‘If we don’t have success, I never tell you that America is guilty for that--I am guilty.”--Ludmil Dimitrov : For Today’s Refugees, Pain Is Gone

Last summer, Ludmil Dimitrov was standing outside the American Embassy in his hometown of Sofia, Bulgaria, looking up at the embassy’s new picture display of the history of Ellis Island and the statue that Dimitrov still refers to as “the Monument of Liberty.”

It was a wistful moment. Not long before, Dimitrov had handed over much of his savings to a corrupt emigration official in exchange for forged passports that would allow his family to fly to Austria, claim refugee status and, perhaps, come to the United States. And now, having yet to receive the passports, he stared at the old, confused immigrant faces in the embassy’s display and wondered: Would he ever be one of them?

This week, with his wife and daughter, he finally was. On his eighth day in Los Angeles, eating lunch in a Chinatown restaurant run by Vietnamese refugees, Dimitrov waxed poetic in classically optimistic and slightly broken English. “If we don’t have success, I never tell you that America is guilty for that--I am guilty.”

But while the Dimitrovs came with a yearning to breathe free that is as strong as that of the huddled masses who milled through Ellis Island three-quarters of a century ago, the circumstances of their arrival were radically different.

There was no seasickness on board, no chaos in a huge immigration station, no plunder on the docks, no heartbreak in a tenement. In fact, on their first weekend in the United States, the Dimitrovs managed to tour both Santa Monica beach and Beverly Hills.

Like most of the 1,000 refugees who land at Los Angeles International Airport each month, they were the beneficiaries of a resettlement network that has largely cleansed the pain of rough-and-tumble, laissez faire immigration.

Today, the skids are greased by a collection of nonprofit refugee assistance agencies that the State Department hires to make sure each refugee’s first few weeks in the United States are supervised. The government pays several hundred dollars per refugee, and agencies use donated funds to supplement their efforts.

The Dimitrovs were sent to Los Angeles as part of a government effort to geographically balance refugee placement, and were assigned to the International Rescue Committee. Because they had neither relatives nor friends here, the full burden of their resettlement fell upon an Eskinder Yesus, an IRC counselor who went into action before their plane touched down.

First, Yesus--who came to the United States as an Ethiopian refugee five years ago--paid two months’ rent on a studio apartment in a comfortable area of the mid-Wilshire district. Then he bought two beds, blankets, utensils and plates for the apartment. He arranged for the family to be picked up at LAX. He took them to lunch the next day and drove them around the city to help them get their bearings.

He took Dimitrov, 37, a graphic artist, and his wife, Albena, 32, a clothes designer, to register at the Social Security office. He took them to the Department of Motor Vehicles to register for driver’s licenses. He took them to the bank to cash the weekly expense check provided by the resettlement agency. He took them to a supermarket to shop. He took them to a county health center for a tuberculosis screening. He got them bus route information. He enrolled their 8-year-old daughter, Bilyana, in a summer school English class so she would be ready for public school by the fall.

Borrowed Suit

For Ludmil, Yesus borrowed a dark three-piece pinstriped suit from a friend. And when he took the family to the beach in Santa Monica and noticed an art design store, he walked in and inquired if the owner might have work, or perhaps just a tryout.

Finding the husband or wife a job within a few weeks so that they do not have to go on welfare is critical, Yesus said. “I don’t want to get them in that status.”

“It’s too much, what the organization make for us,” said an overwhelmed Dimitrov. “We were ready to sleep on the street--but American street.”

Families like the Dimitrovs, who are classified as refugees by virtue of having fled their native countries and filing for entry from a third nation, bear a closer physical and spiritual resemblance to the Ellis Island masses than so-called “legal immigrants,” who come to the United States directly from their native countries.

Each month, an average of 3,000 legal immigrants--the largest numbers from Mexico, the Philippines, Korea and Iran--land at LAX. Much of the time it is impossible to distinguish them from foreign tourists on their plane.

Must Have Sponsors

They carry the same middle-class baggage, wear the same sports clothes and exhibit the same sophistication as their fellow travelers. (“You’re seeing Iranians with carpets worth $30,000 or Filipino surgeons,” said Julian Simon, a University of Maryland professor of business administration who studies the effects of immigration on population.) The immigrants have family or friends to sponsor them, and as a condition of immigration they are aware they may not obtain welfare for three years.

Because most of their paper work has already been prepared and cleared by a U.S. embassy, the immigrants usually need do no more than pass through one of the 35 computer-equipped customs booths in the sparkling, blue-carpeted Tom Bradley International Terminal and then walk a few hundred feet to a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service counter for a final check of their documents.

In Ellis Island’s Great Hall, doctors hovered to catch signs of lameness or deformity while as many as 10,000 immigrants a day were processed in an atmosphere so tense that one observer likened it to “the final Day of Judgment, when we have to prove our fitness to enter Heaven.”

Smooth Operation

By contrast, at LAX on Tuesday morning a handful of newly arrived Korean immigrants sat as calmly as business travelers as they waited for an INS officer to call their name and stamp his final approval on their papers. Nearby, a large sheet had been spread out so that the youngest immigrants on the Korean Air flight--five orphaned Korean infants en route to adoptive families in Texas, Iowa and Kansas--could play on the floor until it was time to take off again.

Waiting for Mail

Across town, Dimitrov was waiting for the mail. Two years ago, anticipating this new life, he had paid a Bulgarian government truck driver headed for Munich to ship a collection of his sketches to friends who had settled in Washington. Soon he would have a portfolio.

In Bulgaria, he said, there was no market for the social and political cartoons that had been his lifelong hobby. And his artistic zest had diminished during the nine months he and his family lived in Austria in one-room refugee accommodations provided by the International Rescue Committee.

“But here,” he said, “when I move on the streets, I want to draw.”