Immigration Overload

hose who trek to the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Omaha office need to fortify themselves with patience. The 10,000-square-foot district office-located in a nondescript industrial park near a busy thoroughfare-is regularly overrun with visitors seeking visas, permanent resident status cards, citizenship papers and plain old immigration advice.

The Omaha office, which also oversees three satellite INS offices in Iowa, is open four days a week for walk-up inquiries. On a typical day, 200 people come to seek meetings with INS officials; everyone who shows up by 2 p.m. is supposed to be seen that day, even if it means they have to wait another three hours.

In the past eight years, the number of daily visitors to the office has quadrupled, says Michael A. Went, INS' acting district director in Omaha. Citizenship applications alone are expected to reach 5,000 this year, almost four times what they were in 1994. Because of these trends, an office that in 1990 had 29 employees and a budget of $349,000 has grown into one with 107 employees and a $2.4 million budget.

A new, 65,000-square-foot district office is on the drawing board, but it isn't expected to be completed until 2001. Its arrival won't come a day too soon. When Government Executive visited the office in August, its small waiting room was already full, with latecomers left to wait outside in the drizzle. (INS officials subsequently worked out a deal with a neighboring business to expand its waiting area.)

The reason for the boom in immigration-related questions is simple. Immigrants, both legal and illegal, have been flocking to the Great Plains to work in restaurants, hotels, agribusinesses and-perhaps most importantly-meat-packing plants. Unemployment in the region is low, and jobs are plentiful.

The stream of immigration has bothered some Nebraskans, who blame the newcomers-often unfairly-for crime, substandard living conditions and increased social-service costs. The clamor has encouraged politicians to hold INS officials accountable for cracking down on undocumented workers. Such concerns have translated into budget and staff increases for the Omaha office, mostly in money earmarked for law enforcement.

Then, earlier this year, an odd thing happened. INS officials became disenchanted with their usual tactic of periodically raiding factories. So they switched to a strategy called Operation Vanguard, in which officials regularly check employees' work papers against federal databases to determine if they are legal residents. Agency observers expected that the new approach would be more humane, but to the surprise of many outside INS, it also worked far better at rooting out undocumented workers than the old system of raids did.

Vanguard forced up to a quarter of meatpacking workers out of their jobs virtually overnight. Businesses faced major disruptions in what already was a period of agonizingly low commodity prices. Suddenly, some of the citizens and politicians who had been urging INS to get tough on illegal immigrants changed course and began asking for greater leniency instead. Meatpacking executives even asked Latino activists-with whom they had often tangled over working conditions-to form an odd-bedfellow coalition in opposition to Vanguard.

So far, however, such lobbying efforts haven't done much to convince INS officials, either in Omaha or in Washington. On the contrary, INS intends to bring the Vanguard concept to other states and to other industries in the coming months-as long as it can nail down an agreement with the Social Security Administration over the use of its databases. "I think Vanguard is working better than the community and the employers anticipated," Went says. "I take the complaints as a backhanded compliment."

More Jobs, More Immigrants

For most of this century, Nebraska was home to only a modest population of Latinos. But their numbers began to increase greatly about a decade ago, when the meatpacking industry significantly expanded its presence in the state. Cattle-rich Nebraska always had been home to slaughterhouses, but in the 1990s, beef processors began to realize how much they could save by minimizing transportation costs. Companies also seized on generous tax breaks offered by the state.

A decade ago, for instance, the city of Lexington, Neb.-located right next to Interstate 80-was reeling from the departure of a big tractor factory. Almost overnight, residents left and businesses closed. "It was like a ghost town," recalls Marty Romero, a community activist who ran a homeless shelter in those days. "The biggest landowner was a bank. People would just walk into the bank and leave their keys on the president's desk." Then IBP, a major meatpacker, moved into the space where the tractor factory had been. Today, thanks largely to the beef industry and its immigrant employees, Lexington is back on its feet.

During the 1970s, meatpacking was considered a good blue-collar job, with workers earning $12 to $13 an hour. Cecilia Olivarez Huerta, now the head of Nebraska's Mexican-American Commission, says when she was growing up in the western Nebraska city of Scottsbluff, "the kids of meatpacking employees had the opportunity to go to college. People had steady wages and good benefit packages. The guys who worked there were considered very, very lucky."

Now a typical starting wage in meatpacking plants is more like $8 an hour, rising to $11 for more experienced workers-and that's in inflated 1999 dollars. With today's low unemployment rates-and with the meatpacking industry's reputation for messy, hard work-the industry's main labor pool now consists of immigrants. "For a Mexican worker making $2 a day, the ability to make $8 an hour in Nebraska sounds very tempting," says D. Milo Mumgaard, an attorney in Lincoln who heads the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest.

Several big companies have even opened recruiting offices in Mexican cities. The companies say those offices are designed to attract the tens of thousands of Mexicans who possess legal U.S. work papers. While some observers express skepticism at that explanation, most do acknowledge that meatpackers would prefer to hire employees with legitimate working papers. The problem, sources say, is that immigrants have been getting increasingly clever about obtaining documents, including driver's licenses and birth certificates, under false pretenses. Many employers are unable-or in some cases unwilling-to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake.

Nationally, INS officials estimate that there are 5.5 million illegal immigrants in the United States, a number that is growing by 250,000 a year. Estimates of the Latino migration into Nebraska are harder to pin down, but the Rev. Damian Zuerlein, pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe church, a predominantly Latino Catholic congregation in Omaha, says his parish has grown from 300 to 400 families a decade ago to 1,400 today. "We're never sure who we have, because the community is very transient," Zuerlein says.

INS official Went says the Omaha office removed 423 illegal aliens from Nebraska and Iowa in 1994; by 1998, that number had risen to 2,378, and in 1999, the figure was expected to top 3,000. Along Interstate 80 alone, nearly 1,500 illegal immigrants were apprehended in the first six months of 1999. "A Nebraska state patrolman told me that he gauged that 1,000 illegal aliens go through I-80 every single day," Went says.

Naturally, the growth in immigration has intensified the conflict between INS and the Latino community-and not just among those with potential immigration problems. Even Latinos with valid working papers are at risk of everyday harassment from law enforcement officers, says Olivarez Huerta.

Earlier this year, for instance, Olivarez Huerta took a call about an incident in Schuyler, an hour west of Omaha. INS officers and local police entered an apartment building at 7 a.m. and arrested 22 Latinos. "The INS is always telling us that unless people are doing something criminal, they won't be seeking them out," she says. The INS told her that in that case it had acted with a police-requested search warrant. But to Olivarez Huerta, the lesson was simple: "If you associate with people at risk, you're at risk too."

Standard Procedures

The INS' most controversial practice during the 1990s was its penchant for launching surprise raids on employers. INS officers, with the cooperation of local and state law enforcement agencies, would surround a plant and work their way through it, employee by employee, arresting and quickly deporting those who could not provide adequate documentation.

"Some of those raids were horrible," Olivarez Huerta says. "They would come in with trucks, jeeps, dogs, helicopters. It was like a war zone-they circled the plant so no one could get out. They wouldn't let people connect with their families. It got everyone very angry." In one case, an INS officer fired at a fleeing car, injuring no one but earning the officer a suspension.

Not only did the raids worry the Latino community, they also earned the INS an unfavorable reputation in the wider community. "I've dealt with the FBI and the Secret Service, but I've never dealt with an agency with the same level of arrogance as the INS," says one former senior political figure in the state. Zuerlein adds that public confidence in the agency was shaken whenever it deported high school students, the elderly or people who were ill.

In recent years, INS officials have taken some small steps to repair the agency's ties to the Latino community, such as scheduling public, arrest-free, question-and-answer sessions in the community. Indeed, every Latino advocate interviewed for this story praised Went for his sincerity and his efforts to handle what they acknowledge is a tough assignment.

The drive to mend INS' public image helped contribute to the demise of raids and the advent of Operation Vanguard. But it was hardly the only factor. Vanguard also was designed to be cheaper than raids, and-if carried out properly-more effective at removing the magnet of jobs that attracted illegal laborers to Nebraska. INS officials had finally concluded that employers were enduring raids as a cost of doing business, viewing them as an annoyance soon to be followed by a long period of benign neglect, while the INS moved on to other sites.

"We did not have a high rate of mistakes with the raids, but we could only do one plant at a time," Went says. "We just didn't feel we were being as effective as we wanted. Unfortunately, what we were seeing was a stream of other illegal aliens who quickly came in and filled positions that had been vacated."

INS officials modeled Vanguard on an approach that had been tested on a smaller scale in Arizona and Washington state. Under that method, INS officials cooperated with employers to check employees' work documents every three months or so. The INS would then compare the documents to various databases-such as Social Security files or state motor vehicle records-to figure out which employees were legal and which were not.

Compared to the high tension of the raids, the Vanguard approach seems-to the uninitiated, anyway-downright wimpy. Under Vanguard, rather than im-
mediately arresting and deporting violators, INS officials simply ask workers with discrepancies in their documentation to explain their situation to agency officials in pre-scheduled appointments. If workers can explain the discrepancies-which could involve something as simple as reversed digits in an identification number or the use of a maiden name instead of a married name-they are sent on their way. If not, they are arrested.

The INS fully expected the bulk of the undocumented workers to skip the interview process altogether-which was perfectly fine with the agency. Ignoring the interview date meant that an undocumented worker would give up his or job-and that, for INS, was the first step toward making the meatpacking industry a legal-only profession. The key was getting the word out-and in the immigrant community, Went says, "the grapevine is extensive." To no one's surprise, Vanguard got media attention from as far away as Mexico when it was announced.

Absorbing the Blow

When the INS unveiled Operation Vanguard in the fall of 1998, reaction to the new approach was mixed. Advocates for Latino causes praised the more humane aspects of the plan, but they also expressed fears that Vanguard would unleash a degree of human chaos like none the state had ever seen. Specifically, activists feared that hundreds or even thousands of workers would suddenly lose their jobs-a development that would ripple across the community, as spouses, relatives and children uprooted themselves.

"Operation Vanguard is not as traumatic, but it is far more comprehensive in its scope, so it causes a heck of a lot more direct and indirect impact all over the state," says public-interest lawyer Mumgaard, who filed comments with INS before Vanguard was launched.

Mumgaard complained that a generalized fear of INS would encourage legal workers to leave their jobs rather than fight to correct discrepancies not of their own making. (The INS went to Latino radio and television to dispel that misconception, Went says.) Mumgaard also contended that a simultaneous flood of accused workers would overwhelm the legal resources in Nebraska, which has only a handful of full-time immigration lawyers.

In a broader sense, Mumgaard resented the focus on undocumented workers. He argues that the main driver of new social spending, from English classes in schools to increased police patrols, is the legal Latino workforce, which accounts for a sizable share of Nebraska's immigrant population. "We didn't feel it was appropriate that INS was playing into the stereotypes about undocumented workers and immigration in Nebraska," Mumgaard says.

As for the meatpackers, they were glad to see the raids end, but they weren't entirely happy with Vanguard, either. The INS agreed to the packers' request that the project's original name-Operation Prime Beef-be changed. But their more substantive complaint-that Vanguard be phased in more slowly-was heeded only up to a point. The purpose of the exercise, INS officials insisted, was to squeeze jobs equally everywhere, so that workers could not move easily from one job to another. "The goal of Operation Vanguard is to have individuals not thinking about coming into the United States in the first place," Went says.

When INS began the first round of Vanguard investigations in Nebraska in early 1999, the agency discovered 4,441 discrepancies out of 24,000 employee records. About 1,000 of the workers with discrepancies showed up for interviews and explained their circumstances to the INS' satisfaction. Another 34 came to the interviews but failed to convince the agency and were arrested. The other three-fourths failed to show up for interviews.

Zuerlein, the Omaha pastor, estimates about a third of the workers in Omaha who were caught with discrepancies left for points unknown. Still, he adds that the community's worst fears of Vanguard-inspired chaos were not realized. "Actually, the community absorbed the blow much better than I ever expected them to," he says. "Vanguard had sensitivity, compared to the workplace raids. INS talked to the community and spent time explaining the change to us. Most people said that during the interview process they were treated with dignity."

Even so, Zuerlein and other immigrant advocates continue to harbor deep concerns about the program, saying it hurts families dis-
proportionately. Single, unattached workers are able to flee the INS one step ahead of the next expansion of Vanguard, while workers who have begun settling into a community with their spouses, relatives and children would have to uproot everybody-a phenomenon that makes it harder than ever for immigrants to gain a sense of permanence in a community.

In a larger sense, critics say, Vanguard heightens enforcement at a time when law-abiding immigrant families are already in a tight spot. For instance, Zuerlein notes that a minor who is in the United States illegally as a dependent of legal parents will not be deported, but as soon as he or she gets married-even to a U.S. citizen-that minor will be deported. "We tell our Republicans in Congress that this is an anti-family law," he says. "It deports spouses and encourages people to live together outside of marriage."

John Boehm-a one-time Republican official in Lincoln who has been handling several Vanguard-related cases as a private attorney-adds that legal children of deported immigrants are forced to choose between staying in the United States, where they can attend school, and seeing their fathers, who would be subject to arrest if they reappeared on American soil. "There's a lot of human tragedy on an individual level," Boehm said. "We've had families who have lived here for years and got caught up in this process. They're good people who have raised families and contributed to the economy, and now they're being punished."

Business' Beef

If Latino advocates have been complaining about Vanguard, business leaders and politicians have been shouting even louder. Meatpackers-and the cattle growers who supply them-say they have been hurt unfairly by the operation. They contend that INS should not have singled out Nebraska and meatpacking, particularly at a time when unemployment in the state is so low and when the agricultural sector is suffering from low commodity prices.

Operation Vanguard "is the most unfair, ill-thought-through government program I've encountered in quite a while," says former Nebraska Gov. Ben Nelson, a Democrat, who opposed the program before leaving office earlier this year. "I don't expect INS to run the agency based on what's best for Nebraska agriculture, but I also don't expect them to go out of their way to come up with a program that kicks agriculture right in the shins."

Gary Mickelson, a spokesman for meatpacking firm IBP, says that "we believe that Vanguard should be refined before it's expanded," adding that "we want to work cooperatively with INS to make the process less disruptive." Among other things, Mickelson said INS should speed up its document-collecting process, which took six to nine months in Nebraska. In addition to taking up company time, he said, such delays meant that many of the documents collected were for employees who had already moved on to other jobs.

In addition, Mickelson says his company would like wider access to databases like the ones the INS relies on. Computerized employee-verification systems are in use in a half-dozen states, but they allow companies only to check new workers, not existing ones, Mickelson says. The more that companies can verify employees' papers before hiring them, he says, the smoother the process will work.

Many members of Congress have tacitly-if not actively-supported tough INS enforcement for years to ease constituent fears. Not even the early-warning cries of meatpackers made them change their tune, sources said. But as soon as cattle growers realized the damage they faced from Vanguard, the state's congressional delegation quickly turned into vocal critics.

"In February [1999], in the midst of the database-gathering, the congressional delegation wrote a letter saying that they were mad about the fact that INS was not going to be tough enough on the undocumented workers it found through Vanguard," Mumgaard says. "By May, it became pretty clear when the numbers came out that it was a humongous deal, with a quarter to a third of the workforce chewed away. So people really started waking up, including Congress."

Some observers consider this turnabout to be a bitter irony. "The farmers never loved the Hispanics until they figured out they needed them," says one veteran politico in Lincoln. "It's not as if they wanted them going to the same schools."

But seeking as broad a coalition as possible, business leaders reached out to community activists in an effort to present Washington policy-makers with a united front in calling for a toned-down Vanguard. For activists who had often battled meatpacking companies over working conditions and employment policies, the overtures proved to be a shock indeed. The day an IBP vice president asked for his help, Zuerlein recalls, "I asked myself, 'What planet am I on?' "

But the activists were willing to oblige. Among other things, cooperation provided them with additional arguments that had wide public resonance. IBP executives invited Zuerlein to accompany them on a lobbying trip to Washington.

The packer-activist alliance "was 100 percent unusual-the most unusual thing I've seen in three years here," Mumgaard says. "But that's good. Part of the advocacy strategy is finding common ground."

Twin Missions

The activists and the meatpackers may have put up a common front, but INS officials in Omaha and Washington didn't change their view that Vanguard is a project worth expanding. "We were very pleased at the results," Went says. "We think it is working here very well."

Indeed, INS has already begun the Iowa portion of Vanguard, with additional industries (such as restaurants and hotels) and states (including Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Minnesota and South Dakota) to follow as soon as it is feasible, Went says. In addition, document checks for Nebraska companies will be updated every three months. "Continuity is very important here," Went says. "You can't do it once and forget about it. Repetition is critical to success."

INS' main hang-up with expanding Vanguard has been the difficulty of reaching agreement with the Social Security Administration over the proper uses of SSA's databases. Social Security officials are worried about possible privacy violations. INS officials say they hope to come to an understanding soon.

If there is a silver lining to Vanguard, it may be that several companies have come up with incentive programs to encourage legal workers who lack citizenship to become naturalized citizens. The Omaha INS office, for its part, is laboring to get the lag time for citizenship applications down from 12 months to 10 months.

But all sides agree that the overall paperwork problem is worsening for the INS. The root of the problem, most observers agree, is that the INS has had trouble striking the right balance between its twin missions of enforcement and human services. In fact, critics say, some of the challenges faced by INS' enforcement arm could be alleviated if the agency managed to process applications more quickly and effectively.

In Washington, interest in splitting the INS into two separate agencies is rising. A House bill, sponsored by Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., would divide the agency into two bureaus within the Justice Department. A Senate bill, sponsored by Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., would also reorganize the agency, but in a slightly less drastic fashion. "We cannot expect the INS to be the good service provider by day and the tough cop by night," Abraham said at a hearing this fall. While the INS has long been skeptical of such proposals, INS Director Doris Meissner acknowledged in the hearing that she is "committed to change."

In its crowded Omaha office, the INS details about 20 employees to service tasks-far fewer than the 40 it assigns to enforcement. Went fully acknowledges the shortfall. "We need to focus more on the service side," he says. "We have people who literally cannot access the INS on the phone. We need more of those positions. You need to be able to pick up the phone, so you don't have to travel here."

The problem, he says, is that he does not set the priorities. For instance, the last time Congress boosted the INS' staffing in Nebraska, it was to add several dozen enforcement officers assigned to handle illegal aliens who were picked up by state troopers along Interstate 80. "If I had the discretion, I would have made a portion of them service positions, because I see a tremendous need," Went said. But he couldn't, because Congress had earmarked the jobs for enforcement.

Such episodes are par for the course, say veteran INS watchers. "Immigration is never going to stop, so the INS' main job is and always will be enforcement," says Romero, the Latino advocate in Lexington. "Anyone who thinks differently is in la-la land." Yet despite their frustrations with the INS, community activists express sympathy for Went and his staff in Omaha. "I'm tired of seeing those poor guys working their hinds off," Romero says. "With their workload, it's no surprise they get tired and aggravated. I don't think the problem is as much with them as it is with Washington."

Despite the challenges, INS officials remain confident Vanguard can work. Other observers are more skeptical. They say the resilience of immigrant workers will inevitably outpace the ability of even a jazzed-up INS tracking system to keep an eye on them. Workers forced out in one area, they say, will soon gravitate to whichever region currently experiences the least surveillance. "One reason Vanguard won't work is that it nips at the heels of an international labor issue and all kinds of economic factors," Mumgaard says.

In October, a 27-member panel appointed by Nebraska's Republican governor, Mike Johanns, began meeting to explore potential common ground among the INS, Latinos and business leaders. So far, though, little consensus has emerged. Some business leaders would like to see the creation of a system of temporary work permits, but Latino advocates say that notion is unacceptable because workers would be even more helpless under that kind of arrangement. For their part, the activists would like to see improved wages and working conditions for workers (which businesses appear unlikely to grant) or freer residency rules (which Congress seems unlikely to offer).

In the meantime, the INS has made clear that it will not overlook workplace enforcement, as both activists and executives have been urging it to do. "I think that everyone-the INS, the community, the employers-has to look at how they can be a solution to the immigration problem," Went says. "The immigration problem is not an INS problem-it's a community problem. People need to look collectively at how they can solve it."

Louis Jacobson is a staff correspondent forNational Journal magazine.