PERSPECTIVE ON THE INS : Break Apart a Problem Agency : It needs creativity, not tough new laws. Separate the main components: immigration and naturalization.

Pity the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Once the poorest and most demoralized agency in the federal government, INS is finally getting some respect--and money--from Congress. But it’s also getting criticized as much as ever for the things it can’t get quite right.

That’s because its 20,000 employees, especially the 4,700 agents of the U.S. Border Patrol are literally on the front lines dealing with illegal immigration, a hot-button issue that every politician from Washington to San Diego wants to look tough about. And when they can’t look tough bashing immigrants, they try to look tough by bashing INS for not being tough enough.

Last week, for example, some members of Congress demanded a Justice Department probe of charges by the INS employees union that agency officials in Miami “purposely and actively” deceived members of Congress on an inspection tour by ordering agents to work overtime during the visit and clearing cells of immigrant detainees so the facilities would not look overcrowded. Revealingly, the visitors were not from a committee on immigration, but a special “task force” on immigration, no doubt looking for some easy publicity.

Having reported on INS for 23 years, I’ve lost count of how often agency employees said they longed for more attention from Congress and the public. Well, now that a border incident in south Texas can wind up on front pages from Los Angeles to New York, I can’t help but recall the old saying about being careful about what you wish for.

But the INS of today is a better agency than the one I first encountered in 1972, when reporting on an FBI probe of INS corruption. It has more people, better equipment, higher morale and much better leaders.

Doris Meissner may be the smartest and best-prepared INS commissioner ever. By selecting an expert on immigration--Meissner had held immigration posts in both Republican and Democratic administrations and was long affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace--President Clinton made a great improvement over the political hacks and retread military officers that previous presidents picked to run INS.

And Meissner has some smart local INS officials, like Silvestre Reyes, Border Patrol chief in El Paso, working for her. A native of Texas, Reyes proved that even the notoriously porous border around El Paso could be controlled, if not completely sealed. He did it by putting his full complement of agents right on the line, pulling them out of so-called area control operations in El Paso’s barrios, where they were a constant irritant to U.S.-born Latinos. It was a controversial and costly move.

But it was also creative in a way like nothing else the INS has ever done. And that’s what INS is going to need to get a better handle on immigration in the years to come: not tough new laws or tough new agents, but creativity.

Here’s my modest but creative proposal: Break up the INS. Not dismantle it completely, of course. But at least break it down into its two main components, immigration and naturalization.

The Border Patrol is one of several agencies, like the Customs Service and Coast Guard, charged with keeping our borders secure. For years, the General Accounting Office, and more recently Vice President Al Gore’s Commission on Reinventing Government, have urged their consolidation into a single border-management agency. Resistance to that idea has come from Congress and INS employee unions, proving that they can be as much a part of the problem as INS management.

But beyond better border control, we need to put more thought into regulating the legal entry of foreigners into this country, whether as workers or investors, and promoting the acculturation of those foreigners who stay as immigrants. This responsibility also falls to INS--remember what the N stands for. But naturalization has received even less attention and financial support than the agency’s police functions. It would be handled better by a new Bureau of Immigration in the Labor or State Department.

This would not be another redundant bureaucracy, for in the future our problem may not be too many immigrants, but not enough--or at least not enough of certain types of immigrants. As our native-born population ages and lives longer, it will need young workers and entrepreneurs to help support it.

In the not too distant future the migration of workers and business people from country to country, especially historically linked neighbors like the United States and Mexico, will be as routine as the flow of goods and capital is today. That means that the INS in its present form and function is a dinosaur--even under the capable leadership of people like Doris Meissner and Silvestre Reyes.