Photo by Romel Jacinto/Flickr (Creative Commons)
Post-9/11 security legislation known as the REAL ID Act allowed the government to waive environmental laws and litigation blocking border fence construction near San Diego, which called for filling in a canyon with 1.5 million cubic yards of dirt. Photo by Romel Jacinto/Flickr (Creative COmmons)
Last May, after the announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, I published a short list of some of the most important ways in which the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that he masterminded radically altered the immigration landscape.
The legislative, policy and other changes that have occurred since are almost too numerous to list. Last month, the Migration Policy Institute released a report detailing some of the policy highlights, more than a dozen changes ranging from skyrocketing border and interior immigration enforcement costs to changes in the way we travel (for example, U.S. citizens must now present passports when returning by land, even if it’s from a quick day trip to Tijuana).
Beyond immigration policy, there have been legislative changes such as the still-active Patriot Act, along with less direct but powerful shifts in the nation’s immigration climate that have had led to enforcement-friendly policies and increasingly strict immigration measures at the state level. Less quantifiable, but important still, have been attitudinal changes, particularly toward Muslims, which continue to affect immigrants today.
I’ve updated this list detailing some of the key changes, taking in major post-9/11 shifts in immigration policy, legislation and beyond:
1) The end of INS, the beginning of DHS: The discovery that some of the 9/11 hijackers were in the country on visas that shouldn’t have been granted led to the end of the decades-old Immigration and Naturalization Service in early 2003. Until then, the agency had overseen all immigration functions from visas to border security. It was replaced by the much broader Department of Homeland Security.
Three sub-agencies within DHS were given authority over immigration matters: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (overseeing customs and border security, including the U.S. Border Patrol); U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, overseeing functions such as naturalization and the granting of legal residency; and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, which is responsible for immigration enforcement in the United States, oversees immigrant detention and deportation, and is responsible for enforcement policies such as Secure Communities and 287(g).
