Lax, outdates system at root of INS troubles
By Thomas Farragher a Nd Alice Dembner, Globe Staff, 9/30/2001
ith its borders so porous and its recordkeeping so unreliable, the United States has little ability to keep all criminals - or terrorists - out of the country and has no system to track them once they're here.
At least 16 of the 19 hijackers who carried out the worst terrorist act in US history on Sept. 11 exploited one of the most enduring tenets of American freedom: its open society. They crossed US borders holding legal papers granted to them by a US State Department