INS Is Found Bogged Down by New Roles : Immigrants: Study says the war on drugs and inconsistent enforcement strategies hinder agency’s effort to keep businesses from hiring illegal aliens.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s drive to keep employers from hiring illegal aliens is being handicapped by the demands of the war on drugs, by inexperienced agents and by inconsistent enforcement strategies, according to an extensive private study released Thursday.

The wide differences in enforcement policy are demonstrated when some INS offices, including the Los Angeles office, concentrate on handing out small fines of $100 to $1,000, while a Chicago office is levying average fines of $45,545, the study reported.

Michael Fix, a co-author of the study, concluded that the INS was probably doing fairly well, given that “they’ve been hugely undermanned and decentralized.”

“Considering what they’re up against, you have to give them a pretty good passing grade so far,” said Fix, a senior analyst at the Urban Institute, a social-policy research organization.

However, the study, co-authored by Paul Hill of the RAND Corp., found sweeping shortcomings and inconsistencies in enforcement of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which makes it illegal for businesses to hire undocumented workers.

“The message here is you can’t keep assigning things to the INS,” Fix said. “Now they have to be not just police but regulators of businesses. They have to police employment at 7 million farms, and then they’ve got to fight drugs too? Look at how many things this agency is doing. It’s too much.”

Citing gross inconsistencies in policy, Fix said that INS offices in Los Angeles, New York and Miami have largely “quit the raid and apprehension strategy” in favor of education and regulation. However, border-area offices continue to rely more on police-style sweeps of workplaces likely to hire immigrants.

While some INS offices are handing out mostly small fines for fraudulent paper work--an approach intended to punish as many employers as possible--others are going after a few major offenders.

“When you have a range of 850 bucks (an average fine at the San Antonio office) to $45,000 (in Chicago), that kind of wakes me up,” said Fix, noting that such inconsistencies suggest that the INS has no overall policy to guide each office.

Among other problems cited in the study:

--The 1986 legislation authorized doubling the number of INS investigators but too many of those hires are inexperienced in investigations. In one employer-sanctions unit in the Los Angeles office, for example, the entire staff was made up of new recruits who “cannot understand, much less enforce, the law,” according to one INS source quoted in the study.

--The INS gets little support from U.S. attorneys in taking employers to court--in part because agents aren’t building strong cases, but also because it is hard to prove that employers are knowingly hiring illegal aliens. The study cited “obvious enforcement problems presented by the easy availability of false documents.”

--The INS and Border Patrol have failed “to develop strong investigative capabilities.” The failure means agents aren’t able to keep tabs on the employment practices of most immigrant-dependent firms, which “are small, mobile and in industries with low barriers to entry.”

--The INS’ drug-fighting initiatives have occupied some of the agency’s most talented investigators. Only two of the offices surveyed--in Los Angeles and Chicago--placed first priority on getting illegal aliens out of the workplace through employer sanctions. Other offices--in New York, Miami and border areas--devoted most staff time to “criminal aliens,” many of whom were involved in the drug trade.

--Enforcement cutbacks were forced by a “budget crisis” wrought in part by a surge of immigrants into Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.

Duke Austin, chief spokesman for the INS, said the agency will “take a hard look” at the study’s findings.

The 109-page report is part of the Santa Monica-based RAND Corp. and the Urban Institute’s continuing joint study on immigration, funded by the Ford Foundation.