The INS Needs a Complete Makeover

The INS, responding to widespread criticism of its performance, has proposed separating its service and enforcement functions but retaining both, the third significant such reform proposal in five years. A contending proposal, by the now-defunct Commission on Immigration Reform, would dismantle the INS and distribute its functions to other departments. We believe that the INS proposal does not go far enough, while the commission's takes us in the wrong direction.

The politicization of immigration policy and frustration with INS performance have been growing for more than a decade. Both proposals react to that but fail to ask the most fundamental question: What is the system supposed to do, and how should it be organized to do it?

We have developed an alternative proposal that starts with goals and principles and develops structures to put them into practice. Immigration policy is top and center of this structure.

The INS' self-conception is primarily as enforcer of laws that it often plays a marginal role in formulating. At times, it is a victim of congressional micromanagement; at others, it becomes a political football between the administration and Congress. The executive branch generally reacts rather than initiates.

We propose creating an independent agency within the executive branch to direct the nation's immigration system. The new agency's core purposes would continue to be complex: facilitating and controlling entry, enforcing the law and delivering services, removing the deportable and naturalizing the qualified.

Various functions currently scattered among several federal departments--such as labor certification (Labor), visa, passport and most refugee and migration functions (State) and refugee resettlement (Health and Human Services)--would gradually be consolidated under a single roof. Consolidation would follow a simple rule: Unless the function (or part of it) falls within the central mission of the department in which it is located, it should move to the new agency.

An independent agency would be better prepared and situated to work with Congress to construct immigration policies that are consonant with other critical domestic and foreign policy priorities, from Social Security, welfare and human resources to education, economic competitiveness and international relations.