Before everyone gets too excited….

Longtime readers of danieldrezner.com may wonder whether it’s possible for me to reconcile my pro-immigration, libertarian perspective with my concerns about homeland security. Annie Jacobsen favors racial profiling over political correctness if it means preventing terrorist attacks; many of the commenters believe a crackdown on immigration is necessary. My position is as follows:

1) Yes, homeland security is a serious issue that justifies greater expenditures and attention by the government — but my concerns, like Stephen Flynn, have much less to do with airports and more to do with the critical infrastructures that have received less attention — railroads, utilities, power stations, etc. 2) I’m far from convinced that techniques like profiling would actually do anything to prevent terrorist attacks (though it might soothe the jitters of travellers like Annie Jacobsen). The problems with profiling come through in this interesting paper by Samidh Chakrabarti and Aaron Strauss (thanks to Doug Merrill from A Fistful of Euros for the link). One key paragraph:

This transparency is the Achilles’ Heel of CAPS; the fact that individuals know their CAPS status enables the system to be reverse engineered. You… know if you’re carryons have been manually inspected. You know if you’ve been questioned. You know if you’re asked to stand in a special line. You know if you’ve been frisked. All of this open scrutiny makes it possible to learn an anti-profile to defeat CAPS, even if the profile itself is always kept secret. We call this the “Carnival Booth Effect” since, like a carnie, it entices terrorists to “Step Right Up! See if you’re a winner!” In this case, the terrorist can step right up and see if he’s been flagged.

The one counterargument to this is that terrorist networks would have difficulty making the necessary adjustment — i.e., finding someone who didn’t fit the pre-set profile. However, if Al Qaeda can recruit a John Walker Lindh, this doesn’t strike me as a terribly convincing counterargument. 3) The costs of blocking immigration cannot be lightly dismissed. The National Foundation for American Policy came out this week with an interesting study on how immigration contributes to America’s science and technology base. This is from their press release:

60 percent of the nation’s top science students and 65 percent of the top math students are the children of immigrants. A new study released Monday by NFAP also shows that foreign-born high school students make up 50 percent of the 2004 U.S. Math Olympiad’s top scorers, 38 percent of the U.S. Physics Team, and 25 percent of the Intel Science Talent Search finalists—the United States’ most prestigious awards for young scientists and mathematicians…. If opponents of immigration had succeeded over the past 20 years, two-thirds of the most outstanding future American scientists and mathematicians would not be here today because U.S. policy would have barred their parents from entering the United States,” said Anderson. Anderson made his comments at a news conference at the National Press Club to release the study’s key findings…. Today, more than 50 percent of the engineers with Ph.D.s working in the United States – and 45 percent of math and computer scientists with Ph.D.s – are foreign-born, according to the National Science Foundation.

Here’s a link to the .pdf report. This echoes a point made by Richard Monastersky earlier this month in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required). One highlight:

Last fall the president of the University of Maryland found himself doing something that none of his predecessors would have dreamed of trying. While on a trip to Taiwan, C. Dan Mote Jr. spent part of his time recruiting Taiwanese students to go to the United States for graduate school. “Can you imagine an American university president doing that?” he asks. In 1988 Taiwan sent more students to the United States than did any other foreign country, primarily to study science and engineering. But in the past decade, the flow of talented Taiwanese has started to dry up, and graduate enrollment has declined by 25 percent. “This is a new day we’re experiencing,” says Mr. Mote…. Even critics of the gloomy forecasts, however, say that America’s science-and-engineering machine faces significant challenges in a world much altered by global competition and increasing diversity at home. The landscape has changed markedly from the days when a group of technically trained white men put another group of white men on the moon. As the number of those men entering science has declined, national leaders have sought to bring more women and minorities into the enterprise. At the same time, the United States has come to rely on an increasing proportion of foreign talent — a strategy that could prove shortsighted if current restrictions on obtaining visas force international students and researchers to go elsewhere.

So there.