Thursday, October 11, 2001

Database could help combat terrorism
Possible infringement on civil liberties part of the cost of national security
By George Deutsch
Texas A&M Battalion

A note posted on the door of a California public school promised a massacre of Muslims in response to the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks and had five students’ names listed underneath.

Needless to say, the students went home.

This type of backlash has prompted an exodus of Arab students from the nation’s universities and a renewed government effort to track the nearly 600,000 international college students in the United States. For the students’ safety and the safety of the country, an international database should swiftly be compiled. To ensure the future safety of everyone, this is not a bad idea.

Efforts to track foreign-born students began after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. But political position left the database as only a pilot project in the American southeast.

Currently, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) does not know the whereabouts of most of the 570,000 international students in the United States.

The question remains whether such a database will help prevent terrorism and be worth the costs involved. According to the FBI, many of the suspects and material witnesses from the World Trade Center attack entered the country on student visas — a fact that has those who oppose student tracking clamming up.

Had the database been in place after the first World Trade Center attack, authorities might have been alerted to Hani Hanjour, a hijacker on the airplane that hit the Pentagon. Hanjour was allowed to enter the country to study English at the Oakland-based Holy Names College, but he never enrolled.

Certain considerations must be made. Though this database is the right move, it cannot be done for the wrong reasons. This must be a calculated decision done out of concern for safety and human life, regardless of whether that life was born in America or elsewhere. Americans must not let their patriotism and emotions lead to discrimination and racial profiling.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks, harassment and hate crimes have skyrocketed. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has reported more than 200 incidents of discrimination and the Council of American-Islamic Relations has seen more than 400 cases, all in the weeks following the attack.

And perhaps most disturbing is a recent Gallup Poll that states 71 percent of African-Americans and 57 percent of white Americans favor profiling people of Arabic descent. With such widespread contempt running rampant, the government has no choice but to keep an eye on the country’s international students, for the safety of everyone involved.

As an enlightened nation, the United States cannot sit by and allow racial hatred to be reciprocated by Americans. America must take whatever steps are necessary to ensure a disaster of this magnitude does not happen again. If creating this database means possible infringement on the civil liberties of a few, so be it. After all, to cure cancer, you have to kill a few mice.

George Deutsch is a columnist for The Battalion at Texas A&M University.
This column was distributed by U-Wire.