When the State Department suspended visa processing for nationals of dozens of countries in early 2026, the reaction split almost entirely along partisan lines. Supporters framed it as long-overdue enforcement. Critics framed it as discrimination dressed up in national security language. Very few voices in either camp were asking the more fundamental question: does the vetting process itself work, and if not, what would actually fix it?
That is the question that matters from a security standpoint, and it is the question Michael Balboni addressed when he appeared on NewsNation to discuss the visa suspensions. His position was direct: the United States should invest in building a vetting process robust enough that people can come through it properly screened. Suspension without process improvement is not a security strategy. It is a pause that solves nothing structurally.
What the Debate Gets Wrong
Immigration has become one of the most polarized topics in American public life, which means that almost every policy conversation about it gets pulled into a political frame before the security substance can be addressed. The result is that the actual mechanics of how people enter the country, what screening occurs, where the gaps are, and what resources would close them get lost in the noise.
From a homeland security perspective, that framing failure is itself a risk. When the security community cannot have a clear, technical conversation about vetting because every statement gets processed as a political position, the underlying infrastructure does not improve.
The history here is instructive. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the success of the September 11 attacks depended in significant part on the ability of the hijackers to obtain visas and pass immigration inspection. The Commission found that all 19 hijackers were foreign nationals, many of whom obtained visas using forged documents, and that incomplete intelligence and screening enabled their entry despite flaws in their documents or suspicions about their associations. The Commission estimated that up to 15 of the 19 hijackers could have been intercepted or deported through more diligent enforcement of existing immigration laws.
That finding did not produce a simple answer about which nationalities to exclude. It produced a finding about process failure: inadequate intelligence sharing, insufficient interview requirements, a watchlist system that was not being used effectively, and consular officers who lacked the tools and training to detect what, in retrospect, were discoverable red flags.
The reforms that followed were substantial. After September 11, Congress overhauled the entire vetting system, replacing nearly the entire pre-9/11 security infrastructure and methods. Those reforms included mandatory personal interviews for most visa applicants, biometric data collection, integrated databases connecting State Department, DHS, and FBI records, and continuous vetting of visa holders after entry.
The system that resulted is genuinely more robust than what existed before 2001. That is worth acknowledging. What is also worth acknowledging is that the system still has gaps, and that those gaps are process gaps, not simply gaps that can be addressed by suspending entry from a list of countries.
Where the Gaps Actually Are
The security case for rigorous immigration vetting does not rest on the premise that immigrants are disproportionately dangerous. The data does not support that. It rests on a simpler premise: the United States operates legal entry pathways that, like any pathway into the country, are potential vectors for individuals with harmful intent, and those pathways need to be monitored and secured with the same rigor applied to other security systems.
The gaps that actually concern security professionals are largely operational rather than ideological.
1. Intelligence sharing between agencies remains imperfect.
One of the central failures identified in the 9/11 review was that the CIA had identified two of the hijackers as terrorism suspects years before the attacks but did not share that information with State Department visa screeners. Formal information-sharing structures have improved significantly since then, but the underlying challenge of ensuring that relevant threat information reaches the people making admissibility decisions in real time is a persistent operational problem.
2. Consular capacity is under chronic pressure.
Visa interviews are the primary point at which human judgment enters the screening process. Consular officers are responsible for making national security determinations on hundreds of applicants per day in some high-volume posts. Staffing shortages, backlogs, and inadequate training create conditions in which even a well-designed system underperforms. The suspension of visa processing for 75 countries was, in part, a response to the recognition that existing vetting procedures needed reassessment. The government undertook a wide-ranging reassessment of consular processing procedures, including fraud prevention practices, national security vetting, and public-charge review standards. But reassessment without investment in the personnel and infrastructure to implement improved procedures does not close the gap.
3. Continuous vetting after entry is resource-constrained.
The visa adjudication process is not a one-time clearance. It is designed to be an ongoing check that continues after entry. In practice, the capacity to sustain meaningful continuous vetting across the full population of visa holders in the United States at any given time is limited. Individuals can change, circumstances can change, and threat indicators can emerge after initial entry in ways the original screening did not anticipate.
4. Social media and digital presence screening is still developing.
The State Department has moved toward requiring visa applicants to make their social media profiles publicly accessible to facilitate vetting, recognizing that open-source digital information is a meaningful input into the screening process. The infrastructure to conduct this kind of screening at scale, and to do it meaningfully rather than as a compliance exercise, is still being built.
The Case for Process Investment
The position Michael Balboni articulated on NewsNation is one that security professionals across the political spectrum can recognize as sound: the answer to a vetting system with gaps is a better vetting system, not the elimination of the pathway.
Visa suspensions have legitimate uses. They create space to reassess procedures, address specific threat environments, and negotiate information-sharing agreements with countries whose cooperation is needed for effective screening. Presidential Proclamation 10998, which took effect on January 1, 2026, suspended entry for and visa issuance to nationals of 39 countries, framing the action as protecting national security through rigorous, security-focused screening and vetting procedures.
Used as a temporary tool to force procedural reform, a suspension can serve a purpose. Used as a substitute for process investment, it does not improve national security in any durable way. The countries whose nationals are suspended today are not the permanent universe of threat actors. Threat environments change. New actors emerge from unexpected places. A screening process that depends on a static list of excluded nationalities rather than genuine analytical and operational capacity will always lag behind the actual threat.
The more durable investment is in the infrastructure that makes vetting work: consular staffing and training, real-time intelligence integration, biometric and digital screening capacity, and the interagency coordination that ensures relevant threat information reaches decision points before entry, not after.
This is an argument that transcends the political framing. It is not a case for open borders or for closed ones. It is a case for competent borders, backed by the investment and operational discipline that competent security requires.
What This Means for Public Safety Leadership
For public safety executives, emergency managers, and security consultants, the immigration vetting debate has a practical dimension that gets little attention in the political coverage.
The individuals who enter the country through compromised vetting processes do not remain abstractions. They become part of the threat environments that local law enforcement, emergency management agencies, and private sector security teams have to manage. The quality of federal immigration screening is a direct input into the baseline threat environment at the state and local level.
That reality argues for public safety professionals to engage with the immigration vetting debate as a security issue rather than a political one, to advocate for investment in process rather than just restriction, and to ensure that local threat intelligence is flowing back to federal vetting systems in ways that improve screening over time.
Michael Balboni’s work through RedLand Strategies, and through his Emergency Management Planning and Crisis Communication practice specifically, is grounded in this kind of systems-level thinking: understanding where the gaps are, what investment closes them, and how to make the case for that investment to decision-makers who are often operating in a politically constrained environment.
Immigration vetting is not a solved problem. It is a security infrastructure challenge that requires sustained attention, adequate resources, and the political discipline to treat it as what it is: a national security function that the country either invests in properly or accepts the consequences of getting wrong.
RedLand Strategies provides security consulting, emergency management planning, and crisis communication services to government agencies, institutions, and private sector clients. Learn more about how RedLand can help your organization navigate complex security challenges.