Well before 9/11, the  Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was broken and needed a major reorganization. Improvements in both its enforcement and visa processing functions, long overdue and some years in the making were on the verge of being adopted.   In the wake of the tragedy, however, with passage of the Homeland Security Act, efforts to fix INS gave way to superseding concerns about coordinating security and antiterrorism under a single federal roof.
An increasing number of employers based in northern New England no longer have the luxury of relying upon traditional domestic sources of manpower to staff their workforces.  Many businesses in the hospitality and resort, health care, manufacturing, food processing and agricultural sectors are sophisticated consumers of visa processing services historically provided by INS.  As a result, creation of the Department of Homeland Security this past November could have substantial implications for businesses whose seasonal employees, technical specialists, professionals and trainees routinely come in contact with federal immigration officials.

Under the Act, INS will be eliminated as a single agency, in favor of separate bureaus: the Bureau of Border and Transportation Security and Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.  The first Bureau will be responsible for preventing the entry of terrorists into the US, securing the borders, carrying out the immigration enforcement functions and establishing immigration enforcement policies and priorities.  The second will be responsible for deciding and approving all visa applications, including asylum and refugee applications.

Whether the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can meet a March 1 deadline for redeploying the 30,000 current employees of INS is unclear.  Coordinating this transition, as with the rest of Homeland Security — which will absorb parts of 22 agencies and 170,000 workers in total — will be a monumental task.  It may well be that the INS as we know it today is around for a good long while.  
But even after INS is subsumed and the separation of enforcement and visa processing functions is complete, it is not likely that U.S. immigration officials will have any greater degree of success in solving the deficiencies that plagued the INS for decades.  When both functions were under the same roof, INS had a dismal record in carrying out its enforcement and visa processing mandates.  For example, last July, INS resurrected an old requirement that aliens living in the U.S. report any change of address to the INS within 10 days of moving.  By September, INS offices were flooded with 700,000 change-of-address cards – most of which have been gathering dust ever since.  The INS did not have the capacity to process such data when the notification program was revived and neither will DHS, at least not soon.

Despite the fact that INS’s budget rose from $1.2 billion in 1993 to nearly $6 billion in the fiscal year that ended September 30, 2002, INS has never been given enough money by Congress to upgrade its technology infrastructure and ensure adequate training.  Going forward, it is certainly not clear that Congress and the Bush administration are committed to boosting the budgets of the two replacement bureaus, especially with the federal government expected to run deficits in the coming years.

Despite demands that immigration services must improve, most observers believe the technology fixes and staffing required to prevent delays and backlogs in visa issuance will not be a priority in the new Department.  This is because DHS managers will be emphasizing security and interpreting their immigration mandate through the prism of enforcement.  Examples of this phenomenon are already becoming apparent.  INS’s new Special Registration Program requires citizens of 20 countries (predominantly Arab countries and those where the dominant religion is Islam) who reside in the U.S. on nonimmigrant visas to personally register with INS.  Across the country, hundreds of persons who have tried to comply prior to the January 10 deadline have been detained by INS or had deportation proceedings initiated against them for a variety of reasons.  Critics of the Special Registration Program emphasize that persons who are adverse to U.S. interests and wish us harm are unlikely to register and the Program imposes discriminatory harm upon those who are legally here. 
Visa processing services and enforcement are two sides of the same coin and must be closely coordinated and subject to the same interpretations of law and policy.  This need for close coordination is especially evident at ports of entry across the U.S. and in other countries where INS mans pre-inspection facilities. 

Employers who interact with INS in the area of visa processing and business immigration services should expect an increased number of delays and errors as the new Department figures out how to perform its immigration functions while it also implements new monitoring programs and roots out old inefficiencies.  Given both the current preoccupation with enforcement (rather than visa services) and the unwieldy transition of resources into a new bureaucracy, visa processing errors and backlogs are likely to get worse, not better, during 2003.