Your editorial “Overhaul immigration bureaucracy” (Feb. 12) overlooks the significant strides the Immigration and Naturalization Service has made over the past few years in implementing its interrelated functions of enforcing the nation’s immigration laws and providing services to support legal migration.
In the past several years since the administration and Congress have made immigration a priority and finally provided the INS with the necessary resources, INS has been making landmark achievements on a number of fronts:
– The INS’ implementation of a first-ever comprehensive Southwest border strategy has made the international border with Mexico harder to cross than at any time in history.
– The INS in 1996 and 1997 removed record numbers of criminal and illegal aliens from U.S. streets and communities.
– The INS more than doubled the number of inspectors at ports of entry along the Southwest border in four years to improve facilitation of travel and deter illegal entry.
– INS reforms of an outdated, severely backlogged asylum system have led to dramatic reductions in frivolous applications and timely decisions on all asylum claims that are filed.
In addition, your editorial ignores two important facts:
– First, the problems cited in a recently released study we commissioned on the naturalization process in 1996 clearly have been overcome by events. They have been corrected by a series of quality-assurance measures that outside auditors concluded have dramatically improved the process.
– Second, your editorial does not recognize the historical fact that the INS was an agency that had been neglected for decades–until the Clinton administration’s 1993 commitment to make immigration a top priority and rebuild the agency. We first focused on our most critical problems–cracking down on illegal crossings at the Southwest border. More recently, we turned our attention to other areas, including fulfilling the mandate contained in our name–that of administering the naturalization process efficiently and effectively.
Where we have been given the resources to do our jobs, it is clear that we can. Nonetheless, we recognize and embrace the need to make structural reforms that will further improve our ability to perform. We are drawing on the outside expertise of management consultants, which have helped major companies and other government agencies, to assist us in shaping the INS of the future.
