Immigration Management: Strong Leadership and Management Reforms Needed to Address Serious Problems.

摘要

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner faces many challenges. The role of trying to enforce laws that are intended to prevent the annual illegal entry of millions of poverty-stricken, often repressed people naturally drawn to a richer, freer, and accessible United States is inherently difficult. In addition, INS is responsible for facilitating the legal entry of immigrants by processing millions of requests for services related to citizenship and asylum inspecting hundreds of millions of people at ports of entry. Balancing these enforcement and service roles would be difficult under any circumstances, but INS' task is compounded by a lack of consensus by both Congress and the American people on immigration policy and its enforcement. To identify ways to improve the overall performance of this important agency, GAO focused on the fundamentals within INS-the systems people, processes, and structures required to manage. GAO's aim was to spotlight the difficulties INS faces in fulfilling its diverse mission and to identify ways in which INS can better manage given today's resource constraints and the environment in which INS must operate. In addition to this report, GAO is issuing separate reports on INS' financial and information management.