The Mess At The INS
JONATHAN MANN, INSIGHT (voice-over): A poet called them "the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free." They're yearning for help from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, yearning for someone to find their file.</s>ALEXANDRA BELL, GREEN CARD APPLICANT: It now appears to be just lost. It never - it left where it shouldn't have been and never arrived at where it needed to go.</s>MANN (on camera): Hello, and welcome. An awful lot of people around the world want to live in the United States. A relatively small number of people are given the chance. The lucky ones who do get permission have the Immigration and Naturalization Service to thank. But these days, people are not feeling very thankful. The INS has, by many accounts, become an overloaded, erratic and insensitive institution. A lot of blameless people are suffering as a result. On our program today - the mess at the INS. Our U.S. affairs correspondent John Vause reports.</s>JOHN VAUSE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Welcome to the United States. Please take a number.</s>A. BELL: The first paperwork that we submitted was in mid-1993.</s>MARIA ESTRADA, GREEN CARD APPLICANT: I filed my petition in December 1993. I should have gotten my green card a long time ago, and I'm still waiting.</s>VAUSE: At the end of last year, nearly three million people were waiting in line for a green card, a work permit or a change in their immigration status, up almost 20 percent in just 12 months.</s>DARRYL BUFFENSTEIN, AMER. IMMIGRATION LAWYERS ASSOC.: What happens every day and every week is that people are in limbo. Human beings who are going through really difficult situations not being able to make decisions about where to live and what jobs to take, families not being able to move within the country, not having mobility in the way that they should.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thirty-three countries represented here today.</s>VAUSE: The Immigration and Naturalization Service is the gateway to the United States. For years, it's been underfunded and overwhelmed and, by its own admission, barely able to cope. (on camera): If you were to give yourselves a grade out of 10 for the service which your customers are getting, at this particular point in time, what would you give yourself?</s>ROSEMARY LANGLEY MELVILLE, INS DISTRICT DIRECTOR: Well, I would say for our effort to do a good job, I'd give us a 9. But for the actual delivery of service, I would say it's more around the 5 range.</s>VAUSE (voice-over): An opinion shared by the president. In May last year, during the campaign, he promised to reform the INS, committing $100 million over five years to reduce waiting times to six months.</s>GEORGE W. BUSH, U.S. PRESIDENT: The current INS is too bureaucratic. It's too stuck in the past. It doesn't matter what party you're from. You've got to admit that when it takes three to five years to process paperwork in the INS, that's too long. It's time to reform the</s>INS. VAUSE: For now, though, hundreds of thousands are caught in the system - people like Alexandra and Derek Bell, who immigrated eight years ago from South Africa looking for a better life. They thought it would take no more than five years to become permanent residents.</s>A. BELL: We recently found out when we followed up on our file, we phoned to inquire how it was doing, and we were told it had been in the wrong office for the last 11 months. And in an effort to correct that, we told them where the file needed to go. And it now appears to be just lost. It never - it left where it shouldn't have been and never arrived at where it needed to go.</s>DEREK BELL, GREEN CARD APPLICANT: When you take our case of our file disappearing into the wrong office for 11 months, where was it? Was it lying on a mailroom floor or, you know, where does it get to?</s>VAUSE: Maria Estrada's file went missing for two years. It was recently found, not by INS staff, but by her husband during his interview for citizenship.</s>ROBERT ESTRADA, GREEN CARD APPLICANT: The lady started asking me question related to my wife's residence papers. And in fact, she asked me about my attorney, which, in fact, I don't have an attorney. My wife has an attorney. I did all that paperwork myself. And you know, finally, I asked her a couple questions, and it just become clear that her file was in my file. And they have been looking for her file for, you know, a couple of years, and I found it.</s>VAUSE: For Darryl Buffenstein from America's Immigration Lawyers Association, familiar stories.</s>BUFFENSTEIN: It is a demoralized agency. It's an unorganized and a disorganized agency. It's not a properly managed agency. It is a very unfunded agency, and it is in a mess. But it's not necessarily the fault of the individuals in the agency. This is a situation where Congress needs to act.</s>VAUSE (on camera): One of the biggest problems, according to the lawyers association, is funding. The adjudication side of the INS was designed by Congress to be user pays. Every year, it collects hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, but not all of that goes towards processing applications.</s>BILL YATES, INS: When our customers pay for a fee, they're not only covering the cost of their own adjudication, but they're also paying for refugee and asylee programs where we don't charge any fees. And again, that's a statutory construction. Congress decided that we would not use taxpayer dollars in those areas. Additionally, for people who demonstrate that they lack the financial capability to pay for a particular benefit, we also use money out of the fee account to cover the cost to adjudicate those applications. We don't use taxpayer dollars.</s>VAUSE (voice-over): And the INS is waiting for worse to come. Last year, the Clinton administration authorized a so-called grandfather clause. For $1,000 fine, some illegal immigrants will be allowed to apply for a green card without having to leave the country. So the attraction is the ability to fill out forms in the U.S. because, for some, leaving the country could mean a 10-year ban on returning. A million people may qualify, but the INS is expecting many, many more to apply because of the mistaken belief this is another amnesty. The agency stresses it's not. Still, there will be a dramatic increase in cases with no extra funding.</s>YATES: If we were a private industry, for example, and let's say we were making computer chips, and the need for computer chips rose by 20 percent or 30 percent, you'd hire more workers. You'd hire more salespeople, whatever you needed to get that supply out and, of course, get the revenue in. With INS, our workload goes up, the revenue rises, but we don't have access to it unless we go through a very complicated and lengthy process with Congress, where Congress has to improve any increase. So the whole system is frankly flawed.</s>VAUSE: For families like the Bells and for people like Maria Estrada, the delays have left them in a kind of no-man's land. Every year, they need a new temporary work permit, special papers if they want to leave the country, and after so many years here in the U.S., there's no turning back.</s>D. BELL: You cannot walk away from it. You've just got to grit your teeth and go with it. And it's not for the weak of heart. That's for sure.</s>A. BELL: And I don't know how you would walk away. What would you do? Pack up all your stuff and go back to a life that you don't have anymore?</s>VAUSE (on camera): Then there's the impact on business. Projects can be left on hold for months, waiting for visas for experienced workers from overseas. But companies which were asked to talk on camera declined, fearing it may harm their relationship with the</s>INS. BUFFENSTEIN: This is a competitiveness issue. From a business and an economic standpoint, American businesses need to function competitively in an international market, and utilization of international personnel, being able to start a project or prevent a project from stopping, having people idle because you can't get a key expert who's coming in that you need is a major international competitiveness issue.</s>VAUSE (voice-over): So how long before the backlog to clear? Even the INS says it could be three years. Critics counter that's overly optimistic. They say unless there is more funding, better organization, the long, long wait will only get worse. John Vause, CNN, Atlanta.</s>MANN: We have to take a break. But when we come back - big, broken, but busier than ever. A conversation with the former head of the INS. Stay with us.</s>MANN (voice-over): The 1990s were a busy time for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The agency processed nearly a million legal immigrants and asylum seekers every year during the past decade. It did get a boost from the Clinton administration. The number of INS employees was nearly doubled, its budget nearly tripled. But a huge backlog remains. (on camera): Welcome back. If illegal immigration is factored in, the influx of the 1990s was the largest in American history. Approximately 12.5 million people entered the U.S. in that time, up from 7.3 million in the 1980s. The previous record was set nearly a century earlier. Doris Meissner was the INS commissioner during the Clinton administration. She's now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Thank you so much for being with us. So many people who pass through the INS system, through the process, are angry. They're frustrated. What would you tell them? What should they know?</s>DORIS MEISSNER, FMR. INS COMMISSIONER: Well, of course, those frustrations are very regrettable, and the INS - any of us would wish that it was not that way. But I also think that you have to grasp what you've just talked about in terms of the volume of work that has developed in the last decade and look at how incredibly antiquated this agency had been for decades. This is an agency that had suffered from chronically poor leadership, from inattention by the Congress and by the executive branch, and so there has been an enormous effort made in the last five or more years to modernize, to bring technology in, to look at modern business practices and to transform the kinds of problems that you've pointed out. A lot of that transformation is under way and has borne fruit. There are very, very vast improvements in many of the procedures. There is a long way to do, and there continue to be these extraordinary workloads generated not by the immigration service, but by the overall times that we live in, by actions that the Congress has taken, by natural disasters that have happened. So this effort that is being made to reduce and eliminate backlogs and get to the point where there are normal processing times, which means that somebody ought to be able to get an application decided within six months, this is something that is not only good for applicants, it's good for the country.</s>MANN: Now, you've covered an awful lot of ground there. Let's back up just a little bit. I have to ask you, because everyone who does any kind of research into the INS hears these horror stories about files that go missing for a year or for two years. I was reading in the Washington Post about one woman, an elderly woman who had to be fingerprinted nine times, if that newspaper's account is to be believed. How do those kinds of things still happen?</s>MEISSNER: Well, as I said, this has been a very, very backward agency. Let's take those two issues - files and fingerprints, which have been chronically problematic issues. Files have been being misplaced by the INS for decades. In the last three years, we have - the INS has centralized all of its files. We were successful in getting the Congress to fund a single file center. It's in St. Louis, Missouri. It pulls together 25 million files - can you imagine an agency that was holding 25 million paper files, decentralized, in sites all over the country? Those are now being brought together. That work, I think, is going to be completed this year, assuming that it's properly funded. And every one of those files now has a bar code so that it can be tracked not only in the file center, but when it needs to be in an adjudicator's hands to decide. Fingerprints - until very, very recently, fingerprints, which have to be taken for the vast majority of applicants in order to determine through the FBI whether they have a criminal record, fingerprints were being taken on ink pads one digit at a time by hand. Vast room for error and having to do them over again. That now has been eliminated so that fingerprints are taken on a machine. They are electronically captured. They can be electronically transmitted to the FBI and back to the INS for the records checks that are required. Those are the kinds of systemic reforms that have been needed, should have been done a long time ago. But we were able in the last administration to make the case and show how they would improve things and put them into place. But those kinds of changes, and there are quite a few others like that, some of them have been completed. Some of them are still under way. And until that kind of reform is accomplished, there will still be problems, although I think most people would agree that it has been much improved from what it was even five, six years ago.</s>MANN: When people talk about these problems, they say the people at the INS are nice enough. You're a nice enough person. The problem, they say, is Congress. Two question - is that passing the buck, and should people understand that Congress is itself, in some sense, hostile to immigrants?</s>MEISSNER: Well, there are all kinds of actors here. Obviously, the immigration service is responsible for being - managing effectively, for streamlining its procedures as much as possible, for suggesting solutions and making the case for what it is that it needs. But ultimately, the Congress is the keeper of the purse. And the issue that was talked about in your piece of funding and of applications and fee money being approved by the Congress is a very important point. The Congress not only sets the levels of funding for the INS in this arena, it has to approve any of the expenditures of the funds. Moreover, the Congress has not, until two or three years ago, appropriated money for this part of the INS's work. Applications and the deciding applications, all the procedures involved have been funded by fees that applicants pay. We made the case that that is simply not enough to bring about the reform and the timeliness that is necessary in order to have a modern system. And so we asked the Congress, in addition to the fee money, to provide appropriated funding. They began to do that in the late 1990s, and that is something that the Bush administration is now continuing and increasing. And that's a very good sign.</s>MANN: So let me ask you, there were changes introduced while you were in office in the Clinton administration. George W. Bush promises more changes. Do you think realistically anyone could be optimistic? Is this a problem that's going to be solved? Is the U.S. going to have a great immigration service anytime soon?</s>MEISSNER: Well, the United States should have a great immigration service. And it can be done. We are an immigration country. Immigration is important to our economy. It's important to the personal lives of countless thousands of people. You look at the census and you see now how very, very important immigration is to our national life, to our national development. So we should have a modern, world-class immigration service. But that also is occurring at an enormously dynamic time, where not only is there a tremendous amount of institutional reform that has occurred but that also needs to continue. There are also major changes that have been made in our immigration laws that have created additional workloads and that probably will continue to create additional workloads. The Congress has legislated major new laws beginning in 1996 that have been important policy steps to deal with immigration, but all of them have generated workloads that have been largely unanticipated. And in addition to that, we've had a number of natural disasters. We had Hurricane Mitch. We've had the earthquakes in El Salvador. In those situations, we've had large numbers of people illegally in the country from those countries, and decisions have been made that those people should be able to stay while their countries are rebuilding. That generates applications for work permits so that those people have legal papers. All of those things are part of the immigration picture, but they all manifest themselves in very, very substantial workloads and dramatic shift in the kinds and in the volume of workloads that the immigration service needs to handle. So everybody needs to work together on this.</s>MANN: Doris Meissner, now of the Carnegie Endowment, formerly of the INS, thanks so much for being with us. We have to take another break. When we come back - how all of this affects you. Stay with us for that.</s>MANN: Welcome back. For most people moving to the United States are hoping to stay here. The immigration service's own problems seem a lot less compelling than theirs. Where do you turn? Joining us now to talk about the kind of things people should or shouldn't do is Denyse Sabagh, an immigration attorney with Duane Morris, an international immigration law firm. Thanks so much for being with us. The former commissioner had lots to say, but let me ask you to say what is on most people's minds - when people call up and they want help, what should they do? Do you just tell them to wait like the rest of us?</s>DENYSE SABAGH, IMMIGRATION LAWYER: Well, when people call up and want help, basically the first hope is they've called an immigration lawyer to begin with. Because a lot of the cases that we get are people that haven't used an immigration lawyer and then have no idea where they are in the process or what exactly is going on with their case.</s>MANN: A crucial point, but let me ask you again - forms and government processes in this country are supposed to be open to everyone, rich or poor. Bottom line, people need to find the money to fire an attorney?</s>SABAGH: I would say, in this instance, yes. Unless it's a simple procedure like a relative visa petition, then I would say that they do need an attorney, especially for employment-based cases and cases where there has been problems in the past with immigration or criminal convictions or having difficulty getting visas at the embassy. Then they need attorneys. It should be an open process. But unfortunately, it's incredibly complicated. The system in the United States is very highly regulated and tightly controlled.</s>MANN: An attorney in their home country, an ad in the paper, an 800 number - how careful do people have to be about the help that they seek?</s>SABAGH: I think that probably the best way to look for an immigration lawyer is to get referrals from people that have already used lawyers that they like. There is the American Immigration Lawyers Association that has a referral service. I think that the embassies probably have lists of lawyers at the embassies. But I think that that's probably the best way - don't go to the yellow pages. Don't just look for an 800 number. You have to feel comfortable with who you're hiring. You have to feel that you can understand them. If you don't understand what they're saying, they're not going to be able to explain it to anybody else.</s>MANN: OK. Everyone who's watching us now is looking to you for some free advice at this moment. Are there any clever tricks, are there any simple things people really should keep in mind that it's going to make it easier for them?</s>SABAGH: Well, I think if they get off to the right start, and they have realistic expectations. They have an understanding of the time that it will take to process their case, I think it will make it easier for them. A lot of the problems come from the fact, as Doris Meissner said, that there is really this long wait. The backlogs are getting longer. People think that if they apply, they're going to be able to come in right away. And that's just not the case. Each process - step in the process takes a certain period of time. We have fairly good projections about how long those times will be, in the ballpark, not to the exact time. I think if they really understand how it works, then at least their expectations will be realistic and they won't always be wondering what happened with my case? Where is it?</s>MANN: What's the hardest thing? Is it getting into the country to begin with? Is it getting a green card if you're in? Is it becoming a citizen once you have a green card?</s>SABAGH: I think the hardest thing is to get a green card. In the United States, a lot of times when people come in and see us, they tell us how great they are. They'd be a great benefit to the United States, and they'd really like to come and get a green card, and what do they need to do? And the way our system is set up is you really have to fit yourself in a little box. It's like we have a system where if you don't fit yourself in one of the categories, you just can't come. So the hardest way - I think the hardest thing in the process is actually obtaining permanent residency, a green card. And again, if it's employment-based, it's probably the hardest because it's usually a three-step process which includes a labor certification by the employer who tests the labor market, an employment visa petition and then the actual application for the green card. A little tip might be that if somebody is in the process and they're actually at step three where they can apply for their green card, because the processing at the embassies now is a little faster, they might want to process at home at their embassy if they don't have any other problems with their case.</s>MANN: On that note and with that good counsel, Denyse Sabagh of Duane Morris, thank you so much for being with us.</s>SABAGH: You're welcome.</s>MANN: And that's INSIGHT for this day. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues. END TO ORDER VIDEOTAPES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF CNN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FROM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com