Reorganization of INS?

The INS that is certainly getting on in years is to be restructured. After James Ziglar has taken office as the new director of the INS, the debate about a reorganization has been sparked again. President George W. Bush had already made this one of his most important tasks during the presidential campaign. He and Congress are planning to divide the INS into two departments:

At present, the INS has two fields of responsibility: on the one hand, they offer services in the fields of immigration, asylum and naturalization. On the other hand, the INS is also responsible for some other fields, such as police work to ensure border security. This includes, for example, border management and control, deportations, as well as identifying illegal immigrants. The US government now wants separate departments to take care of these different tasks. On this, Bush is supporting the suggestion of one Texan Member of Congress, Sheila Jackso-Lee (Democrat), to create the office of an attorney general as part of the Justice Department who will supervise both departments.

Ziglar doesn't believe that such a separation makes sense. Instead, he suggested to split the INS into two divisions, one for service and one for police work, leaving both under the roof of just one department. The Bureau of Immigration Enforcement would be responsible for border security, investigation and intelligence services. The other one, the Bureau of Immigration Services, on the other hand, would only be responsible for processing residence permits of all kinds. Furthermore, there is a plan to create the position of an ombudsman, an "Office of Customer Relation," as well as combining all administrative regions and districts into nine "Service Areas."

After taking office Ziglar announced that his emphasis would be on improving the INS' efficiency. Ever since the mid-90s there has been a backlog of naturalization applications and green cards outside the lottery (1994: 1 million, 2000: 3.9 million).

Applicants have to face waiting times of more than two years at the INS. Ziglar wants to reduce this to six months.

At present the INS has 34,000 employees and an annual budget of 10.3 billion DM. President Bush announced that he was planning to raise the budget to 11.8 billion DM for the reforms and create 1,300 new jobs.