INS Proposes Special Visas for Family Amnesty

WASHINGTON — Immigration officials, in a key shift in policy, Tuesday proposed issuing special visas to grant legal status to the spouses and children of illegal immigrants who applied for amnesty before the May 4 deadline.

In draft legislation being circulated on Capitol Hill, the Immigration and Naturalization Service says that it plans to ask Congress to broaden immigration rules to permit legal status for family members who did not qualify for amnesty themselves under the one-year immigration program.

The new plan would reverse a policy announced by the agency last October that relatives of aliens qualifying for amnesty, including minor children, could be deported “with no special protection,” despite their family ties. The INS said at that time that children would be protected only if both their parents had enrolled in the program.

No Sudden ‘Heart’

INS spokesman Verne Jervis said that the proposal does not mean the agency suddenly has gotten “a heart.”

“We’ve never been opposed to family unity,” Jervis said. “But we could not do what Congress has refused to do and just blanket in family members. Congress had determined that aliens had to be eligible (for legal residency) on their own.”

The prospects for approval of the plan, which the INS estimates would give legal status to an additional 200,000 aliens, are uncertain.

Before it can be introduced in Congress as a Reagan Administration-backed bill, it must first be approved by the Justice Department, the INS’ parent agency. Also, several key members of Congress have adamantly opposed any late changes in a program that they consider eminently fair.

However, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), a member of the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, called the proposal “an excellent idea” that he said he believes Congress would accept “in some form or another.”

“I only wish our immigration officials had come forward with this during the period of applications for amnesty,” Berman said. “I fear that some eligible applicants never came forward because of their concerns (that) their families might be divided.” Alien advocates applauded the new move and pledged to rally support for it.

The family amnesty provision is “more generous than what we had been requesting,” said Charles Kamasaki of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino organization that pushed unsuccessfully for an extension of the amnesty program.

Arrived Too Late

Under the immigration reform law of November, 1986, illegal aliens who had lived in the United States since before Jan. 1, 1982, were allowed to file for legal residency during a one-year period that ended May 4. More than 1.5 million applied, but some of them had spouses and children who did not qualify because they came here after the cut-off date.

Under the new proposal, once an applicant receives permanent residency, his spouse and children could receive legal status through a special visa. Jervis said that special visas would allow them to bypass normal immigration channels that often involve lengthy waiting periods.

Establishment of special visas for family members would help meet more of the labor demands of U.S. employers “and would help reduce some very large backlogs” of Mexican immigration cases, Jervis said.

Would Raise Ceiling

The draft package also would raise the ceiling of all admissible immigrants to 650,000 a year from 490,000, and would increase from 53,000 to 125,000 the number of visas available to immigrants who possess certain skills needed by American employers.

INS officials said that they hope the new proposal will answer alien rights groups’ charges that the agency is insensitive to the problem of divided families, which critics contended was one of the chief flaws of the new immigration law.

At a House hearing in October, immigration Commissioner Alan C. Nelson exclaimed: “Don’t you put us in the position of breaking up families, because we’re following the law.”