The Immigration Mess

Brownsville, Texas. Weary yet hopeful, their bodies battered but their spirits high, the families while away the hours at the Casa Romero shelter for Central American refugees. They line up for a lunch of rice and beans, served from steaming kettles; they mop the floors and shoot pool; they practice English phrases; and they wait. And wait.

When they learn that their applications for political asylum in the U.S. are finally about to be dealt with, they trek to a makeshift Immigration and Naturalization Service post at the newly opened Port Isabel Processing Center, 25 miles away. Two weeks ago, angry local officials forced the shutdown of an INS office in Harlingen to rid the town of 500 refugees who have been shoehorned into overcrowded shelters and camps since last year. At Port Isabel, the refugees, clutching their meager possessions, line up to be fingerprinted and questioned by immigration officials -- and then wait some more to find out if they will be allowed to partake of the American Dream.

The hectic scene in southern Texas reflects the confusion of a U.S. immigration policy that is on the verge of being swamped by a virtual tidal wave of new arrivals. "We stand on the precipice of an enormous immigration crisis," says Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson, who, with Democratic Congressman Romano Mazzoli of Kentucky, wrote the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. It is a crisis with which the U.S., despite its cherished history as a nation of immigrants, is not prepared to cope. "We have no population policy," complains a State Department official. "No total concept on which to build."

The emergency springs primarily from Central America. Since last June, 30,000 Nicaraguans fleeing war and economic misery have flocked to the U.S. That number could be dwarfed by the tens of thousands expected to arrive in the U.S. in 1989. As a result of Moscow's liberalized emigration policies, some 50,000 Soviet citizens, primarily Jews and Armenians, will be allowed to leave the U.S.S.R. this year; most will be headed for the U.S. Several thousand of the 5 million Afghanistan refugees camped in Pakistan will also emigrate to the U.S.

The Immigration Reform Act is an example of the disarray of current policy. Designed to control a huge influx of illegal immigrants, the law provided an opportunity for 3 million to 5 million aliens who had lived and worked in the U.S. since before 1982 to become permanent residents. It also established penalties for employers who knowingly hired illegal aliens, making it much more difficult for them to find jobs and provoking discrimination against job seekers who merely look like foreigners. But the law has not significantly reduced unauthorized immigration. The flow from the South continues at such a pace that the INS is embarking on what literally amounts to a last-ditch tactic: it will soon dig a 5-ft.-deep, 4-mile-long trench along the Mexican border near San Diego, in part to prevent fast-moving cars packed with illegal immigrants from racing across the boundary.