INS Studies Plan Limiting Immigrants’ Work Areas

In an effort to keep immigrants seeking asylum from clustering in a few areas of the country, the government is considering the legality of issuing work visas limiting where they may be employed, the country’s top immigration official said Thursday.

The aim is to keep already overburdened cities, including many in California, from acting as an “economic magnet” to immigrants whose asylum applications are being processed, Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Gene McNary told reporters.

“We’re exploring, at the present time, the legal authority to issue work permits on a geographical basis, which is to say that if somebody gets a work permit it may not be (valid) anywhere in the United States,” he said. “It may exclude Miami or San Diego or areas that are overwhelmed at the present time.”

McNary, who took office last month, said he has asked INS lawyers if the idea would be legal and whether legislation would be necessary to implement it. “They may find that it’s impossible,” he said. “But something should be possible, even if legislation is necessary. It makes sense to me.”

Local and state officials--most notably in California, Florida and Texas, where immigrant groups are more likely to settle--have complained to federal authorities that the expanding influx of immigrants in their communities has placed an unfair burden on their citizens’ ability to pay for social services used by the immigrants. In the closing months of the Ronald Reagan Administration, federal officials detained Nicaraguan and other immigrants claiming asylum in an effort to dissuade others from following them to the United States.

The new policy, if implemented, would affect only immigrants who are claiming asylum based on persecution in their home countries, a process that may take a year or more to resolve. Duke Austin, senior press spokesman at the INS, said that about 100,000 people would be affected annually if the idea were implemented. He said that INS officials haven’t proposed any contingency plans to implement the idea. “We just haven’t gotten that far on this yet,” he said.

While many immigration experts and officials of immigrant rights organizations strongly objected to the detention policy, they were reluctant to offer an opinion on McNary’s proposal because it has not been formally announced. But some said the idea seemed unlikely to be practical, noting enforcement difficulties and the legality of limiting immigrants’ freedom of travel.

Francisco Garcia, director of immigration rights programs for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), said in Los Angeles that he welcomed the idea of moving away from the detention policy, but found problems with the idea of forcing immigrants to live in pre-selected places.

“We very firmly believe that anyone in the process of adjusting their status to live in this country should be entitled to an automatic work authorization,” he said. “But we should let the market dictate where people should work and live. I have grave concerns that this would prevent the free movement of people.”

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores said that while she had not seen the proposal and thus could not evaluate it specifically, she felt the idea of directing the immigrants to areas where more work seemed to be available for them “might be beneficial . . . . “

“I’m talking about areas where there are more jobs than people,” she said.

Wade Henderson, an official with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, said that McNary’s idea deserves study. But Henderson said his fear is that it would have “a troubling dimension. It could lead to potential restrictions on the right to travel, which would be a violation of their civil liberties.”

Dick Higgins, executive director of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a Washington-based public-interest law firm that seeks to reduce the levels of U.S. immigration, said he doubted it would be possible to enforce such a policy.

“On the practical level, I don’t see how you could enforce residence,” he said. “If a person is sent to Omaha, how could you stop him from moving a week later to Miami? I don’t know.”

Higgins said he saw merits in the idea because immigrants shouldn’t be huddled in one place, causing an unfair burden on a city’s social services. “But we’re set up as a country not to enforce residence status,” he said. “We don’t have an internal passport system like the Soviet Union.”

In the 1970s, immigration officials encouraged agencies resettling a flood of Vietnamese and Cambodians to find sponsors around the country willing to find jobs and apartments for the refugees. The voluntary plan, which was intended to distribute the impact of resettlement to all the states, often faltered as refugees left their original sponsors to seek warm weather and a community of their fellow countrymen.

McNary said that he had recently visited Miami and had seen that city coping with a large illegal alien population from Central America. He said that the medical, educational and other social services accept all the Nicaraguans.

“In Miami, if there is anything bigger than their brain, it’s their heart,” he said. “They don’t turn anyone away. Instead of saying, ‘We don’t want any more Nicaraguans in Miami,’ they say, ‘We want them all to have work permits.’ ”

He said he met with Florida’s two senators and community leaders who thought the work permit idea could be worked out as a solution to the problem. “We want to tell some people you can’t just go to Miami or San Diego . . . you can work in some other part of the United States,” McNary said.

Responding to McNary’s comments, Miami Mayor Xavier L. Suarez said in a prepared statement that he appreciated the commissioner’s willingness to help his and other cities. But he said he did not see “any basis for distinguishing one area from another, except perhaps in the quantity of (federal financial) input. I don’t see why the help cannot be apportioned according to level of need.”

Ken Klein, press secretary to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), said that the senator met with McNary in Miami on Dec. 2 but did not recall discussing the work permit issue “at length.” Klein said Graham thinks it is unfair for the federal government to detain immigrants in a few locations, but he added that the senator has not endorsed McNary’s idea.