The Bush INS: Time for accountability.

'I knew a lot of folks who are naturalized citizens and immigrants," James Ziglar lamely responded when asked at a House hearing last March what specialized experience qualified him to serve as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. When he was nominated in the spring of 2001, the former business executive and self-described libertarian freely admitted that he had "no discernable experience in the field of immigration law and policy"; but his boyhood friendship with Trent Lott and a two-year stint as Senate sergeant-at-arms that won him powerful friends across the aisle were seen as sufficient qualifications for the new chief of the beleaguered INS.

That was then. Ziglar assumed his post with enthusiastic bipartisan support a month before 9/11 -- and this August announced his intention to resign as INS commissioner by the end of the year. What happened in between was that the lax and inefficient INS had become a national- security problem.

When 19 visa-holders hijacked those planes, they did serious damage to the libertarian case on immigration. Overnight, James Ziglar's resolve to make the INS a friendlier and faster dispenser of green cards made him the wrong man at the wrong time. In more complacent times, he had seemed a fitting choice for the immigration-friendly Bush administration and its supporters in the business community who have no interest in cracking down on the labor pool of an estimated 7 million illegal aliens. Ziglar also satisfied the demands of political correctness by declaring that his top goal would be to ensure that the INS treated its clients with "respect and dignity, and without any hint of bias or discrimination." At the confirmation hearing, then-majority leader Tom Daschle joined Trent Lott in heaping praise on the nominee before declaring, "Amen, let's vote."

After 9/11, though, the libertarian commissioner didn't have a prayer. And his failure is not his alone: James Ziglar's uncontroversial appointment yet rocky tenure at the INS is symbolic of policymakers' schizophrenic treatment of the agency. Members of Congress typically castigate the INS for being insufficiently client-friendly, only to pounce opportunistically when the agency allows a bad actor, like sniper suspect and illegal alien John Lee Malvo, to slip away. There was no disagreement when Ziglar told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "I'm not one who likes the idea of people being detained unless they're convicted of a crime or a danger to society."

When notifications of approved student visas for two of the 9/11 hijackers arrived six months after the attacks, and a year and a half after they were requested by the flight school, liberals were outraged. Sen. Ted Kennedy, who is generally preoccupied with loosening visa requirements, angrily announced that "a flawed information-collecting and tracing system that allows potential terrorists to enter or remain in the United States" could not be tolerated.

Conservative critics of the INS are inclined to blame its problems more on Kennedy and his colleagues than on the agency itself. In addition to the bureaucratic mindset that it shares with other government bureaucracies -- the INS resisted automating its files 25 years ago to preserve entry-level jobs -- the agency is crippled by disdain for its mission on the part of those responsible for overseeing it. These critics believe that its dysfunctions -- including low morale and high turnover among the agency's 33,000 employees -- are the product of the inconsistent policies of successive administrations and Congresses.

These mistaken policies have serious consequences. Mark Krikorian, ...