INS Says It’s Ready; Critics Predicting Amnesty Chaos

Years of impassioned debate over immigration reform and months of tedious planning to implement it have been translated into the details of desks, chairs, computers and new employees who will begin Tuesday the massive task of granting amnesty to as many as 4 million illegal aliens.

At stake are both clerical and philosophical questions. Can the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service handle the expected crush? And can it do so fairly? The agency says it can, but many critics predict chaos.

“Contrary to what you may have heard from those who fought immigration reform and would like to see it fail, INS is well prepared,” INS Commissioner Alan C. Nelson declared at a Washington press conference last week. “There will be some problems; I am convinced they will be few.”

Critics like Peter Schey, executive director of the Los Angeles-based National Center for Immigrants’ Rights Inc., charge that the agency has placed too heavy a burden on voluntary organizations that are expected to help illegal aliens prepare applications and that the agency still will be unable to handle its part of the job.

“INS has clearly dropped back and punted,” Schey said. “INS cannot handle the ordinary traffic of (immigration) applications in any reasonable manner, so it’s hard to imagine how they’ll handle the crunch of legalization.”

In any case, the preparations have been considerable.

In seven hectic months, the INS has created a nationwide system of 107 legalization offices linked to a single data entry center in Kentucky, a U.S. Department of Justice computer in Texas and four regional processing facilities. The legalization offices, according to government figures, have been staffed with nearly 2,000 employees and provided with 25,000 seats for people waiting, 697 desk-top computers, 1.4 miles of counters and 44 million blank forms.

The INS has budgeted $125 million for the amnesty program in the current fiscal year and $144 million for next year. Congress has not yet appropriated money for the program, however, and the agency is spending funds originally budgeted for its regular operations, according to officials who insist they will have enough money to carry out the program.

Central to the immigration service’s plans--especially in the key Los Angeles district, which is expected to handle up to one-third of all applications in the country--is a procedure by which applicants are requested to either mail in their forms or submit them through designated voluntary agencies.

Illegal aliens also can pick up or drop off applications at amnesty offices, but there is little else they can do there without appointments. Officials have said that legalization centers in the Los Angeles area will provide only limited advice to applicants. Interviews will be conducted only by appointment. The centers began passing out application forms last week and distributed about 58,000 of them.

Residence Requirement

Under the main legalization program, aliens must show that they have lived in the United States in illegal status since before Jan. 1, 1982. They must apply during the one-year period that begins Tuesday. Illegal aliens apprehended and released by the INS since the law was signed have only 30 days to apply.

Applicants for a separate farm workers program can apply beginning June 1.

The procedure encompasses layers of backup and review that INS officials say will help the agency maintain equal standards across the country--even though inexperienced employees will perform much of the evaluation work.

When applications come into legalization offices, they first will be processed on computers that will print out letters with interview appointments and temporary work authorization cards good until the date of the interview, officials said.

Work authorization is important because on June 1 enforcement begins of sanctions prohibiting employers from knowingly hiring illegal aliens not already on the job as of Nov. 6, 1986.

The law provides for the INS to give applicants temporary work authorization when they apply for amnesty, so this could encourage large numbers of people to apply during the initial weeks of the program.

But the agency has taken some of the pressure off by establishing rules allowing illegal aliens to receive work authorization through Sept. 1 by simply stating to a potential employer that they believe they qualify for amnesty and intend to apply for it.

Los Angeles District INS Director Ernest Gustafson said all these decisions together have laid the basis for a smooth opening of the legalization effort at INS offices in his seven-county area, which agency officials have predicted may handle 1.2 million applications or more.

‘Can Control the Flow’

“Your flow (of applicants to be interviewed) is not going to be that great on May 5,” Gustafson said. “And we can control the flow.”

Los Angeles district offices, however, are still not quite fully staffed, and more glaring problems have arisen elsewhere in the country.

Linda Wong of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund predicted that people will be “storming the INS offices, primarily to get information and application forms.”

“You’re going to see people losing their tempers because they’re standing in line for nothing but the forms,” Wong said. “They’re going to want to insist on some further information, rather than being palmed off on voluntary agencies.”

Immigrant rights advocates have also criticized the INS for not printing application forms in Spanish as well as English and for not releasing a final version of the complicated regulations--about 170 pages--until Friday. “I think it’s absurd to put out final regulations a few days before a program of this significance goes into effect,” Schey said.

The INS is counting on major assistance from voluntary organizations, especially the so-called “qualified designated entities” (QDE) that have signed agreements with the immigration agency to help illegal aliens prepare applications. The U.S. Catholic Conference, through the efforts of local dioceses, is expected to play an extremely important role in this.

276,000 Pre-Registered

Catholic Charities of Los Angeles, the largest such agency in Southern California, has already pre-registered about 276,000 probable applicants.

“I think INS has put the onus of this program on the shoulders of voluntary agencies without giving them sufficient time to prepare, train staff and budget their programs,” Schey said.

Schey estimated that the voluntary agencies--both those that have signed agreements with the INS and those working independently--will handle 75% of the total work involved in the legalization process.

Optimism about INS preparedness in Los Angeles is reflected from the level of Western Regional INS Commissioner Harold Ezell down to local supervisors like Richard Quirk, a former immigration enforcement officer who came out of retirement to take charge of the Huntington Park legalization office.

Quirk said last week that although furniture was still being moved in and his staff was incomplete, everything was falling properly into place. “There is no confusion in my mind right now,” Quirk said. “There are just a lot of people to deal with.”

Many local offices were, like Quirk’s, still not fully staffed last week. The Hollywood office, for example, was short of its full complement of legalization officers, and Gustafson said that, districtwide, about 10% of the 364 new slots remain unfilled.

Permanent INS employees or former employees hired out of retirement--some with Border Patrol backgrounds--fill the top two spots in each legalization office, according to INS officials.

In the Los Angeles district, more than 100 of the amnesty office employees have backgrounds with the agency and about 225 slots are being filled by people with no previous INS experience, Gustafson said.

Ability to speak Spanish or another language besides English was considered a plus, but not a requirement, he said. Korean, Tagalog, Arabic and Iranian are among the languages spoken by some office employees.

In Chicago, a controversy has developed because none of the area’s four offices are in Latino neighborhoods, even though Latinos are expected to make up about 90% of the illegal aliens who seek amnesty there.

The United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago, a grass-roots Latino group, says it plans to encourage people to boycott one of the facilities Tuesday as a symbolic protest.

INS officials in Texas have said that there are not enough voluntary agencies set up along the Mexican border and in East Texas, where large numbers of applicants are expected.

Ezell predicted that the “biggest downside” in the opening weeks of the program in Los Angeles “probably will be people thinking they can just walk in, sit down and become temporary legal residents.”

‘Doing All We Can’

“The public needs to understand we’re doing all we can to schedule them, process their applications and give them temporary work authorization as fast as we can with modern technology,” Ezell said.

Computers are central to many aspects of the process.

Desk-top computers at the legalization offices will not only be used to print the initial appointment letters and short-term work-authorization cards, but will at the same time produce six-month work-authorization cards and data cards that will be placed in applicants’ files for use later on in the process, according to Karl Ullrich, training coordinator in the Western regional office of immigration reform.

A key point in the process is when the applicant comes in for an interview with a legalization adjudicator. Applicants will be placed under oath and interviewed under penalty of perjury, but INS officials have pledged that this will be done in a friendly atmosphere rather than in an adversarial manner.

Illegal aliens who admit to anything disqualifying them from amnesty--such as too-lengthy absences from this country--will have their applications denied, according to local INS officials.

If the interview goes successfully, the alien will be given the six-month work-authorization card, and the file will be forwarded with a recommendation for approval, Ullrich said. Although many of the adjudicators who will make this initial decision have no previous INS experience, supervisors will review their work and be available for consultation.

Codes on Recommended Denials

Applications recommended for denial will also be forwarded for further processing. On these applications, according to James O’Keefe, associate regional commissioner for management, a number code system ranging from “one” to “five” will be used to mark the seriousness of the adjudicators’ concerns. “One” will represent the least serious problems--perhaps smudged typing raising a question about the authenticity of a document--while “five” will label applications with the most severe deficiencies.

Applications from throughout the nation will be forwarded from legalization offices to a document-processing center operated on a contract basis by Appalachian Computer Services Inc. in London, Ky.

Information from applications will be put onto computer tapes there, then shipped to Dallas for further processing in a Justice Department computer, according to Elizabeth MacRae, INS associate commissioner for information systems.

Information will go from here to the FBI for cross-checking; material like dates of legal entry will be cross-referenced with INS computers, and statistical reports to Congress mandated by the law will be prepared, MacRae said.

Any relevant information discovered in the FBI or INS checks will be added to the files, and they will be forwarded to one of four regional processing centers around the country, O’Keefe said. Applications from the INS Western Region will be processed at an INS office in Laguna Niguel.

Joe Thomas, director of the Laguna Niguel center, said plans call for processing 6,150 applications a day by a staff of about 200. Management and supervisory staff will consist entirely of permanent INS employees or former employees, but some of the adjudicators will be new to the immigration agency, he said.

These people will conduct random reviews of applications recommended for approval and will examine all applications recommended for denial or marked with negative information from the FBI and INS checks, Thomas said. Each examiner is expected to review 20 to 40 applications a day, he said.

If recommendations of denial are found to be unjustified, applicants will be legalized, Thomas said. If applications simply are too weak to show eligibility “by a preponderance of the evidence,” then “we would go back and ask for additional documentation,” he added. If evidence of fraud is found, further investigations will be initiated. The regulations provide that applicants found to have committed fraud may be prosecuted and deported.

‘Establish the Uniformity’

Thomas said he believes “the statute and the regulations establish the uniformity” needed to enforce the law fairly across the nation. Supervisors in each legalization office will be able to spot and eliminate any differences in how individual adjudicators are handling cases, he said. Regional processing centers, in turn, will be able to identify any patterns showing unequal standards, he said.

The regional center’s decisions to approve or deny applications, or request more information, will be passed back to local offices, which will call applicants in again, Ullrich explained.

Successful applicants will receive temporary residence cards, authorizing employment and travel abroad. Those whose applications are denied will be informed of the denial and the reasons for it. They will be required to return their temporary work-authorization cards and will receive information on the appeals process.

Aliens who receive lawful temporary residence under the main amnesty program may apply for permanent residence during the one-year period beginning 18 months after the date of receipt of their amnesty application fee, according to the regulations.

Confidentiality provisions are written into the law to prevent the INS from simply deporting denied applicants, and Ezell has repeatedly pledged that “this is not a sting operation.”

Some attorneys suggest that anyone with a chance of winning amnesty should apply. But some critics question whether these guarantees are ironclad.

“I would be remiss in telling someone to go forward and apply for legalization if they do not stand a good chance of qualifying,” Wong said.

Wong also questioned whether individuals newly hired to work as amnesty adjudicators will be competent to decide who should qualify.

“We’re talking about critical legal issues that will determine ultimately whether people qualify or not,” Wong said. “It’s not simply an issue of administrative work flow. People are going to be asked to make judgment calls from the beginning to the end of the line.”

With inexperienced adjudicators making the initial decision on applications, Wong said, “those supervisors are going to get bogged down in the process before that application moves on to the next stage. . . . I frankly think INS is underestimating the amount of work and time that’s going to be required in reviewing these applications.”

Thomas, however, insisted that the system is up to the task.

“It’s clear that if there is any error,” he said, “the error is going to be on the side of (benefiting) the applicant, rather than vice versa.”

Contributing to this story were researchers Rhona Schwartz in Houston and Wendy Leopold in Chicago.