ironically different target group. The INS waiting room is
filled with yarmulke-wearing Middle Eastern Jews, mostly Iranian,
many of whom escaped and have been living here for several years
without properly regularizing their status. An old bearded man
with a black vest reads the Torah, moving his lips in silence.
Guys on cell phones are canceling business appointments. A young
man is studying for his finals. There are some Armenians too.
A couple of Sudanese, some Syrians. What we all share in common
is the dawning realization that nothing is happening.
At mid-day we are told the computers
are down. The computers had been down on Friday too. And it's
not just here. As one staff member explains, if the system's
down here, it's down everywhere, all across the nation, at airports
and INS offices, from LA to Miami. So nothing can be done about
it. The system is somewhere else, in some other special program,
in a place where they do things such as data-mining. Some people
have been waiting for two days to register and it looks like
they are headed for three. The system. Is down.
If only in all this they'd catch one
or two big-time terrorists, it would make it all seem worthwhile.
Instead, they are rankling the Canadians and taking in visa over-stayers.
In California, hundreds of people with immigration irregularities
were detained. (A Reuters headline called them all Muslims. Is
that true? Can we can the INS officials, Reuters reporters
- even know the difference?) Many of these people had been in
the US for years, working, sending their children to school,
the usual immigrant story. They had failed to regularize their
immigration status sometimes due to government backlogs
and negligence. The troubling aspect of this is not that these
people were taken in for violating laws. That is what states
to do and it has been happening over the years to poorer Latin
American workers caught in INS raids. The troubling part is that
in this case, the government is not giving out any real information.
Still, all the analogies to the internment
of Japanese during WWII may be stretching it. For one thing,
this is not a blanket policy, covering all nationals of a certain
origin irrespective of status. In this case, citizens and permanent
residents are not part of the current dragnet - if I had a green
card, I'd have been spared this ordeal - and those whose status
is bureaucratically unblemished don't appear to run into problems.
In fact, Iranians have been in the streets protesting the INS
practices. There have been obvious concerns about racial profiling
and discrimination, but all modern immigration systems are based
on discrimination amongst classes of people who are judged to
make good citizens (rich, educated) and others who would make,
literally, poor citizens. So what are we suddenly protesting?
What exactly is the basis of the discrimination? It's not ethnic
because the countries on the list are ethnically diverse. It's
not religious because there are many non-Muslims on the list
(see Jews, above) and many Muslims who are not. It merely picks
out people who were born in certain places: the five countries
I mentioned; another thirteen, ranging from North Korea to Algeria
and Morocco to Eritrea, in an expanded second group with registration
deadlines in mid-January; and a third after-thought of a group,
consisting of US allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, whose nationals
have until February to come in and feel special.
That, actually, is one of the program's
real problems. I am, by choice, a Canadian citizen; by accident,
a national of Iran, which as it happened is where I was born.
I have to go and register because according to the new special
notion of citizenship and nationality, my allegiance to an accidental
place of birth trumps my allegiance to a country I chose consciously.
To be fair, human beings have the odd tendency to feel abnormally
strong allegiance to their place of birth, hence the term homeland
and, of course, the desire to give it security. But the US requirements
also trump the sovereignty of other states in the international
system, whose citizens are now being treated differentially according
to criteria imposed by the US. This transforms the post-enlightenment
secular idea of citizenship into a post-911 fossil. Someone should
remind us again that North America was founded on the idea that
origins are not destinies, a person's place and station of birth
are not equivalent entities. The US law's antediluvian notion
of origins is absurd today. We are living in a world where
to take one among the countries on the second list more
people of Lebanese origin (12 million) live outside than inside
the country and the largest Lebanese communities abroad are in
the Ivory Coast (70,000). We are living in a country the
US where the second language of Beverly Hills is Farsi.
In this world, origin and destination are cleft apart, making
an unpredictable axis.
Take the origins of all those who have
been arrested or killed for terrorist activities since 911. How
many were Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians or Libyans? It seems that
there have been more U.S. and U.K. nationals in the rank and
file of al-Qaeda. So why is that first group there at all and
why is it first? Why were Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, political
friends of the US, added recently as an afterthought when such
a great number of the rank and file came from these countries?
And how about Egypt? Apart from providing al-Qaeda's top leadership
and much of its rank and file, Egypt is distinguished by being
the second largest recipient of US aid after Israel. Whatever
the purpose of the selective registration process, its priorities
seem not to add up to an efficient bulwark against potential
terrorists. It either has other unknown motives or it is the
voodoo solution of an administration of witch doctors lost and
frightened in the complicated, uncontrollable world of globalization.
Purge some ghosts, purify the air, mark the border between sacred
and profane.
By Monday afternoon, the system in practice
was faring no better than the policy in principle. The computers
were still down. All those heads extended on craned necks had
slumped. Four or five people were asleep. Hairdos were ruffled,
the manila envelopes crinkled. A couple was playing cards. Some
had spread out to eat. A worrying number started to mumble out
loud to themselves. Every time a staff member appeared, he or
she was mugged with questions, solicitations, pleadings. But
they themselves were desperate. Their faces said we don't want
to be here anymore than you do. And that actually brought us
closer, helpless people on different sides of the surveillance
cam. They eventually decided to run things manually and recruited
help from floors up. We were now back in the analog age, being
fingerprinted with ink and photographed with a Polaroid. While
the terminals sat idle, files and photographs piled up. Then
were lost. I had to dig mine out myself. People stood up from
their seats, milled around in disgruntled groups, called out
for help.
"It's chaos," reported one
observant staff member.
"Smile," said the Asian man
with the Polaroid.
The closest thing I'd experienced to
26 Federal Plaza at about 3 p.m. was the Mugama'a at 1 Tahrir
Square in downtown Cairo. In a neo-fascist building dating to
the days of Nasser, this was a crumbling Egyptian bureaucracy
in charge of citizen records. On the seond floor, there was an
office in charge of registering visitor entries and exits. The
American version in Manhattan had nicer seats and a smoke-free
environment.
When I finally left the federal building,
at four o'clock, I had been specially registered twice. The next
day, when I was leaving the country, I had to go through the
INS again and check out. Not surprisingly, I was not to be found
in The System. So I was registered for the third time. I don't
know what will happen when I return.
In the 475 pages of the Homeland Security
legislation, which according to the New York Times will take
decades to decipher, there is great emphasis on big centralized
operations of which the above is version 1.0. There is no doubt
that currently, the INS has trouble handling the 500 million
people and 100 million vehicles that cross the US border annually.
According to a discarded Daily News I found at 26 Federal Plaza,
an FBI operation testing the borders recently managed to slip
in some very dangerous missiles and chemical agents through the
ports. This will undoubtedly be used to justify more appropriations
and more ghost busters. But the problem is not with more, it
is with what you are willing to do with more. Only 2% of shipping
containers entering through commercial ports get inspected. That
figure has been the same pre- and post-9-11. What goes unmentioned
even by the Daily News is that trade and profit are
the highest priorities. No one wants to disrupt the flow of commodities.
Almost $900 billion worth of goods enter the US every year and
that can make for a lot of Departments of Homeland Security.
Still, defenders claim that an integrated
customs, police, CIA, FBI, immigration, etc. database will help
the country manage things. Visa over-stayers are the expected
victims. They claim that early glitches are normal, database
crashes are growing pains. Within the next few years, this thing
will be as dependable as a blind oracle.
The first major theorist of modern bureaucracies
was Max Weber. He explained the technical efficiency and rational
superiority of its administrative methods, though he lamented
the loss of personal relationships and the falling away of the
sacred, of some sort of ethical principle, in determining outcomes.
He witnessed modern bureaucracy in its early stages and did not
foresee how rationality can betray itself and how an accidental
glitch within a supposedly infallible system can make life hell
for regular folks. That kind of vision fell to a later generation
and the second great theorist of bureaucracies, Franz Kafka.
Kafka came too early to see yet another kind of bureaucracy.
The totalitarian state became Orwell's territory. There is another
kind still, which for lack of a more evocative label can be called
a third world bureaucracy. This kind of bureaucracy was set up,
in part, to meet the exigencies of the state as modern state.
Its existence was proof that the government was doing something,
namely governing, managing its citizens. They were inundated
with data which was of little use to them. In the midst, information
that may have been of use to them got lost in the data glut.
In the actual offices, there was eternal waiting, and lots of
personal chatting and a complicit fatalism between the citizen
and the bureaucrat. There was also chaos. That was the Mugama'a
in Cairo. The big new US bureaucracy in this shrinking world,
could become Orwellian while producing a safer nation. More likely,
it will do little to make the country safer, but will make it
seem as though something is being done. The result might be a
kind of third world bureaucracy: personal, inefficient and frustrating,
just like what I saw on Monday.
A-A Farman-Farmaian is a Canadian writer, published in The Toronto
Globe and Mail, National Post, Yahoo! Internet Life, Saturday
Night, Pacific News Service, Al-Ahram Weekly and other magazines
and newspapers. He can be reached at: boutan@att.net
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