General SWING. We are lost in our present quarters. They are very large but not arranged in the manner which would be for the most efficient operation of my type of program.

PROTECTION OF RECORDS

Senator BRIDGES. Suppose the temporary building were destroyed. Are your records protected?

General SWING. They are not. They are in the most hazardous condition, so far as location is concerned.

Senator BRIDGES. Is it important to maintain them and preserve them?

General SWING. These records, if lost, could not be replaced. They affect the lives of millions of individuals.

Senator BRIDGES. What is the present construction of the temporary building in which you are located? Is it a typical temporary?

Mr. ANDRETTA. One part of the building was so bad, Senator, that they had to demolish it. The roof was leaking badly and the floors had all buckled.

Senator BRIDGES. For the record, where is this old buildings?

General SWING. On the old city dump at the end of East Capitol Street. In addition, it is a great handicap to efficient operation because it is so far from all other Government activities.

The shortest time to any other activity by car is 15 minutes, and we work with the Customs and the State Department and Visa Department on the other side of town.

Senator BRIDGES. I have not been enthusiastic about some agencies spending millions of dollars for new buildings, but I think from my own observation and I think the chairman would agree, that you are woefully inadequately housed now and it could jeopardize-if it were destroyed as it easily could be some time-records which are essential to the country.

In the suggestion of this language provision which was not approved by the House, I think that the Senate could well consider it because you are in a very vulnerable position.

General SWING. I concur, Senator. I feel that way.

Senator BRIDGES. You feel strongly that we should do it?

General SWING. Yes, sir.

Senator BRIDGES. In the first place, General Services Administration should do it, but if they say they do not have the funds available, if this is written in so that you could use your own funds to do it, do you think there are buildings available in Washington that would be suitable?

General SWING. The buildings can be found. I am positive of that. Of course, it must be on a competitive basis, but I am sure there are available buildings.

Senator KILGORE. I am worried about those records. Would the building you contemplate renting adequate safeguard records?

General SWING. Yes; we would not accept a building unless the records were completely fireproof and safe; and in the bidding, which would be required, the specifications would carry that as one of the foremost items in the bid, to protect these records.

COST OF RENTAL OF NEW QUARTERS

Senator KILGORE. How much money would you need under the proposed language provision to authorize you to rent quarters? General SWING. It would probably cost us between $16,000 and $17,000 a month to get the space we want until GSA could take it over. I cannot give you a total sum, because GSA, I know, once we are in the building, will exert every effort to take charge in the normal way.

Senator BRIDGES. That is probably less than $200,000.

General SWING. Annually less than $200,000.

Senator KILGORE. Is that rental estimate included in the budget estimate?

General SWING. We would have to absorb it in the present budget. Mr. ANDRETTA. We are not asking for additional funds for it.

POSSIBILITY OF ABSORPTION OF COST

Senator KILGORE. You are just asking for authorization?

General SWING. Yes, sir. The mere fact that the records themselves would be moved into a place which is tailored to fit our operation and to house these records would reduce the administrative expenses such that we would absorb it in that one item of handling the records and storing them so that we would not require additional funds. Senator KILGORE. Do you have other questions?

REPLACEMENT OF MOTORS

General, is there any money in this estimate to replace motors in your patrol boats from gas to deisel?

General SWING. Yes, sir. We are replacing all gas motors with diesel motors.

Senator KILGORE. That gas motor situation worries me because those motors are liable to blow up.

Have you anything further, General Swing?

General SWING. No, sir.

I thank you very much.

Senator KILGORE. Let us look at the breakdown for a minute. They gave a reduction of $31,300 on inspection for admission into the United States.

POLICY OF UNIFORMS

Senator BRIDGES. May I ask another question, General. What is the policy in Immigration on uniforms?

General SWING. The policy on uniforms, of course, with the socalled fringe benefits, is to require immigration officers to wear presentable and clean uniforms, realizing that particularly at the port of entry those are the first officials that a foreigner meets coming in. The inspectors force itself has just recently concurred in a change of uniform which is much more presentable than the old uniform and is presently being issued.

Senator BRIDGES. What does that look like?

General SWING. Well, I am an Army man, but it looks very much like the Air Force uniform.

Senator BRIDGES. Is it blue?

General SWING. Yes, sir.

Senator BRIDGES. You are changing the whole thing over to a blue? General SWING: All the immigration inspectors, yes, sir. The patrolmen will still wear their border patrol uniform, which is a handsome one, but the immigration inspectors, who are the other uniformed men, I have long though had a shabby uniform.

REORGANIZATION PLAN

Senator KILGORE. I wonder if you would care to make a statement about the effectivenes of this reorganization plan. How effective has that been?

General SWING. We feel that it has been most effective, particularly in getting, first, better administration. We had 15 administrative officers throughout the country supervised by this central office, which held to itself and centralized too much authority. We have passed out to the 4 regional offices a great deal of the administrative work which was required here in the central office and taken away all of the administrative work of these 15 small offices which were replicas of the main office.

We have saved, as I recall the figures from memory, about 279 clerical position and the overhead administartive positions and placed in the administrative sections in the regions more competent men to handle work that was handled in the district offices by less competent persons.

Senator KILGORE. In other words, you think it is more efficient.

General SWING. It is proving out in my estimation to be more efficient. Here is the administrative man. I would like him to give his comments.

POSITIONS ELIMINATED UNDER REORGANIZATION PLAN

Senator KILGORE. Before you get to that, how many positions did you say that that replaced?

Mr. LOUGHRAN. We eliminated 269 positions in the Administrative Division alone. We have centralized the operation as General Swing mentioned, moving it from 15 district offices into the 4 regional offices. It is working much better and more economically.

Senator KILGORE. It is the first time that I saw regional offices set up without a national office in embryo.

General SWING. The force is 269 less than it was prior to these 4 regions. We took the money for those 269 positions and with that paid for 50 naturalization examiners' positions to take up the backlog in naturalization petitions and 35 investigators that we put solely on subversive case investigations.

We have for the first time in over 10 years a naturalization backlog caught up. There is always a 3 month's lag, but it is on a current basis now for the first time.

Senator KILGORE. In other words, the money you saved on administrative work you put into the field positions.

General SWING. We put it into the field operators to carry on the mission of the Service.

EFFECT OF CUT ON BORDER PATROL

Senator KILGORE. I know that they gave you a cut on border partol of $917,000. What will be the effect of that?

General SWING. That effect will be serious because it will have to be applied so that it will not release border patrolmen. I asked for increases which you gave me. The only place I can apply that money is to move them around. For instance, the whole southern border patrol now is operated from one regional head, an integrated patrol. Prior to reorganization, we had some 29 sectors along the southern border with no head except in Washington to direct their movement. As it goes now, the cotton comes in around Brownsville, and in the lower valley it will be in there in mid-June. The cotton picking progresses from Brownsville into west Texas and north Texas and up into Arkansas and moves to California, where it is a little later.

I need this money to move large task forces-200, 300 men-across the continent to take advantage of the fact that when the harvest season is on, that is when the pressure is on for the wetbacks to come in.

Unless I get the money to move them, it means I would have to ask for more men who were stationed in one place and stay there, and you would be paying salaries to men far in excess of the travel money I need to move these men around.

There is always a lull some place along the border, and where there is a lull we pluck out those men and with our jeeps and planes more them to the place where the pressure is.

It is an integrated military operation, actually.

Senator KILGORE. If there is no work for the wetback, he is not coming in; and by following crops, as it were, you use a mobile force; and that is where you say the expense question comes in? General SWING. Yes, sir.

Senator KILGORE. Could any part of this be taken care of in equipment, vehicles, and things of that kind?

General SWING. Not a bit of it. Mr. Chairman, we figured this very closely. This is the travel and the per diem of the officers themselves and the fuel and the operating expenses to make the vehicles run for those periods in moving them from one extremity of the border to the other.

Senator KILGORE. What percentage cut in efficiency do you estimate with the cut?

General SWING. I would repeat-and, of course, it is a "guesstimate" that we would lose 40 percent in efficiency in operation of our mobile force.

INVESTIGATIONS ACTIVITIES

Senator KILGORE. I note on the question of investigations a reduction of $41,700.

What reason did the House give on that cut?

General SWING. The cut on the automobiles was distributed arbitrarily, this part to investigation work.

Senator KILGORE. Do you have a backlog of investigations?
General SWING. I have been fighting a backlog of everything.

Senator KILGORE. How large a backlog is it?

General SWING. We had 276,000 pending cases when I took over. Senator KILGORE. I know from my experience on the Immigration Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee.

General SWING. We had those pending investigations.

Oh, a lot

of them had been gone over and screened with a picked crew of investigators so that we could get our teeth into something.

You couldn't get your teeth into that large a number of investigations with the number of investigators.

We have that backlog to seventy-thousand-odd. We are screening out the current ones. We are trying to push back for later investigation old ones that have been hanging around, some for twenty-odd years, and trying to get current.

For instance, in New York City we have organized a search investigation crew to search out localities where we know aliens congregate and since January the increase in the warrants served and the warrant proceedings have more than doubled per month just simply by getting down now to where we can see what are the important things.

AREAS OF INVESTIGATIVE BACKLOG CASES

Senator KILGORE. In what parts of the country are your biggest backlogs?

General SWING. The large metropolitan areas, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago.

Senator KILGORE. How many investigators do you have?

General SWING. We have 787 investigators, and 35 of those we got with this administrative saving.

Senator KILGORE. That accounts for the request for restoration; is that right?

General SWING. Yes.

Senator BRIDGES. I have a couple of questions, if I may.

ORGANIZATION OF BORDER PATROL

As you divide this country up into districts, General, you have your Immigration Border Patrol. Are they under one head in a district or just how is it organized?

General SWING. The Border Patrol operationally is under the regional heads of the four regions. We have particularly organized the southern border so that the whole patrol is under the regional director at San Pedro.

The northern border is of sufficient extent that we have it divided into two sections. The regional director at Saint Paul has it from around Buffalo on west and the Burlington headquarters has it from there on to the Atlantic. They have an intelligence staff and operating staff.

I can only talk about the intelligence staff in executive session. On the southern border we have these staffs who penetrate and attempt to divine what the trends are. We have the operating staff in this region that correlates the actions in one section with the other, which is an innovation in the handling of the patrol.