Study Urges Creation of Single Agency for Immigration Issues

America’s growing immigration problems require the creation of an independent agency that would absorb the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the visa-granting and refugee responsibilities of the State Department, according to the results of a three-year study of immigration policy commissioned by Congress.

In a report scheduled for release in July, the Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development plans to recommend that “the scattered government structure now handling immigration and refugee matters be centralized into a new Agency for Migration Affairs having the status of an independent entity, such as the Environmental Protection Agency.”

The draft report makes clear the commission’s belief that the patchwork of immigration policy-making and enforcement now fragmented among half a dozen agencies is too inefficient, understaffed and ill-trained to cope with the flood of foreigners here.

INS figures indicate that about 10 million immigrants and refugees were legally admitted to the United States in the 1980s, the largest single decade of immigration in U.S. history. At least twice that number are estimated to have entered illegally.

The new agency, the report says, should have “overall leadership and direction for U.S. immigration policy” and be headed by “a single, high-level official, reporting directly to the President.”

It calls for the new entity to assume control of the operations and personnel of the INS, except for the Border Patrol, and assume control of the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, except for assistance to U.S. citizens abroad. It also would control the department’s Bureau of Refugee Programs and the asylum unit of its Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs.

The proposal seems certain to spark objection from the Justice Department, which has policy control over the INS, and the State Department, which would lose a substantial share of its current authority and personnel. Sources familiar with the report said they expect a strong effort to eliminate or water down the new agency proposal in the still-tentative draft of the report.

The 12-member bipartisan commission was established by Congress in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.

Its 104-page report focuses most of its attention on ways to help economically distressed countries provide jobs and other incentives that will keep their people at home. It makes an especially strong argument for the United States to provide trade preferences, even if that involves “immediate undesired results” such as the export of some domestic American industries to countries with low labor costs.