A $100 million budget shortfall at the Immigration and Naturalization Service could threaten the fate of thousands of potential Jewish emigrants seeking to leave the former Soviet Union.
To lower costs, INS will begin July 1 to cut the number of refugee interviews in Moscow, from an average of 84 a day to 48.
Currently, anyone who is seeking to come to the United States from the former Soviet Union must travel to the Russian capital for an INS interview.
“There is this significant shortfall due to poor planning by INS and inefficient management,” said Martin Wenick, executive vice president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. “They did not do their statistics properly and forecasted more income that did not come in.”
INS Associate Commissioner for Management Ken Rath agreed with Wenick’s assessment.
“The revenue projections were wrong and probably should have never been made,” Rath said.
INS offices abroad are funded directly by fees charged to immigrants applying for papers when they arrive in this country. The United States ran an amnesty program for illegal immigrants in the late 1980s that resulted in a huge increase in applications for legal working papers.
INS officials did not account for the reduction in fees collected after the legalization program ended by early 1989. According to Rath, this year marks the first time INS overestimated revenues.
Despite claims by Rath that the State Department will fund the refugee program through the end of the fiscal year, Dewey Pendergrass, deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement said, “The State Department has no funds to bail out INS. We are already stretched to the limit.”
INS is a Justice Department agency, but the State Department is the lead agency for refugee issues.
However, plans are in the works to find funds from other government agencies but no agreements have been reached, Pendergrass said.
Under the annual ceiling set by the administration and Congress, INS is allowed this year to admit up to 121,000 refugees from around the world.
SCATHING LETTER SENT TO CHRISTOPHER
Due to the backlog of applicants seeking to leave the former Soviet Union, INS is expected to meet its annual quota of 55,000 refugees from the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and other Eastern European countries.
Wenick said there should be no reduction in emigration from that region for six to eight months. He added that during the first eight months of fiscal year 1994, 22,000 Jews have arrived in the United States, mostly from the former Soviet Union.
But the revenue shortfall could drastically affect the number of refugees coming from African nations and Vietnam, as INS travel budgets are reduced.
INS officials travel from European offices to meet with refugees in countries without permanent offices. Unless INS is able to make up for the shortfall, interviews will cease in the coming weeks as travel budgets run out.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a scathing letter to Secretary of State Warren Christopher last week threatening to delay the confirmation process for Phyllis Oakley, the nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, until Christopher responds not only to the status of the funding shortfall but also outlines the conditions in the former Soviet Union for Jewish refuges.
The INS currently has only one office in the former Soviet Union to process all refugee applicants. Refugees from all 15 new republics must travel to Moscow with their families, usually at least twice, to complete all the necessary paperwork and interviews.
“Processing in Moscow has not kept up with the events of the past few years,” Grassley wrote in the letter to Christopher. “I’m sure that you agree with me that it undercuts the humanitarian goals of our country’s refugee program if bureaucrats unnecessarily add to or raise hurdles refugees already face.”
Grassley asked Christopher for a list of steps he and INS plan to take to ease the burdens on refugees and how they plan to account for the budget crisis.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
