Nobody’s Happy With the Mess at the INS

Even by the customarily chaotic standards of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, this year has been a mess.

First the agency fell behind in implementing President Clinton’s offer of temporary amnesty to Central Americans reeling from Hurricane Mitch, leaving tens of thousands stranded in the United States without permission to work.

Then the immigration service gave out 20,000 more visas to high-tech workers than the law permits. By mistake.

And then suspected serial killer Angel Maturino Resendiz was apprehended at the border by INS agents and released to Mexico even after police alerted the agency that he was a murder suspect. The agency said it didn’t find his name in its files.

Add to the flubs the 1.8 million people waiting in line to become U.S. citizens, the children of immigrants who have become citizens waiting 30 months for green cards that they should, by law, receive immediately, plus 3 million other people waiting for other immigration benefits, and it’s no wonder immigrants in Los Angeles and elsewhere pale at the thought of the agency.

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Nowhere do the problems at the INS hit harder than in California, home to more new immigrants than any other state. Go to any INS office in the state, and you are likely to find long lines of people queuing up before daybreak, knowing that more than likely they will wait all day.

Stories of the INS losing fingerprints, misfiling paperwork and treating worried immigrants rudely have become as common as tales of Department of Motor Vehicles incompetence. In 1998, immigration officials concede, nearly 80,000 files were misplaced. And millions of illegal immigrants are living in the United States, easily eluding INS efforts to find and deport them.

“Everybody has something bad to say about the INS,” said Mary Beth Sullivan, legislative counsel for the California Institute, a think tank that tracks federal legislation of interest to Californians. “It has gone progressively downhill. And they haven’t done anything to clean up their act.”

The situation at the agency is so bad that these days not even INS Commissioner Doris Meissner is willing to defend it.

“The first person who is advocating for a restructuring of the agency is the commissioner,” said INS spokeswoman Maria Cardona. “She has said repeatedly that she is committed to changing the agency. She says the agency as it is now is not poised to grant the best service it can, and that it needs a restructuring so it is able to administer a coherent immigration policy into the next century.”

But Washingtonians dismayed at the INS’s performance part company over the issue of how to change the agency.

Since early this year, Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.) has pushed legislation that would split the INS into two bureaus within the Justice Department, one to enforce immigration laws and patrol borders, and another to handle the cases of legal immigrants. The Clinton administration opposes the legislation.

A Senate alternative, sponsored by Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), would preserve the agency’s authority over both functions but streamline its management and give it a new name.

The fight involves more than bureaucratic turf. Critics say the fast-growing organization has become unwieldy and politicized; immigrant advocates fear that reformers want to reduce services for foreign residents and visitors.

“The services side of our immigration system should not be diminished or shortchanged,” said Frank Sherry, director of the National Immigration Forum, a Washington lobbying group on immigrant rights. “But I don’t think there is anyone out there who thinks the system we have is working well right now.”

It’s no wonder. The agency has doubled in size in five years, as immigration, both illegal and legal, has skyrocketed. For three years, auditors haven’t been able to balance the INS books. After reviews of its 1998 budget, the agency still couldn’t account for $41 million. And hundreds of millions of dollars invested in new computers appears to have been mismanaged, according to the General Accounting Office.

The problems hit immigrants at all ends of the social scale.

At Allergan, an Irvine-based pharmaceutical and medical device company, dozens of high-tech jobs have gone unfilled because the INS office in Laguna Niguel has been too overloaded to handle requests for months on end, said Brad Gary, vice president of government operations at the firm.

“It’s very frustrating,” Gary said. “We’d like to get them in and start work. We need these people to grow. But we’re having problems getting them in.”