Reason Magazine - Staff

Reinventing the Border

comments@ceousa.org (Daniel W. Sutherland) — Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:00:00 EST

The country faced a crisis along the southern border. Illegal immigration and drug smuggling were flourishing from San Diego to Brownsville. Commentators argued that "foreign influences" were corrupting the country and demanded severe restrictions on immigration; some called for the commander-in-chief to send in the troops.

After months of study, the president announced a new plan in his State of the Union address. The problem, he argued, was that too many agencies were patrolling the border. Interagency rivalry and inefficiency were rampant, crippling enforcement efforts and wasting scarce tax dollars. It would make more sense to assemble the competing agencies into one lean, professional unit.

The president who delivered that speech was Herbert Hoover; the drug being smuggled was alcohol. After a lengthy fight, Congress rejected his plan.

Seven decades later, lawmakers are considering similar proposals. In the waning days of the last Congress, the Republican leadership slipped into its budget package a plan to break the Immigration and Naturalization Service into two separate agencies, one to provide services to legal immigrants and one to guard the border. Congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration fended off the proposal, but Republican leaders have promised to revive the issue in 1999. The immigration committees on Capitol Hill, recently dominated by contentious philosophic and economic debates, will now spend much more time analyzing blueprints for restructuring the INS and its Border Patrol.

The need for some sort of radical INS reform is increasingly obvious. Since 1992, the INS's annual budget has nearly tripled to nearly $4 billion. It has almost 15,000 more employees than when Clinton took office, with more officers allowed to carry a gun than any other federal law enforcement agency, including the FBI and the DEA. The number of Border Patrol agents has risen from about 3,000 to more than 7,000. The results are less than impressive:

In 1996, more than 300,000 people were waiting for the INS to process their citizenship paperwork. Now, more than 1.5 million people are in line. Residents of large cities, such as Chicago and Los Angeles, may wait as long as four years.
In 1986, when Congress granted an amnesty to illegal immigrants, 3 million people signed up. Today, there are 5 million illegal immigrants in the United States. In other words, the problem is almost twice as large as when we last tried to wipe the slate clean and start over.
According to a 1998 San Francisco Chronicle series, the buildup along the southern border has been "largely to no avail." Recent research by Wayne Cornelius and Claudia Smith at the University of California at San Diego suggests that the heightened controls may have simply encouraged illegals to stick around once they get here: "Short-term shuttle migration"--the academic term for working here illegally for a short period and then returning home--may be giving way to more-permanent illegal immigration.
Legal immigrants, and the businesses and families that sponsor them, are complaining of increasingly shabby service from the INS. Carl Shusterman, a Los Angeles immigration attorney, recently told the Los Angeles Times, "This is the very first time in my 22 years practicing immigration law where the entire system--not just naturalization, but the entire system--seems to be melting down."
Violence along the border has skyrocketed, and so have citizen complaints. At one point, the Border Patrol actually asked Congress to stop authorizing money for it until it could adequately train and equip its new hires. (Congress refused.)

Small wonder, then, that a recent House report concluded that the "INS is overwhelmed with the task of handling its responsibilities, resulting in a broken immigration system." Under the circumstances, Congress can hardly avoid re-examining the entire structure of the immigration bureaucracy.

The most modest proposal is the one offered last fall, to divide the INS in two. Some scholars have revived Hoover's idea to merge all the federal law enforcement agencies with responsibilities along the southern border, including the Border Patrol, the Customs Service, the DEA, and the Agriculture Department. Still others propose merging all of the bureaus that facilitate legal immigration, including significant parts of the State and Labor departments, into one independent agency similar to the Social Security Administration. Some of its duties could even be privatized.

Now two congressmen have taken it upon themselves to shepherd INS reform through Congress. One is Texas Democrat Silvestre Reyes. Before being elected in 1994, Reyes was chief of the Border Patrol sector that includes El Paso. He gained national prominence by creating "Operation Hold the Line," an initiative credited with virtually eliminating the flow of illegal immigrants through that city's business district. In 1997, Reyes drafted a bill to divide the INS in two, much like the Republicans' 1998 proposal. When Reyes speaks of the need to overhaul the agency where he worked for more than 25 years, his colleagues listen.

The other key congressman is Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), the chair of the subcommittee that appropriates the INS's budget. After nearly 15 years of trying to fix the agency's abysmal financial accounting systems and byzantine organizational chart, Rogers decided enough was enough: "It's just time we admit that this agency just will not work and assign the chores to agencies that have proven records and can be held accountable," he told Marcus Stern of the Copley News Service.

Rogers has been especially frustrated by the INS's ineffectual efforts to "reinvent" itself. The INS has announced major reorganization plans four times this decade, in 1991, 1994, 1997, and 1998. Its problems have remained intractable. "Same people. Same problems. Same shortcomings," Rogers says. It is always dangerous for a federal agency to anger the chairman of the committee that appropriates its funding.

Congressional Democrats now find themselves in a difficult position. Reyes is their most knowledgeable spokesman on immigration issues, and his proposals have a clear Democratic pedigree: The Carter administration pursued a major overhaul of the agency, and in 1990, then-Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) introduced a sweeping reform bill. On the other hand, Al Gore has been trumpeting his "national performance review" project--his much-heralded effort to reinvent the federal government--as evidence of his suitability for the presidency. Gore has long pointed to the "new INS" as evidence of his project's success and therefore has resisted, and encouraged congressional Democrats to resist, any proposals that would call his past efforts into question.

The Republicans, meanwhile, face a much clearer path, mostly because INS reform is one topic the party's feuding factions can agree on. Prominent Republicans have clashed over California's Proposition 187 (the 1994 initiative prohibiting illegal immigrants from receiving government services, including education and medical care), over welfare benefits for legal immigrants, over proposals for a national ID card, and over the number of foreign workers Silicon Valley should be allowed to import. Pat Buchanan and Pete Wilson have traded barbs with Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp. Lamar Smith of Texas chairs the House Immigration Subcommittee, and Spencer Abraham of Michigan holds the Senate's equivalent post; both are conservative Republicans, but their views on immigration are diametrically opposed. Yet there's one thing they all agree on: The INS is a costly disaster.

Furthermore, party leaders think INS reform could be a winning issue with Hispanic voters. Nearly every Latino with a relative, neighbor, or business associate who has recently immigrated can relate an INS horror story. The Border Patrol is particularly hated. Because Hispanics have recently voted against the GOP by large majorities, many Republicans are eager to develop proposals that would appeal to Latino voters. INS reform may be one such proposal.

Since President Hoover announced his plan in 1929, more than two dozen congressional committees, blue-ribbon commissions, and executive agencies have made similar recommendations. Each time, entrenched interests derailed reform. Given recent developments, some sort of change may finally be on the way. If nothing else, one of the government's poorest-performing agencies will finally receive serious public scrutiny. And that, in itself, is reason to cheer.

Identity Crisis

comments@ceousa.org (Daniel W. Sutherland) — Mon, 01 Dec 1997 00:00:00 EST

Last November, Republican Rep. Robert Dornan lost his Orange County, California, congressional seat by 984 votes. A former test pilot, actor, and talk show host nicknamed "B-1 Bob" could not be expected to step quietly into retirement. The day after the election, the fiery former presidential candidate called a press conference to charge his opponent, Loretta Sanchez, with stealing the election. He claimed there had been widespread voter fraud, that thousands of noncitizens had gone to the polls to support Sanchez.

Little did Dornan know that, in addition to sparking a fascinating congressional investigation, his case would expose fundamental weaknesses in one of the most sweeping programs regulating private employment decisions ever implemented by the federal government. The attempt to document his charges would show that the Immigration and Naturalization Service is not up to the task of making sure that new employees are legally authorized to work in this country. In fact, notwithstanding the reassurances of politicians who back such a verification program, any serious attempt to meet this goal will require some form of national ID card.

Dornan's supporters focused their attention on Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a company hired by the INS to help immigrants prepare for the citizenship test. The Hispanic advocacy group was paid to teach immigrants a few highlights of American history, explain how our government is organized, and drill them on practice tests. It also did something for which it was not paid: It registered the immigrants to vote. The evidence suggested that several hundred noncitizens may have voted in Dornan's district, the vast majority for Sanchez.

Dornan eagerly shared this discovery with his former colleagues on Capitol Hill, and the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation. Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) came up with a logical idea: Why not compare the INS's list of legal immigrants with the Orange County voter rolls? If more than 984 people appeared on both lists, a new election would be necessary. In late April, Thomas sent a letter to the INS requesting this information.

Thomas's letter put Clinton administration officials in an awkward position. They certainly did not want to assist an investigation that might overturn the election of a new ally, and they were especially reluctant to help a man perhaps best known for loudly challenging the president's integrity and patriotism. Administration officials were tempted to argue that inherent limitations in INS databases prevented them from assisting the investigation.

But claiming that INS databases were unreliable would jeopardize another Clinton administration priority: cracking down on illegal immigration. Under the administration's pilot "employment verification project," an employer who wants to hire someone claiming to be a legal immigrant types information about the applicant into a computer linked to the INS. The INS computer checks the name against its databases and electronically confirms whether or not the person is eligible to work. In other words, at the same time that Thomas was asking the INS to verify the immigration status of new voters, the administration was promoting a project that supposedly could verify the immigration status of new workers. Even more inconvenient was the fact that the project was being tested at several hundred companies in Dornan's congressional district.

After several weeks of stalling followed by congressional subpoenas, the administration finally settled on a strategy. On May 21, Thomas received a letter from INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, stating that the INS could not confirm the immigration status of new voters. "Since INS data have been assembled in many places over many years in different formats," Meissner wrote, "a simple electronic match will not produce completely reliable information."

She claimed developing a reliable list of ineligible voters would require INS employees to search both computer and paper files, a process that would take months. The list that Meissner attached to her letter, based on a preliminary review of INS records, was startling: Half a million Orange County voters appeared in the agency's records as noncitizens. A few days later, the INS produced a second list. When both first and last names, along with dates of birth, were matched, more than 18,000 people appeared to be both immigrants and voters. The figures were so ludicrous that Dornan could do little with them.

As if the letter were not embarrassing enough, the agency mistakenly addressed it to "William C. Thomas." As the committee chairman noted at a May 21 press conference, "My mother and father would be shocked, because they named me William Marshall Thomas....If they can't even get my name right, there is a degree of concern about the accuracy of the list."

But the Clinton administration was not about to admit that its employment verification project was a failure. In fact, the White House was preparing to expand the project dramatically. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, a bill promoted by the administration and enacted by congressional Republicans desperate to prove they could govern in a bipartisan manner, requires the project to clear citizens as well as noncitizens. Accordingly, the administration is merging INS and Social Security system databases to create a worker registry--a list of all people who are authorized to work in this country. Armed with this new database, the administration is encouraging companies to make sure that prospective employees, citizens and noncitizens alike, are on the government's list before they begin work.

The law requires that the project be tested in five of the seven largest states. Given the number of people who change jobs or enter the labor force each year, it is likely that the expanded employment verification system will be used millions of times during the next few years. In September 2001, Congress will vote on whether the project should become a mandatory nationwide program. Unimpeded by the admission that INS databases are unreliable, the worker registry is steadily expanding.

The Dornan election challenge is not the first time the nascent national identification program has proven awkward for the Clinton administration. In February 1995, the White House called a meeting of skeptical advocacy groups to convince them of the wonders of electronic verification. A meeting at the White House is a rare privilege, so the representatives of the groups made sure they were in their assigned places at the scheduled time. A White House aide eventually took the podium to explain that Meissner was running late. Ten minutes passed, then 20. Finally, a harried Meissner appeared, a half hour after the meeting was supposed to begin. The activists later learned that the holdup was not a traffic jam or an urgent telephone call: Meissner had been stopped by White House security. It seems the INS commissioner, on her way to make a speech about the effectiveness of verifying a person's identity through a federal computer database, had been late because the White House computer security system would not accept her identification documents. Needless to say, the project gained few new supporters at the meeting.

Administration officials are not the only ones who've been put in uncomfortable situations by the employment verification project. During the House Judiciary Committee's deliberations on last year's immigration bill, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) introduced a proposal to give the Labor Department several hundred new wage-and-hour investigators. If more investigators were patrolling the nation's factories, he reasoned, there would be less exploitation of both legal and illegal workers. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) vehemently argued the standard conservative line: Government interference in American business has been destructive and must be curtailed. He suggested that Berman was just another liberal Democrat who didn't get the message of the 1994 elections. Smith's speech would have been more compelling had he not, only minutes earlier, convinced his colleagues to insert into the bill a plan to make every business in America obtain approval from a federal database before hiring new employees. Berman suggested that his colleague might want to let the ink dry on his national identification project before again decrying the federal government's size and influence.

As Republican supporters of a worker registry prepared their legislative strategy, the most ticklish problem was to avoid the dreaded "national ID card" label. They concluded that the government could reliably verify that people are who they say they are only by assigning everyone a unique and secure number. It would be logical and efficient to issue a card or document with the number printed on it. To guard against counterfeiting, the card would need to be encoded with biometric data such as a fingerprint, retina scan, voice pattern, or blood sample. But the sponsors of the immigration legislation could not admit this is where the law would lead.

Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) took every opportunity to reassure the public: "A `national ID card' is not necessary, and I have always opposed such an approach." Rep. Smith took the same line: "I oppose a national ID card, and that is exactly why the legislation is written the way it is." Those who remained skeptical were told that they didn't need to take the sponsors' word for it; the legislation specifically prohibited the development of a national ID card. Section 404(h)(2) of the bill reads, "Nothing in this subtitle shall be construed to authorize, directly or indirectly, the issuance or use of national identification cards or the establishment of a national identification card."

But that provision was just window dressing. The law does not prohibit a national ID card; it merely says that nothing in that particular subtitle should be read to encourage one. Pilot projects testing the feasibility of a national ID card were tucked away in other subtitles.

There is, for instance, one to determine the feasibility of issuing all Americans and authorized immigrants a "durable," "tamper-resistant" Social Security card. Another provision requires Americans who live in remote areas near our northern border to hold an identity card that contains biometric information. Under the plan, some northern border stations will be equipped with card-reading machines. When an American tries to re-enter the country after the border station's normal business hours, he will insert his card into the machine. The machine will either take a picture of his hand and compare it to the hand geometry contained in the card, or it will ask him to speak into a microphone so it can compare his voice to a voice pattern encoded in the card. If the machine verifies his identity, the border gate will open. The law authorizes a similar project on the southern border, requiring that "border crossing cards" include "biometric data" that is "machine-readable." The legislation also calls for an investigation of whether driver's licenses could be used as national ID cards.

Simpson, set to retire just a few weeks after the law passed, abandoned all pretense when he gave a speech on the Senate floor reviewing his final legislative accomplishment. He candidly predicted that the worker registry would lead to "a more secure identifier," such as "a slide-through card like you use with a Visa when you make a purchase, perhaps some type of driver's license photograph, retina examination like they have done in California." Had Simpson stated during the floor debate that his bill would hasten the day when the federal government will issue an identification card encoded with a "retina examination," the law would have failed by a landslide.

Simpson and his allies clearly believed that Americans are afraid of anything that smacks of a national ID card. Is such a fear justified? When the federal government assembles a comprehensive list of all people residing within our borders, and supplements it with biometric information on each person, it will offer bureaucrats and politicians a tempting tool for all sorts of projects. The Department of Health and Human Services already plans to use a National Directory of New Hires, established by the 1996 welfare law, to enforce child-support payments (See "Kiddie Cops," Citings, page 10); a complete worker registry would enable it to dig deeper. Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.) has introduced a bill that would allow the use of the worker registry to verify new voters. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has suggested that parents could screen domestic help by means of "digital voice biometrics" over the telephone. Actor Carroll O'Connor has proposed using a national ID system to monitor drug dealers. Dan Stein, a leading anti-immigration activist, has suggested that a national identifier could be used to monitor gun sales.

Deadbeat dads. Voter fraud. Child abuse. Gun violence. Drug trafficking. And that's just for starters. In Pakistan, the government is considering a proposal that its national ID card include blood group information to assist in AIDS screening. One could imagine social conservatives in this country supporting such an idea. In Kenya, the national ID card lists the bearer's tribe, making it easier for the government to monitor the activities of the president's opponents. Such information might be useful in this country as well--helping affirmative action programs, say. In Taiwan, fingerprints are included on all national ID cards, so the police have a comprehensive fingerprint bank to consult when they investigate a crime. The FBI would certainly welcome the opportunity to develop a similar database.

The promise of a national identification system is that it would make government more efficient and effective. That's also the problem.