Bush Says INS Should Be Split in Two

George W. Bush on Monday proposed splitting the Immigration and Naturalization Service into two agencies, one to guard the nation’s borders and the other to welcome new legal immigrants and help them deal with red tape.

And in a further bid for support among Latino voters who have rallied behind him in unusually large numbers during his two campaigns for governor of Texas, Bush called for rescinding present policies he called barriers to family reunification.

Specifically, the presumed Republican presidential nominee proposed changing the rule that prevents spouses or minor children of a permanent legal resident from visiting that resident once they apply for permanent emigration status themselves. The rule grows in part out of the difficulty of assuring that such visitors leave the United States once their temporary visas expire.

But it can separate families for years, Bush aides said.

“That’s not right,” Bush declared, vowing to reverse that policy to allow close family members to visit permanent legal residents.

“Family values don’t stop at the border. Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande,” he said.

Bush, addressing the 71st annual convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens, spoke without a prepared text and offered few details about how his proposal would work, beyond saying each new agency would be supervised by a separate associate attorney general.

The idea of splitting the INS did not originate with Bush. It has been pushed in Congress this year by Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Texas), although it has failed to gain widespread support. INS officials say the agency can be reformed without such drastic measures. They have proposed creating two separate chains of command within the agency for enforcement and benefits.

“The INS proposal would keep the agency under one person,” said Sharon Gavin, an INS spokeswoman for the western region. “We have to look at both sides of immigrant issues, but we feel it’s important for them to stay one agency in order to share information.”

Vice President Al Gore’s campaign staff criticized the Bush proposal. Bush would “start from Square One and create yet another bureaucracy that just isn’t necessary,” Gore spokesman Douglas Hattaway said Monday. “We support streamlining, rather than expanding the INS, to strike the right balance between law enforcement and customer service.”

Hattaway said Gore has been working with the Clinton administration on ways to restructure the agency.

And it remained unclear Monday how Bush’s proposal would work, raising a host of questions about how two agencies would coordinate their operations, avoid creating even more bureaucracy and improve effectiveness without increased spending. In announcing the plan, however, Bush seemed to be following a strategy he has used on other complex issues, including Social Security reform and reducing the stockpile of nuclear weapons

He offered a broad proposal and suggested details could be worked out in bipartisan negotiations with Congress if he wins the White House.

The speech to LULAC marked the beginning of a three-day campaign swing across the East Coast and Midwest that is designed to heighten Bush’s appeal to minorities, especially Latinos and African Americans who traditionally support the Democrats.

In a speech laced with Spanish, Bush praised the contribution of Latino immigrants to the United States, especially those who have started small businesses. He noted that in California alone, Latinos now operate some 600,000 businesses.

While affirming his support for efforts to enforce existing immigration laws, Bush praised the values and entrepreneurial spirit of legal immigrants and said they should be welcomed, not viewed with hostility.

The INS, he said “often sends mixed signals.” Separating law enforcement from what he called the welcoming function, Bush said, would help send the message “loud and clear, the INS is to help families.”

The mission of the immigration service agency, Bush said, should be to ask: “How can I help you? What can I do to help you complete the paperwork?”

In the long term, Bush said, the solution to illegal immigration lies in fostering economic growth in Latin America through such things as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he once again endorsed as a positive step for both the United States and its neighbors to the north and south.

In the meantime, he said, better economic opportunities in the United States would continue to draw waves of immigrants. “Moms and dads trying to feed their children, that’s why they’re coming,” he said.

While immigration must be controlled, Bush said, “our country must be mindful that they’re human beings too.”

In a fact sheet released before the speech, the Bush campaign said under the present INS structure, “border enforcement is often criticized as unfocused, and the service component frequently appears adversarial and unfocused.”

In addition to the speech focusing on Latinos, Bush was scheduled to address the Congress on Racial Equality in New York Monday night and deliver a speech on welfare reform in Detroit today.

Beyond his proposal for dividing the INS, Bush pointed to his record of supporting education reform in Texas as an indicator of his commitment to meet the needs of minorities.

He advocated increased local control of schools, but with greater accountability for increased learning.

“We must challenge the soft bigotry of lowered expectations” for poor and immigrant children, he said, echoing a view shared by most education reformers across the political spectrum. “When you expect less, you get less in education.”

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Times reporters Bonnie Harris and Anne-Marie O’Connor contributed to this story.