Paper, Paper and More Paper

The room is as wide as a tennis court and as long as a football field. Along one end are tiers of metal drawers, jam-packed with filing cards. Each card represents a file that is not there because there is not enough room. These absent files have been sent to New Jersey, but 25,000 of them are hauled back every year. Near the door stand rows of shopping carts full of files in transit.

Welcome to the headquarters of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York City. Its 2.1 million files, according to a devastating new report by the National Academy of Sciences, symbolize the INS's inability to "produce reliable, accurate and timely statistics that permit rational decision making concerning immigration policy." For example, the report asks, "Do immigrants, legal and illegal, take jobs away from unskilled natives, especially minorities and youth? We just don't know." Do aliens pay more in taxes and Social Security than they receive in Government services? The answer is the same.

The statistics presumably lie somewhere in those files, but the report describes the system as Dickensian. "The contents, when you can get to them, are still paper, the paper is still sometimes wrong, often incomplete and always clumsy, and it takes three days to put files back . . . Sometimes the files can't be found; they've been misplaced in some bureaucratic limbo. And even if the paper system were improved (it) would still be wholly useless for answering larger questions . . . to create a basis for national immigration policies."