The Wrong Way

Nothing is wrong, in principle, with the Immigration and Naturalization Service's plan to register and fingerprint temporary visa holders in this country who hail from countries with a history of sponsoring terrorism or exporting terrorists. It makes sense for the government to have as precise an idea as possible of who is here and where those people are living. The assumption by some civil liberties groups that it is illegitimate racial profiling to attach stricter conditions for visas for nationals of some countries than for others seems wrong. Yet a basic sympathy with the INS's "special registration" project does not redeem the counterproductive manner in which the INS handled the first wave of registrations.

The initial deadline for registration - for those from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Sudan - was Dec. 16. Hundreds of people who showed up to comply, many of them in Southern California, were handcuffed and detained on minor immigration charges. Some of these people seem to have had merely technical problems and had already submitted paperwork to fix them. Somehow, a program intended to keep track of who was in the United States turned into another dragnet for trivial immigration matters unrelated to terrorism.

The bait and switch, which punishes and humiliates those who tried to follow the rules, can only undermine the purpose of the registration program. It's hard to imagine that this action will not discourage those with technical visa problems from showing up on Jan. 10, the registration deadline for people from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. If the government plays "gotcha" with the immigration laws, it might score a few deportations, but it risks guaranteeing that the database it is assembling remains woefully incomplete. That's a bad trade.

It also promises to further alienate the very communities whose aid in the domestic war on terrorism is most essential. Complaints about the roundup came not only from Arab American groups that have long been critical of American counterterrorism policy, but also from fiercely pro-American Iranian exile groups; the son of the former Shah of Iran, in a full-page ad in the Post last week, decried the "unfair targeting" of Iranian immigrants.

Legitimate law enforcement activity creates more than enough friction with Muslim communities, which understandably feel vulnerable in America after 9/11. Law enforcement simply can't afford to exacerbate this problem gratuitously.