Immigration Services

Though much of the recent debate on immigration reform has been focused on whether Congress should grant legal status to the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in this country, the Senate immigration bill approved late last month wisely includes measures that will also benefit legal immigrants. The Senate proposal increases the annual limit on family unification visas to nearly half a million, allowing more relatives of legal immigrants to come and live in the U.S. The legislation also raises the cap on employment-based visas used by American companies to hire mostly highly skilled and educated immigrants as permanent residents.

Masil J. Mason, a retired U.S. Immigration Service official and former border patrolman, died of pancreatic cancer Sunday at Howard County General Hospital. The Ellicott City resident was 90. Born and raised on a cattle farm in Hamilton County, Iowa, he enlisted in the Navy in 1934 and served on the USS San Francisco and Quincy on shakedown cruises in the Pacific. In 1940, he joined the U.S. Border Patrol and worked on the Mexican and Canadian borders for four years. He also served in the Naval Reserves during World War II. He subsequently joined the U.S. Immigration Service and retired in 1973 as an administrator in the commissioner's office in Washington.

The more than 40 immigrants who gathered in the ceremonial chambers of the U.S. District Court in Baltimore yesterday afternoon knew what to expect of their 15-minute naturalization ceremony - an event for which they had long been preparing. What they didn't know, however, is that they would share the experience with a group of 46 fourth-grade pupils from Chesapeake Academy in Anne Arundel County - the first such visit to the courthouse by academy students. "It's so special that they are here with us," said Anne Truong, 25, who immigrated from Vietnam four years ago and lives in Silver Spring.

A customer service telephone system run by immigration authorities is frustrating and inefficient, and in some cases has provided such bad advice that clients have been detained or deported, according to immigration lawyers, who are pressing to have the service scrapped. Last June, the Department of Homeland Security cut off telephone access to immigration offices around the United States, where most applications for citizenship or changes in immigration status are decided. Instead, the department's Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services directed the public to use a toll-free National Customer Service Center telephone system to resolve immigration-related problems.

WASHINGTON - A former prosecutor of headline terrorism cases began work this week as acting chief of the nation's troubled immigration agency, prompting a debate among advocates over whether enforcement will overshadow immigration services. As acting commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Michael Garcia takes a job that will last less than a year. By September, the INS will be divided into its two functions - enforcement and services - with separate bureaus integrated into the new Homeland Security Department.

The Foreign-born Information and Referral Network - a Columbia nonprofit organization with the ambitious goal of helping immigrants start new lives in America - is struggling with a roughly $50,000 deficit, the largest in its 20-year history. The only organization in Maryland that works comprehensively with all foreign-born people, FIRN has gone back to budgeting basics as it tries to lift itself out of debt. And its basic premise is, "We get the money first, and we spend it second," said Dawn Fisk Thomsen, the group's interim director.

WASHINGTON -- Accountants at the Immigration and Naturalization Service have won agreements over the past few weeks to collect at least $5.6 million in fees that the agency had not bothered to recover before, for lack of accounting clerks.Airlines take a $6 fee from each arriving international passenger, collected as part of the ticket price. They are supposed to turn that money over to the INS, which uses it to pay for its inspection programs.But the Justice Department learned this year that the agency was failing to collect the fees from 22 airlines and six cruise lines -- a loss of as much as $23 million a year, while the agency's obligations were about $60 million greater than its projected income.