As Congress weighs comprehensive immigration reform legislation that would likely include strengthened enforcement measures, a significant expansion of guest workers, and perhaps include increased levels of permanent immigration, some question whether the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can handle the increased immigration workload. In response to growing concerns that the immigration responsibilities and other important duties of DHS were not functioning effectively, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the Second Stage Review (2SR) to base work on priorities driven by risk. "Strengthen[ing] border security and interior enforcement and reform[ing] immigration processes" is on the six-point agenda driving Secretary Chertoff's plans to improve DHS management. Currently, three agencies in DHS have important immigration functions: Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). In 2004, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that many of the management problems that plagued the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) have carried over to the three DHS immigration agencies. Late in 2004, the Heritage Foundation released a report that reached the following conclusion: " ... in consolidating responsibility for border, immigration, and transportation security, DHS actually increased the number of involved agencies to eight and created additional problems that now need solving." There are at least three elements to consider when assessing DHS effectiveness in immigration policy: (1) the immigration laws and regulations, (2) the management and administration of the agencies charged with implementation of the immigration laws and regulations, and (3) the funding resources and staffing to carry out these laws and regulations. As Figure 1 illustrates, these three elements drive the effectiveness of immigration policy. Over the years, Congress has considered all three elements to address perceived, as well as reported, problems in immigration policy. This report focuses on the management and administration element. It analyzes the division of immigration responsibilities in DHS and sets the stage for the current debate over how these functions are organized. The report opens with a brief history of the federal responsibility for immigration and the legislative debate that led to the transfer of most immigration functions to DHS. It follows with an organizational chart depicting current immigration functions in DHS. The major immigration duties of the various DHS agencies are summarized and Secretary Chertoff's "Second Stage Review" is explained. An analysis of available immigration workload data offers some perspectives on the work of the three agencies over time. The report concludes with a summary of key concerns, overarching views, and emerging policy questions. Congress's role over naturalization and immigration derives from Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. In 1882, Congress enacted a law providing for an examination of all aliens who arrive in the United States; in 1891, Congress established the Bureau of Immigration. In 1903, Congress transferred the various existing immigration functions from the Department of Treasury to the then-Department of Commerce and Labor. By 1905, this agency was known as the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. When the Department of Labor (DOL) was established in 1913, the immigration and naturalization functions were transferred and split into the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization, both in the new DOL. The two bureaus again merged into the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in 1933. These immigration and naturalization functions remained in DOL until 1940, when most were moved to the Department of Justice (DOJ), largely for national security reasons. In 1952, Congress consolidated and codified the body of immigration and citizenship laws and policies into the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The last legislative reorganization of federal immigration functions was in 2002. Currently, five federal departments have important immigration responsibilities, with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the lead. Figure 2 presents the dispersal of immigration duties across these five departments following the enactment of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 ( P.L. 107-296 ). Although the departments of Justice and State do not have a wide range of immigration duties, those that they do have are quite important and extensive. In the 1970s and 1980s, organizational critiques of INS arose as the agency was unable to stymie illegal immigration and was faced with growing backlogs of adjudications. During this period, the GAO published several reports that found problems in the administration of adjudications, the enforcement of immigration laws, and the management of case records overall. The Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (SCIRP), which Congress established in 1978, offered a comprehensive package of recommendations in 1981 that included options aimed at strengthening and streamlining INS. SCIRP referred to INS as "beleaguered" and specifically recommended that INS be elevated as an agency within DOJ, with the Commissioner upgraded to a Director reporting directly to the Attorney General. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) strengthened and broadened immigration enforcement (e.g., authorized legal sanctions against employers who hire unauthorized aliens) and legalized the status of several million unauthorized aliens living in the United States. Although this major overhaul of immigration law featured many of the recommendations of SCIRP, it did not address the organizational issues raised by SCIRP. Indeed, some observers have subsequently concluded that IRCA exacerbated the management problems of INS by overloading it with competing mandates, which included the legalization of 2.7 million unauthorized aliens, additional border controls, and the expansion of work site enforcement and employer sanctions. When the Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development (IRCA Commission), which Congress established in IRCA, issued its final report in 1990, it called for the creation of an Agency for Migration Affairs that reported directly to the President. The IRCA Commission recommended placing all immigration, naturalization, and refugee functions from the INS (except the law enforcement functions of the Border Patrol and interior enforcement agents) and from the Department of State into this independent agency. The IRCA Commission argued that consolidating and elevating these functions would address the problems brought on by inadequate prioritization and fragmentation across departments. By the close of the 20 th century, there was widespread concern with INS management that primarily centered on the competing priorities of adjudicating immigration benefits (service) and enforcing violations of immigration law (enforcement). In September 1997, the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform became yet another congressionally mandated study group to point out the administrative and management problems that plagued the implementation of immigration policy. It described INS as an agency suffering from conflicting priorities and mission overload, whose enforcement and service missions were incompatible. The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform opted not to echo the past commissions' proposals to elevate the federal immigration system; rather, it recommended that the federal immigration system be fundamentally reorganized by, among other things, dismantling INS. GAO focused on specific problems with INS, most notably for having antiquated databases, failing to integrate its systems, and continuing the use of paper for tracking most of its data functions. The GAO reports were critical of the INS's field and regional offices due to an absence of communication among the various offices. The DOJ Office of Inspector General also questioned the reliability of INS's information systems and the accuracy of the information. The last two Commissioners of INS, Doris Meisner (1993-2000) and James Ziglar (2001-2003) each proposed to restructure INS administratively into distinct enforcement and service branches. Ziglar's restructuring was in progress as Congress weighed legislative action, which was further fueled by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Prior to these attacks, several pieces of legislation were before the 107 th Congress that would have abolished INS and would have either created two separate bureaus within DOJ to carry out INS's current services and enforcement functions, created a integrated immigration agency within DOJ, or dispersed INS's service functions among a number of different agencies and created a new enforcement agency within DOJ. When the 107 th Congress weighed the broader question of homeland security and the creation of the DHS, the issue of where to locate the various immigration and citizenship functions then performed by the Department of Justice's INS and the Department of State's (DOS) Bureau of Consular Affairs became a major concern. The debate in the 107 th Congress centered on several options: place all of INS in a newly created DHS under a Border Security and Transportation Division (Bush Administration); place INS's enforcement functions in DHS under the Border Security and Transportation Division, but leave INS's service function in DOJ under a newly created Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (House-passed H.R. 5005 ); place all of INS in DHS in its own Directorate of Immigration Affairs, which would have two separate bureaus for the enforcement and service functions, with border inspections as a stand-alone and dual-function entity within the Directorate of Immigration Affairs (Senate substitute); or, place INS's enforcement functions in the DHS Bureau of Border Security and INS's service functions in the DHS Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (House-passed H.R. 5710 ). In addition to the transfer of INS, there was considerable debate over whether the issuances of visas should remain with the DOS. When the President's proposal to establish DHS ( H.R. 5005 ) was debated, his initial plan to give the DHS Secretary exclusive authority through the Secretary of State to issue or refuse to issue visas was a thorny point. The House Select Committee on Homeland Security approved compromise language on visa issuances in H.R. 5005 that retained DOS's administrative role in issuing visas but added specific language to address many of the policy and national security concerns raised during hearings. An amendment to move the consular affairs visa function to DHS failed when the House passed H.R. 5005 . The Homeland Security Act (HSA) of 2002 ( P.L.