Amnesty: Day One : Legalization Offices Open With No Fuss

With his wife, Lily, and two friends along to lend “moral support,” illegal alien Paul Perez showed up at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Santa Ana legalization office on South Ritchey Street at 5 a.m.--to beat the expected crowds.

But none materialized, and when the doors opened at 8 a.m., beginning the first day of official business for legalization offices, Perez, 24, who has lived in Santa Ana for eight years, went in and came back out with an application form in hand in less than five minutes.

“A lot of people are still scared about this, and they’re staying away to see if anyone is picked up,” said Perez, an electronics assembly worker. “You gotta be confident, though.”

Amnesty applicant Jaime Magallon agreed that overcoming fear of the INS--his own was instilled during 16 years of evading the immigration authorities--was difficult but necessary.

“Yes, I’m scared, but there are some things in life that one must do anyway,” said Magallon, looking relieved as he left the Santa Ana office with four application forms. “I have a tremendous responsibility--my children were born here--and we already feel like this is our country. . . . If I didn’t think I’d qualify, I wouldn’t be here.”

The scene was much the same in Garden Grove and Buena Park, where hundreds of illegal aliens, some boldly but others nervously, walked up to information counters and asked INS employees for the forms that could make their residency here legal.

Santa Ana chief legalization officer George Newland, a retired Border Patrol officer, looked like a proud new restaurant owner as he stood by the door Tuesday morning and greeted each illegal alien as he or she walked in.

“Hello, how are you?” Newland said as a man dressed in dungarees, boots and a cowboy hat walked in with his family and asked for four applications.

More Traffic on Monday

Traffic on Tuesday at the Santa Ana office was actually slower than on the day before, when employees handed out 1,800 applications. That was down to about 1,300 on Tuesday.

The most frenetic moment of the day at that office came when a workman installing linoleum accidentally set off a small fire in the office restroom. Damage was minimal, however, and service was not interrupted for long.

In some places around Southern California, the first day of the nation’s new immigration law spawned a mini-industry as dozens of entrepreneurs mingled with immigrants at legalization centers. Outside some legalization offices, entrepreneurs stood and hawked legalization booklets, fingerprinting services and advice on the new law.

Kam Santos, a genial, casually dressed man with a bug tattoo on his right hand and a spider web tattoo on his left, showed up early outside the Hollywood legalization office to sell handbooks on “How to Become an American Citizen.”

Almost doubled over from the weight of his red, white and blue manuals, he approached immigrants as they waited in line to get into the office. When they exited, Santos tried again, smiling, with the same lines.

‘The Whole Nine Yards’

“Everything you need to get your status is here, from filling out forms to the history of the United States,” he said. “It’s got the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ all the presidents, a dictionary of important words, the Constitution and all the amendments--the whole nine yards. And it’s in English and Spanish.”

With citizenship has come a hardy and sometimes pesky new breed of salesmanship.

Outside the Hollywood legalization office, keen-eyed hustlers handed out flyers for medical clinics and fingerprint studios. In the same shopping gallery that houses the East Los Angeles legalization office, hundreds of immigrants lined up at a studio specializing in fast service for snapshots and prints. And some photography studios across the city were reportedly turning customers away because they were so busy.

Immigration officials were not pleased with this latest American growth industry but said they could do nothing unless outright fraud was committed. ‘

‘It’s a free country,” said Western Regional INS Commissioner Harold Ezell. “We don’t want it to seem like we sanction these people, but we don’t own the public sidewalks. We can’t order these people away. It’s buyer beware.”

Kam Santos and his colleagues outside the Hollywood legalization office said they were acting with only the purest of intentions. “This is a public service, what I’m doing here,” Santos insisted.

Health Clinic Flyers

Santos planted himself firmly in front of each of his potential customers. Flipping through the pages of the his how-to-become-an American manual, Santos told them soothingly that the paperback booklet was “self-explanatory.”

Standing near Santos was Carlos Beltran, looking slightly ominous in a pair of dark sunglasses while he handed out flyers for the Clinica de Salud Familia, a health clinic providing medical checkups for immigrants. The clinic has been approved by the INS for giving medical tests to applicants.

“I tell people we are a clinic of service to this community,” he said. “People don’t know which doctors to go to, and we are near.”

Salvador Rivera, 40, a Salvadoran refugee, dropped by the Hollywood office Monday to pick up application forms. He wound up taking a job handing out cards for a nearby fingerprint center. He returned Tuesday, with a shopping bag filled with cards bearing the name and address of his new employer.

“I came here to get application forms, and a man came up to me and said he needed someone to work for him,” Rivera said. “He’s paying me $3.50 an hour for eight hours a day.”

Inside the legalization office, INS staffers who were caught up in the chaos of the first day of the new law said they had little time and even less authority to discourage the sidewalk entrepreneurs. One of the INS workers said that last week he had approached a truck advertising fingerprinting services which had parked for several days in a space for the handicapped, directly in front of the legalization office.

Busy Photo Studio

“I informed the gentleman inside that he didn’t appear to be handicapped,” the INS official said. “He hasn’t been back since.”

Competition was not so keen outside the East Los Angeles legalization office. But that may have been because Jimmy Aguilar’s Amnestia studio, which had opened Monday, had all the business it could handle. On Tuesday morning, more than 200 immigrants lined up, spilling out into the mall, to pay $15 for fingerprints and two glossy color photographs.

“People are telling me it’s this way all over the place,” said a satisfied Aguilar.

Even 17 blocks from the San Fernando legalization office in Sepulveda, there was money to be made at Parthenia Amnesty Services, where legalization advice was meted out at a price of $300 for each adult, $200 for teen-agers over the age of 14 and $100 for children.

“Business is beginning to pick up rapidly,” said Ira Kwatcher, manager of the clinic, which opened four months ago to capitalize on the complexity of the immigration law.

Even Kam Santos, who was being turned down more often than he was making sales, was optimistic enough to be selling his $6.95 citizenship manual for $8.

“What I’d really like to do is find some immigration lawyers who’d like to put these books in a package deal for their clients,” Santos said. “Then I wouldn’t even have to hustle. But for now, I’ll take what I can get.”