Border Patrol Gets First New Agents in More Than a Year : Recruits: A hiring freeze has depleted staffing in San Diego, an area of high attrition to begin with. However, the 49 new officers are a far cry from the 50% national increase once promised.

The U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego, operating at its lowest staffing level in four years, recently received its first new recruits in more than a year, officials say.

The action breaks a more than yearlong nationwide Border Patrol hiring freeze that supervisors say has strained enforcement along the almost 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border.

However, the number of agents hired--49--is a long way from the 50% increase in national Border Patrol staffing that was promised by the sweeping immigration reform legislation of 1986. And U.S. authorities in Washington say such a large-scale hiring push is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future, considering federal budget restraints. Officials do predict that staffing will increase nationwide by perhaps 10% this year.

Despite the modest hiring prospects, Border Patrol authorities in San Diego were gratified to break a hiring logjam that has seen resources stretched to the limit. More overtime and internal transfers have been used to fill responsibilities as hundreds of clandestine border crossers continue to seek entry into the United States daily from Tijuana.

“We’re very happy to have them (the new agents) here,” said Ted A. Swofford, a spokesman for the Border Patrol in San Diego.

The 49 new agents were assigned earlier this month to the San Diego sector, whose officers patrol the most popular illegal crossing zone in the entire border area, Swofford said. The sector has about 700 agents, not including the new hires. They patrol all of San Diego County and parts of Orange and Riverside counties. The region is the key corridor for hundreds of thousands of undocumented foreigners en route each year to Los Angeles and other booming immigrant job markets in the United States.

Border Patrol staffing has declined in San Diego at a time when the agency has an expanded roster of responsibilities, including additional involvement in drug interdiction and the investigation of employers who hire undocumented workers.

The problem of understaffing is seen as particularly severe in San Diego, which has long had one of the agency’s highest attrition rates--more than 10% annually--for a variety of reasons, including the area’s high housing costs and the stress of working along the nation’s most-trafficked border.

The 49 officers, Swofford said, are the first new agents assigned to the area since January, 1989. They are attending the agency’s 18-week training program near Brunswick, Ga. After the course, they will be sent back to San Diego, where they are expected to be posted mostly along the border with Tijuana.

The hiring freeze was imposed in late 1988 after former Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Alan C. Nelson had embarked on an ambitious hiring program in response to the 1986 immigration reform law. Increased border enforcement was billed as one of the law’s principal components, although observers say there was never sufficient congressional or White House commitment to finance a buildup.

Officials since have acknowledged that the INS, parent agency of the Border Patrol, over-hired without having enough money, leading to a budget crunch that resulted in the freeze.

The lifting of the freeze is part of what federal authorities hope will be a gradual expansion of the Border Patrol staff during 1990, said Duke Austin, an INS spokesman in Washington. INS Commissioner Gene McNary has expressed a desire to increase staffing nationwide, from the current level of about 3,900 agents to about 4,300, a rise of slightly more than 10 %.

“That’s a goal,” Austin said. “We’ve got to make some hard budget decisions.”