Conferees OK Immigration Law Revisions

House and Senate negotiators Tuesday agreed to a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, clearing the way for what sponsors hope will be quick final action on landmark legislation that has bedeviled lawmakers for years.

The final accord, merging political forces and approaches that long had clashed, bars employers from knowingly hiring illegal aliens but offers amnesty to aliens who have lived in the country since Jan. 1, 1982.

Confidence Expressed

Key conferees expressed confidence that both the House and Senate would endorse the long-awaited compromise plan, but Sen. Majority Whip Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) implored panel members to press opponents not to try to derail the package by throwing procedural obstacles in its path as lawmakers rush to adjourn this week.

“I’ll hope you’ll assist me in crushing knuckles and several other things,” pleaded Simpson, who has championed immigration reform drives in the Senate for several years. He predicted that President Reagan would sign the bill.

Alan C. Nelson, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said that Administration officials had reservations about a controversial provision establishing a special, accelerated amnesty program for farm workers. “But overall, we think the conference report is an acceptable package,” Nelson said.

The employer sanctions in the package are designed to check the flood of job-seeking aliens pouring into the country by the millions each year. The INS expects to catch a record 1.8 million illegal aliens in 1986. Experts estimate that for every person caught, one to two more evade authorities.

If the compromise becomes law, every employer from the manager of a large factory to a housewife in search of a maid would face fines and possible jail terms if they knowingly hire a worker in the country illegally. The fines would start at $250 to $2,000 per alien for the first offense.

Would Become Legal

At the same time, however, as a result of the amnesty provision for illegal aliens who have lived in this country for the last four years, “hundreds of thousands” of aliens would be eligible to become legal residents, Nelson predicted. Charles Kamasaki, a lobbyist for La Raza, a coalition of Latino special interest groups, estimated the figure as “somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million.”

The 1982 compromise date was more liberal than the one in the original Senate bill, which had required aliens to have lived in the United States since Jan. 1, 1980.

House sponsor Peter W. Rodino Jr., chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the amnesty program “shows the active compassion on the part of this country.”

Although Congress has considered various forms of immigration reform for the last 15 years, the conference agreement is as close as the idea has ever come to becoming law. The pact refines and combines elements such as amnesty--once bitterly resisted by conservatives--with sanctions, long fought by a wide coalition of special interests, including Latino and civil liberties groups that contended it would lead to job discrimination against anyone who looked or sounded foreign.

Opposition Eases

Opposition to those concepts has gradually eased but movement on legislation stalled for months this year in a dispute over how to satisfy the fears of Western growers that sanctions would decimate their businesses by stripping them of the largely illegal work forces they use to harvest their crops.

In the end, conferees agreed to a complex plan that made it much easier for field hands--who compose an estimated 8% to 15% of the nation’s illegal alien population--to win amnesty than other undocumented workers. To obtain temporary residency, field workers would have to show only that they had worked here for 90 days during the 12-month period ending last May 1.

The final package also includes provisions that would guarantee states and local governments up to $4 billion through 1994 to reimburse them for extra welfare and school costs caused by legalization, bar illegal aliens from receiving most federal welfare benefits for five years, increase the manpower of the U.S. Border Patrol by 50% to help stop new illegal entries and require federal immigration agents for the first time to get search warrants before raiding farm fields.

Deportations Suspended

The employer sanctions would not go into effect until 18 months after the law was signed to allow employers to become familiar with them, and deportation proceedings would be suspended for most illegal aliens during that period to allow them to apply for legal residency.

In a measure included to curb anti-Latino discrimination, employers would be banned from discriminating against job applicants merely because they are foreign-born.

The panel dropped a pair of controversial House-passed provisions that were strongly opposed by the Reagan Administration and that some lawmakers had termed “veto bait.” One of them would have ended employer sanctions 6 1/2 years after the bill became law, while the other would have temporarily blocked the Administration from deporting Salvadorans and Nicaraguans here illegally who claim to be refugees from civil strife.

However, Simpson said the White House had informally promised not to deport many affected Salvadorans because of chaos in El Salvador caused by recent devastating earthquakes.

‘Bait and Switch’

The deletions angered Kamasaki. He said Latino House members are skeptical of the bill but that some had been lured into supporting it because of the House provisions, only to fall victim to a legislative “bait and switch” in the conference.

“We’re not happy, we’re not pleased, but there’s probably just enough in there that mounting an attempt to kill it (the conference report) would fall short,” he acknowledged.

Reflecting the compromise nature of the package, even supporters found it mediocre. For example, Roger Connor, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, predicted that sanctions one day would check the influx of illegal aliens but expressed strong dislike of the special farm worker provisions.

‘It’s a bit like kissing your sister,” he said of the bill. “There ain’t going to be no champagne corks popped over this one, but it’s something that’s got to be done.”

Staff writer Karen Tumulty contributed to this article.