INS Chief Backs Authorization Card for Work : Aliens: McNary says the documents would deter illegal immigrants and lessen bias against minority job applicants.

Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Gene McNary said Wednesday that requiring all working-age Americans to carry an “employment authorization document”--denounced by critics as a national identity card--would slow employment of illegal aliens and reduce discrimination in enforcing immigration law.

McNary, speaking with reporters at INS headquarters, said two representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has strongly opposed such a requirement, displayed an “open mind” about the concept during a meeting with him two months ago.

But the two men, Wade J. Henderson, associate director of the ACLU’s Washington office, and Lucas Guttentag, director of the ACLU’s immigration task force, said McNary had provided “a complete mischaracterization” of their reaction and that they remained staunchly opposed.

McNary discussed the controversial card amid reports of sharply increased apprehensions of illegal aliens along the U.S. border with Mexico. There were 89,925 such apprehensions in February, up 35,909 from a year earlier and 4,495 more than the January total.

The INS chief attributed the increase to the widespread availability of fraudulent identity documents and the failure of U.S. policy to stress prohibitions against illegal entry of aliens into the United States. A counterfeit-proof employment authorization card would help combat the fake ID problem, he said.

McNary said that requiring employment-age individuals to carry an official authorization document “would greatly enhance our ability to enforce employer sanctions (for hiring illegal aliens) and give us the ability to eliminate discrimination” in enforcing the law.

Critics of current immigration law contend that it causes discrimination against legal immigrants and other minority group members because employers fear they could be illegal aliens and are reluctant to hire them.

But McNary stopped short of endorsing a nationally required work card, an idea that has proved highly controversial in the past, saying “it’s up to others to take the initiative.”

The General Accounting Office, the auditing arm of Congress, is expected to issue a report soon citing a national work card as one possible response to shortcomings in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The new law created employer sanctions and provided amnesty to certain illegal aliens already in the United States.

McNary said he would prefer that responsibility for a work authorization card rest with the Social Security Administration, not the INS. “Social Security is more job-related,” he said. “We’re alien-related. We’re talking about a card that goes beyond aliens.”

McNary said that the two ACLU officials met with him after he first took office to discuss a number of issues and that they expressed their opposition to an employment authorization document just for aliens--an opinion that he said he shared.

“They (the ACLU officials) took the position it may be that it’s more important to eliminate the possibility of discrimination than try to hang on to a sense of privacy, when everybody knows that’s gone by the boards,” McNary said.

But Henderson said that he and Guttentag took no such stand.