April 2, 2002

Inside the Immigration and Naturalization Service

Questions for Commissioner (and GW Alum) James Ziglar

James Ziglar, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) commissioner, lectured at GW’s Law School Feb. 26. After his lecture, he answered audience members’ questions. Prior to his current position at the INS, Ziglar was sergeant-at-arms of the United States Senate. His previous positions include managing director of PaineWebber Incorporated; assistant secretary of the interior for water and science; and director of operations for the Bureau of Reclamation, the US Geological Survey and the Bureau of Mines. Ziglar received his undergraduate degree and his law degree from GW and is a member of the New York, DC, Virginia, and Arizona bars. 

The following is an excerpt from the question and answer portion of that lecture.

Audience Question: Has the Immigration and Naturalization Service done, or will the service do, anything about the visas that the State Department issued to terrorists who had been recruited by the CIA and its then-asset, Osama bin Laden in Saudi Arabia?

James Ziglar: You obviously have access to information that I’m not aware of in those particulars, but, if you’re talking about the 19 that came in, they all got visas from the State Department. That’s true. I have to tell you, at the time that the State Department issued visas to those individuals, there was no information available to the State Department or to us about those individuals. Now, it may have been in the CIA or the FBI, but it wasn’t available to us. One of the issues that is out there in restructuring the security structure in this country is the sharing of information among agencies so that we can identify those people who we know to be terrorists or criminal aliens or whatever they happen to be. That is a key issue. The State Department still has the responsibility for issuing, but I can tell you that they are concerned about it, and I’ve been working with them daily trying to enhance our systems so that we have this information.

Audience Question: As a Canadian, one of the concerns we have is that our very different immigration policies are going to come under fire and there will be pressure from the American government for the two main border countries, Mexico and Canada, to also change their policies to reflect American policy. Can you comment on that?

JZ: We are in the process of trying to work on a third safe country agreement with the Canadians so that we don’t have some of these problems we have at the border about where somebody should be seeking asylum. The Canadians and ourselves have been working together to see if there isn’t a way that we can synchronize our policies a little more closely in the refugee and in the asylum area so that at least with respect to trading information, we can deal with people who are not seeking asylum in a legitimate sense. I think that we’re going to be able to work with the Canadians very cooperatively. We will be working with the Mexicans at some point, but that’s a very different situation.

Audience Question: Before Sept. 11, the front page news was the administration’s plan to possibly grant amnesty to Mexican workers and possibly to out-of-status workers from other Latin American countries, as well. That issue has only begun to resurface in the past couple of weeks. I’m wondering to what extent you think that will resurface with President’s Bush and Fox and what your personal stand is on that program?

JZ: First, let me clarify something. The word amnesty keeps getting thrown around and that, to my knowledge, and I’ve been in the middle of all these talks, has never been on the table — like the 1986 amnesty, for example. A number of concepts about regularization of equal status tied to, for example, a temporary worker program, and a variety of different iterations of this are out there. Obviously, Sept. 11 brought that to a halt. We’ve had several meetings with the Mexicans since Sept. 11. The President still wants to deal with the problem we have in this country of people who are in illegal status. Let’s be honest about it. We’ve got seven million people in this country that are in illegal status, they have been here for a very long time, they contribute to the economy, they provide a lot of labor that cities like Las Vegas would probably go out of business if it weren’t for the illegal labor that they have. Probably about four million of them are Mexicans. They’re here. There are not enough resources in the INS, the FBI, or any law enforcement agency to go out and round up seven million people and kick them out of the country, and I don’t think that people would want to. But we’ve got to enforce our laws and we’ve got to come up with a way to come to closure and to deal with this problem about folks here who are illegal. I think we need to deal with this, and it’s going to be very politically difficult to do that this year, particularly right on top of Sept. 11 and in an election year.

Audience Question: You talked briefly in your speech about reorganizing several important agencies. Could you expand on that a little?

JZ: There are a variety of ideas out there. One is to have a huge border management agency that would include INS, customs, Coast Guard, and the agricultural inspection division of the Department of Agriculture. That would be a gigantic agency that would reach literally from the heart of America — from the interior enforcement out to the whole world with what some people would think would be a seamless web. I have some personal concerns about it, but if the President says that is what he’s going to do, I will support it. I think it’s a management migraine to just know the cultures of the particular agencies. There’s a little overlap, but there’s something to be said for redundancy in protecting your borders. There are all sorts of other options down to doing nothing except strengthening each one of those agencies. I think the decision will be made on that in the near future.

Audience Question: If anyone has dealt with the INS on a regional or local level, it’s very difficult to get through. I was wondering if anything was being done to facilitate the means by which an alien, or anyone else, can access information or speak to someone at the INS?

JZ: That’s a huge problem. We are expanding our telephone center, we are expanding our access to the interactive Web sites — a place people can go online, for example, to view the status of their case. You have to understand the magnitude of what’s happened. We have had in the last six years more applications for naturalization in the country than we had in the prior 40 years combined. The work load at the INS is just overwhelming. Our systems have never kept up.

Audience Question: In transnational adoptions, it would appear that international cooperation between the INS and the equivalents of foreign countries would be crucial in an area like that. I was wondering if you could speak about that process and what other cooperations you have and if you’ve learned that the deficit in information sharing that you’ve had domestically among the FBI and the CIA and the NSA and the INS gave rise to Sept. 11?

JZ: I can’t tell you whether Sept. 11 would not have happened if we had better information sharing, whether on an international or and intranational basis. I have a feeling that odds of not having it happen would have been better, but I can’t tell whether it did or didn’t make the difference. I can tell you that there is an absolute commitment to sharing information in the government and we have a lot of our partners overseas who now feel threatened. International cooperation is clearly getting better and I think will get better yet. With respect to the adoptions, our international adoption process works just fine if the country from which the baby is being adopted has a legitimate transparent system like the Chinese. The Chinese probably have the best system around. It works just fine. The problem is that our system is cockeyed when you’ve got a situation in a country like Cambodia, particularly, or Vietnam to a lesser extent, where the system is not without corruption, it is not regulated. In those situations, we find that the facilitators and the adoption agencies get American citizens into an adoption system, they get them identified to a kid, and they get them over there. Then we find out that that child is not an orphan. The baby may have been sold, the baby may have been stolen. We’ve had some of those cases. The emotional trauma for the family and the political pressure you get in this job to look the other way, which I’m not willing to do, is enormous. That’s why I announced in December a complete revamping of our system so that it will reflect what’s called the Hague Convention on intercountry adoptions. The Hague Convention actually does provide a model system for countries to adopt so that we never get into a situation where a child is introduced to a prospective adoptive parent until we know that child is an orphan under our system or somebody else’s system.

Audience Question: I understand that some foreign airlines don’t give their manifests to the US before the planes land on our soil. What’s being done to rectify that?

JZ: We have the statutory power to impose that requirement and on land conveyances, too. We will have a regulation that says you can’t come into this country if you don’t give us an advance manifest of who’s on your plane. But I have to tell you, for years before Sept. 11, about 80 percent of the airlines were already providing that. It’s about 85 percent now. So this is not like the whole world is saying, “No, we’re not going to give you our manifests.” This has been done for a long time and it will allow you to figure out if you’ve got a criminal that you know something about.

Audience Question: I hope in addressing the culture of the INS you will include the problem in communication by practicing attorneys reaching or trying to contact the INS attorneys. It’s not that they all change their telephone numbers, but even if we have them we can’t get through or get return calls. It confuses the system and makes it more inefficient. It takes more time on all sides.

JZ: I agree that we’ve got a problem with communications and getting back. We’re begging, screaming, and pleading for as many resources as we can to try and resolve it. Technology will help, but it is not the only answer, just like security. You’ve got to have a human being to answer a question that a computer can’t.

Audience Question: Regarding interpretation of the immigration laws, immigration authorities sometimes don’t consider it as humanly as they should.

JZ: You’re talking about the exercise of discretion that’s not consistent from place to place?

Audience Question: There is no humanistic approach…

JZ: I’m trying to do a restructuring of this agency because of the inconsistent application of the law. You go from district to district and you may have a district director someplace who came from the enforcement side. Then you get a district director somewhere else who came from the service side and they see the world in very different terms. So this person would say, “We’re going to grant humanitarian parole.” The other person would say, “The heck with you,” and there’s no real standard. I hate to say it, but a lot of our 33 district directors have created kingdoms in their own right. That’s one of the reasons I’ve got to change the chain of command so that in the adjudications in the service side, we have consistent policies about how we’re going to do things.

 

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