Record snafu undermines INS efforts

Recently, there were calls for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to step up its enforcement of the rules that require immigrants to keep the U.S. government abreast of their whereabouts and what they are doing.

In an editorial at the time, we suggested that in a free and open country of nearly 280 million people, such efforts will never be perfect. But we encouraged the INS to restore some sanity to the way it tracks non-citizens in our midst.

Little did we know, however, what an enormous problem that is for the INS.

A few days ago we learned that the INS has been warehousing more than 2 million documents from hundreds of thousands of immigrants who properly sent in change-of-address notices, applications for benefits and applications for citizenship. Some of the documents date back to the early 1990s.

The INS, faced with the renewed effort to keep tabs on immigrants, has conceded that its vigilance in this area has been lax. "We were a backwater agency 10 years ago," said INS spokesman Bill Strassberger.

Somehow, that response to what appears to be a critical lapse in paperwork sounds a bit lame.

More than that, publicity about the stored documents, which have never been officially reviewed, raises the possibility that some foreigners have been deported after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks for failure to comply with notification requirements, even though they may have been in full compliance. INS officials say that isn't the case.

Critics of the way the INS operates have raised the volume in the wake of news stories about the Kansas City-area warehouse full of unprocessed INS documents.

A real concern are the 200,000 change-of-address notices languishing there. Even though the INS insists no one has been improperly deported because of the paperwork snafu, the fact remains that those 200,000 individuals are at risk of running afoul of the new push for compliance.

Let's hope that the INS, at the least, has some way of expediently checking to see if immigrants who claim they have filed the proper notices have, indeed, done so. This means the INS is going to need a lot of people to track down pieces of paper stored in a warehouse. Is the INS up to this task?