Good Choice for Immigration

President Clinton’s nominee to be U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner, Doris Meissner, would have a hard job even if it just entailed running that beleaguered agency. Despite the efforts of some hard-working and dedicated employees, the INS for decades has been troubled--underfunded, spread too thin, plagued by poor morale and often rated by Congress as the worst-run agency in the federal government. Meissner has been nominated at a time when attention is again focused on immigration as a major public issue.

Some analysts are suggesting that--as the chief agency charged with enforcing immigration laws--INS may be as much a part of the problem as part of the solution. And they are proposing some fundamental reforms in INS--even breaking the agency up.

As far back as the Nixon Administration, the General Accounting Office was maintaining that INS’ major law enforcement unit, the U.S. Border Patrol, could do its job more efficiently as part of a single border management agency that would combine the Customs Service, Coast Guard and other, lesser-known agencies charged with guarding the country’s borders and ports of entry. That is still an idea worth adopting.

If relieved of law enforcement responsibilities, the INS could focus on the increasingly complex task of assessing immigration trends, comparing them to this country’s immigration needs and advising Congress on how many immigrants should be approved at any given time.

At a time when immigration to this country is an ever more sophisticated phenomenon--taking in not just Mexican migrant workers but political refugees from China and other trouble spots, not to mention potential terrorists from all over--the job of keeping track of it all will have to be done with more sophistication.

Meissner seems well-equipped to run INS at this challenging time. She has hands-on experience--gained as a top INS executive, and acting commissioner, during the Reagan Administration. And she has done her homework on the big immigration questions while director of immigration policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Somewhere on her daunting agenda Meissner must find time to ponder not just INS’ day-to-day problems but those big immigration issues as well.