Charlie Peters called this one in following problems at the Department of Homeland Security reported on by the New York Times (and following a post from our own Matthew Blake which should be nominated for best 2009 immigration-related-blog-post headline).  Charlie says that “eight years after 9/11 they still don’t have a way to see when people’s visas have expired.  It’s just an open door to get into the United States with no way of knowing who’s here and who’s not.”

But there’s more from the author of How Washington Really Works:

What it reflects is that when they absorbed the Immigration and Naturalization Service into Homeland Security, they didn’t focus on what they needed to do:  improve those agencies.  Instead they got into this big desk-shuffling thing of the merger and wasted so much emphasis on the merger and not on making the agency better.

The confusion and disarray on how to fix this issue, captured by James McKinley and Julia Preston’s reporting, makes it clear that DHS and Congress have a lot more work to do if we’re going to fix this problem.

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