Immigration Naturalization Service
The INS stood for the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service which was initially a part of the United States Department of Justice and handled immigration issues till it ceased to exist from March 1, 2003. Since then the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), collectively under the Department of Homeland Security have been looking after the immigration naturalization service. The USCIS, formerly the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS) looks after the administrative side of immigration issues like permanent residence, asylum and naturalization. The ICE which was formed by the coming together of the Federal Protective Service, U.S. Customs investigators and the Federal Air Marshal Service deals with enforcement functions, deportation and intelligence and investigation related issues. Finally the CBP tackles all the border functions that the Immigration and Naturalization Service would previously deal with. Immigration became a federal responsibility when in 1875, the US Supreme Court deemed so, to curb individual States from passing their own immigration laws, right after the Civil War. In 1891 the Immigration Act led to the formation of an Office of the Superintendent of Immigration, as part of the Treasury Department. It was the responsibility of this office to check the admission, rejection and processing of all immigrants looking to enter the country. It therefore was in charge of immigration naturalization services. At all the prominent US ports, 'Immigrant Inspectors' were stationed who would collect manifests of immigrants and also a 'head tax' of 50 cents from each immigrant. Ellis Island, New York was the largest such collection centre.
In the early days immigration was always a concern of commerce rather than revenue, for in the early 1900s the Congress' overwhelming interest in immigration was to protect American workers and wages. The Congress' concerns are reflected in their decision to transfer the Bureau of Immigration in 1903 to the now defunct, Department of Commerce and Labor. Following the First World War, the Congress made an attempt to slow down the rate of immigrants entering the country from especially the European nations by issuing laws in 1921 and 1924, limiting the number of immigrants by assigning a fixed quota to each nation according to that nation's representation in the previous US Census figures. Therefore each year the State Department issued a fixed number of visas and only those immigrants who had one of these valid visas and could produce them would be granted entry to the country. In 1940, the then President Roosevelt shifted the Immigration Naturalization Service from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice. |
