It’s the Right Time to Break Up the INS

Democrats in Congress have now countered President Bush’s proposal to open U.S. borders to Mexican guest workers with an immigration reform plan of their own. So it looks like a compromise is possible and something will get done--sooner rather than later--to bring U.S. immigration policies more into line with the reality of a rapidly globalizing world economy. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that while Bush and the Democrats are trying to one-up each other by discussing immigration in idealized terms, they are forgetting a gritty reality that could undermine their best intentions: The agency that will have to do most of the work carrying out any new immigration laws remains one of the most hopelessly dysfunctional bureaucracies in the federal government.

I refer to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, an agency of the Justice Department. The INS has long been the source of horror stories--from unanswered telephones to lost files to years-long waits for even simple matters to be resolved--not just by those unfortunate members of the public who must deal with it but even by members of Congress who have tried to intervene on behalf of constituents.

Bush made it abundantly clear as a presidential candidate that he was aware of the INS’ problems when he proposed breaking up the agency. At the time, cynics suggested Bush was just trying to win votes among newly naturalized Latino citizens, who knew the INS’ reputation all too well. But there have been proposals to break up the INS floating around Washington since at least 1972.

That’s when the Nixon administration briefly considered merging the U.S. Border Patrol, the INS’ uniformed arm, with the Customs Service and even part of the Coast Guard to form a single border management agency. At the time, law enforcement was so uncoordinated on the Mexican border that Border Patrol agents could not communicate by radio with their counterparts in the Customs Service because they used different types of radios in their patrol vehicles.

That has since changed, of course, under pressure first from the Nixon White House and later from subsequent administrations that also put more money and resources into the INS. And, in all fairness, the INS today is far better than the underfunded and demoralized agency I first got to know 30 years ago.

But the INS is still torn between two fundamentally conflicting missions. On the one hand it must keep illegal immigrants out of the country by guarding our borders and ports of entry as far away as Chicago. Even if Bush brings illegal immigration under control by negotiating an agreement with Mexico, half of the 6 million to 8 million illegal immigrants in this nation come from somewhere else in the world, crossing any borders they can.

Meanwhile the INS must deal with basic issues concerning legal immigrants--be they German students, Haitian farm workers or high-tech engineers from India. These issues include determining how many are needed and with what skills, and how these immigrants can be helped to integrate into our civic and cultural life.

The INS has never had the resources or the personnel to do both jobs well. All too often it is the service component that suffers while the agency has devoted most of its attention to stopping illegal immigration. For instance, the INS’ backlog of applications for naturalization of would-be citizens stands at about 700,000 and has sometimes ballooned to 2 million. So just as it always made sense to have a single agency in charge of guarding our borders, it is now just as urgent to have a single agency in charge of regulating the legal flow of immigrants into this country.

This is as good a time as any for Bush to act on his break-up-the-INS pledge. Not only has he got the Democrats talking about immigration reform, but last week Bush’s nominee for INS commissioner, the Senate’s former sergeant-at-arms, James Ziglar, was unanimously confirmed.

Ziglar has no prior experience with immigration, but he is widely regarded as an expert manager, and he has strong personal support on Capitol Hill, as evidenced by the standing ovation he received after his confirmation vote. If there was ever an INS commissioner to fix what ails the agency, Ziglar appears to be that person.

Candidate Bush may have had political motives when he talked about breaking up the INS. But he was on to something that must be part of the new debate over immigration reform.