Tougher Rules, ID System Planned, INS Chief Says

The Clinton Administration, hoping to retake the initiative on immigration reform, plans to be tougher about imposing sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants and is moving toward embracing a controversial national computer identification system to help curb illegal immigration.

Top Administration officials are still debating whether a central registry or an even more controversial national identity card would be the better tool for combatting illegal immigration in the workplace.

But Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said Monday that the Administration expects to make a decision and announce its new approach by the end of this month.

She said that the Mexican economic crisis raises “very ominous” problems for the United States and makes tougher enforcement of employer sanctions even more crucial as a means of stemming the flow of illegal immigrants crossing the border in search of work.

“You have to have a credible deterrent at the workplace,” she said.

Meissner, interviewed by Times Washington Bureau editors and reporters at a breakfast session, declined to predict the outcome of the debate within the Administration. But a senior Administration official, who insisted on anonymity, said that “we’re moving in the direction” of a national registry as proposed in September by a bipartisan commission appointed by Congress.

Republican congressional leaders also spoke out on the mushrooming immigration issue Monday.

Sen. William V. Roth Jr. (R-Del.) called criminal immigrants “a serious and growing threat to our public safety” and introduced legislation to simplify and strengthen the process for deporting them.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) also raised the possibility of requiring sponsors of legal immigrants to be financially responsible for them for as long as five years after they arrive in the United States.

At a press conference, Gingrich said: “I have no problem saying, ‘If you’re going to sponsor somebody to come to the United States, we’re prepared to make that sponsorship real and binding, and you really do have a financial obligation. . . . ‘ I think probably for three to five years.”

A proposal by the Administration for development of a central verification system would be strongly opposed by some immigration and civil rights groups on grounds that it would increase discrimination and violate privacy rights.

Meissner called such concerns inevitable and legitimate but said that they could be minimized by technological advancements that make it possible to arrange computer information so it is not contained in a single databank.

“There are multiple databases off of which the user can get one answer. But the managers of the databases--the government, the agencies that are responsible for them--do not have all of the linkages,” she said.

A proposal for a national registry also undoubtedly would run into heavy opposition in Congress, where employer sanctions have never been popular.

Meissner noted that Congress funded the INS “very generously” last year, increasing its budget by 25%--the biggest single increase in the agency’s history. But, she added, “the one area that got cut back severely was on employer sanctions.”

“I think that is because there is no real system that people believe in--politicians or employers--for doing employer sanctions appropriately,” she said. “That gets to the issue of identifiers and the degree to which we have a better way for employers to know who is legally in the country and who they are allowed to employ. That, I think, is going to be a huge debate in the Congress.”

Although there are about 7 million employers in the country, the INS has fewer than 1,000 people devoted to enforcing laws against employment of illegal immigrants. As a result, the agency relies heavily on voluntary compliance.

In addition to congressional resistance to any massive registry of persons eligible to work in the United States, some ethnic, immigrant and civil rights groups argue that a registry would heighten discrimination and intrude on privacy. Furthermore, such a step could lead to what they consider an even more onerous development: creation of a national identity card.

The proposal for a computer registry was the centerpiece of a report by the Commission on Immigration Reform to improve enforcement of a 1986 law prohibiting the employment of illegal immigrants. After the report was submitted to Congress more than three months ago, former Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Tex.), appointed to chair the panel by President Clinton, urged the Administration to act immediately on its recommendations.

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