Congress Members Eye U.S. Visitors Database

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), who has long battled illegal immigration, has joined the rush of lawmakers seeking to weed out foreign terrorists on U.S. soil.

Gallegly is a sponsor of the House version of a bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) to better track foreign students and others who enter the country on visas.

The sweeping legislation would require the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the FBI and other federal agencies to create a shared database that could update information about visitors to the United States.

Airlines, cruise services and buses that cross U.S. borders would have to enter passenger lists into that database prior to each departure. Federal staffing at borders would increase.

The bill also would mandate creation of “tamper-proof” visas, work permits, pilot licenses and other documents by using fingerprint or face recognition technology. And it would revamp the foreign student visa program, shutting out students from countries that support terrorism, mandating background checks and requiring universities to report to authorities any visiting students who stop attending classes.

“We haven’t had a tracking system,” Gallegly said. “Now the chickens have come home to roost.”

Through the years, immigrant advocacy groups have attacked Gallegly for taking hard-line positions, such as barring citizenship for American-born children of illegal immigrants and requiring annual searches to find illegal immigrants living in public housing.

Contacted Friday, officials from some of those organizations said they had yet to thoroughly study the anti-terrorism measure, which was filed last week.

Ventura County’s billion-dollar agricultural industry relies to some extent on undocumented workers, but Rob Roy, president of the Ventura County Agricultural Assn., said he had no objections to the legislation.

“I think Elton has the national security interest here,” Roy said. “There’s a lot of broad-based bipartisan support on these issues, and they’re a direct response to terrorism, not an overhaul of the immigration system in the United States.”

Besides, Roy added, “They’re mostly directed at people who come into the country using visas, so it’s not necessarily going to affect people coming into the country who aren’t in those categories.”

Gallegly said he doesn’t expect heavy resistance from immigration advocates.

“It’s going to be a lot more difficult for people to go out today and scream about being free-spirited,” he said. “There’s been about 5,000 people killed in New York City and a nation sitting on edge for almost two months now.

“Everything that happened that infamous day in New York City was a direct result of how our immigration system has failed,” he continued. “Anybody who tells you different is not being intellectually honest.”

Gallegly said he had no estimate yet on what the measure would cost. Last year, Justice Department officials said a requirement to merge INS and FBI fingerprint files would cost more than $200 million.

But a directive to combine the files came in response to a case in which a Mexican drifter wanted for murder was in and out of INS custody repeatedly without agents realizing he was wanted by the FBI.