Worries and Rumors About Amnesty Intensify Stress Among Immigrants

All through the day, Eugenia Arevallo can think of nothing but la ley .

On the way to work, she listens as friends tell her their rumors and sad tales, then she tells her own. At home, she eats constantly to put thoughts of the nation’s new immigration law out of her mind.

Her husband, Justino, is calmer on the surface. But he smokes more now and is tempted more frequently to leave their rented house in Boyle Heights to brace himself with a shot of whiskey at neighborhood bars. He returned recently from a visit to the doctor with an orange vial of pills, prescribed to soothe his nerves. One night, Eugenia awoke to see him crouched in the darkness, pounding the floor and sobbing.

“Sometimes we pray for help,” she said. “God willing, everything will work out and we will be allowed to stay here.”

In Los Angeles’ sprawling community of illegal aliens, life has always been edged with fear and stress. Dogged by the constant fear of discovery by bosses and government officials and the threat of arrest and deportation by immigration agents, the region’s estimated 1 million indocumentados have endured by conducting their lives with caution.

Now, caution is no longer enough. The 6-week-old amnesty program has raised new fears about the future, confronting many undocumented aliens with painful decisions about coming out into the open and many others with deadlines that will force them to either return to their homelands or burrow deeper into the immigrant underground.

Those who work with these immigrants, in schools, in mental health clinics, in immigration offices, say these fears are increasingly emerging in classic symptoms of stress.

Their anxieties show up in impressionistic images: Korean immigrants hesitating at the door of a Wilshire District legalization center, afraid to enter and ask for application forms; troubled Salvadorans losing sleep over their future and reliving their border crossings in nightmares; illegal aliens from Mexico slacking off on assembly line jobs, girding for the latest rumors of imminent mass raids by immigration agents.

Officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and private groups working with illegal aliens worry that along with other factors, these new fears, realistic or unfounded, have impeded the early success of the new law, contributing to the low turnout of applicants in the early weeks of the program.

“I have a difficult time comprehending it, but I think we have to acknowledge that it’s been a problem,” said William King, the INS’ western regional director for immigration reform. “We’re trying to come up with as many ways as we can to eliminate these fears.”

That will not be an easy task in a multiethnic immigrant community where suspicion of the agency’s motives runs deep, stoked by rumors and conflicting information.

“This law has put an entire community of people on edge,” said Dr. Robert Desdin, supervisor of adult outpatient care at El Centro Community Mental Health Center in East Los Angeles. “We see the ones who are troubled the most. But when they show the kind of increases in stress that we’ve been noticing lately, it has to be affecting the community at large.”

There are no statistics to quantify that kind of communal strain. But many who work with illegal aliens insist that the disappointing first-month national turnout--about 62,000 amnesty applications have been returned from among 900,000 forms that were handed out--hint at the depths of those fears.

“Those are alarming figures,” said Ira Bank, a lawyer who specializes in immigration cases. “It would seem to me that people should be rushing to get into this program.”

Victor and Maria, a Mexican immigrant couple who live in El Monte, showed up at a nearby INS legalization office to pick up application forms just two weeks after the amnesty program started in May. But since then, the papers have sat untouched in a cardboard shoe box.

Victor, 34, has lived in Los Angeles since 1978, working in a factory that produces fans and electrical fixtures. He would appear to qualify under the amnesty law, which provides that illegal aliens who arrived before 1982 are eligible for citizenship. So would his wife, who came in 1981. But she returned to Mexico twice since then, leading to worries that she could be disqualified for leaving the country during her stay. The law allows only “brief and casual” departures.

They are unmoved by INS assurances that non-eligible relatives would not be deported while other family members apply for amnesty. Victor was caught and sent back several times by Border Patrol officers near Tijuana before he came over for good in 1978. Since then, he has always been watchful for INS raids at his factory, his pulse throbbing whenever he notices strange Anglos in the vicinity.

Unsure about how to proceed, Victor and Maria will do nothing until they are confident that they can apply without fear of separation.

For some, there is not even security in waiting. Those who bend under the pressure seek help from the few medical clinics that cater to immigrants. At El Centro and the Clinica Monsignor Oscar A. Romero in the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles, doctors and nurses have detected a surge in anxiety levels of long-time patients and a small, but growing wave of new referrals.

The complaints range from insomnia and diet disorders to full-blown hallucinations. David Gangsei, a clinical psychologist who works at the Community Counseling Service in the USC area, told of one patient whose dormant fear of policemen was reawakened by daily news reports about amnesty.

“She is literally afraid to do anything,” Gangsei said. “Whenever she sees a policeman, she runs back into her house. Her fears have been exacerbated.”

Anna Deutsch, another psychologist at the same clinic, said one Salvadoran patient relives her successful border crossing in recurring nightmares.

“It’s always the same,” Deutsch said. “She was in a car trunk with two others, and the car was stopped for a moment at the Border Patrol office. In real life, the car went on. But in her dream, the trunk opens up and the immigration police pounce on her.”

There is little that the psychiatrists and counselors can do to ease the fears.

“Of course we encourage them to talk, and we can adjust their medication if they are previous patients,” said Dr. Carlos Muralles, a staff psychiatrist at El Centro. “But a lot of what we do is try to give them information so they can make rational choices.”

The numbers of immigrants who go to the clinics for help are a distinct minority in the immigrant community. A 1984 medical survey by UCLA researchers revealed that untreated anxiety disorders were among the most neglected maladies in the immigrant community, Desdin said.

‘Fatalistic Streak’

“They have a strong fatalistic streak,” Gangsei said. “Only the ones who are truly in desperation come to us. The rest work out their problems in their own ways.”

For some, that means a paralysis of will. Asian immigrants frequently telephone attorney Terry Ng at the Asian-Pacific Legal Center of Southern California for information and advice about the amnesty law, then refuse to leave their names and telephone numbers.

“I try to explain that we’re not an arm of the government, but you can’t persuade them,” he said.

At the INS legalization office on Wilshire Boulevard, Korean immigrants sometimes wait outside the glass doors, asking bolder friends or strangers to pick up application forms for them.

“I see them standing there, and I ask them what they are doing,” said Susan Kim, an INS adjudicator. “They have this fear that even if they walk into the building, someone will grab them and deport them.”

One Filipino immigrant sat through his entire 10-minute interview in tears, convinced that at any moment, he would be seized and deported.

“When he finally got his red (temporary work) card, he was speechless,” Kim said.

As the school year wound down, high school counselors found some of their students distracted and depressed, mirroring their parents’ apprehensions. Irasema Pedraza, a counselor who talks regularly with immigrant students in Orange County junior high and high schools, said she encountered teen-agers who talked of dropping out or giving up on college plans because of the uncertainty ahead.

Growing Resignation

Dr. William Arroyo, a USC psychiatrist who specializes in counseling immigrant children and teen-agers, said he has noticed growing resignation among young clients.

“In some, we’ve seen a drop-off in their academic performance,” he said. “Some are more irritable at school. They’re afraid of losing their friends, losing the environment they’re comfortable in. It’s especially rough on children from El Salvador, who were traumatized by war and now may be draft age.”

In factories, fear takes the form of rumors. Days before the amnesty program officially started in the first week of May, word swept one East Los Angeles shoe factory that on Cinco de Mayo, the INS would stage a mass raid. Guillermo, a wiry Salvadoran immigrant who works at the factory, was anguished about the rumor, but told his wife little about it the night before.

“I didn’t want to worry her,” he said.

The next day, there were no raids. Since then, similar rumors have surfaced, he said, interfering with his concentration and slowing down his work on the assembly line.

At the factory where Justino Arevallo works, there have also been rumors of raids. Several years ago, during one INS raid, the Mexican immigrant was arrested and sent back across the border.

“I will be back tomorrow,” Arevallo boasted to one INS official, and indeed, a day later, he was back in his Boyle Heights home, ready to return to his job assembling faucets and towel racks.

Raids may not cause him alarm, but he and his wife have other fears. Eugenia Arevallo, a Salvadoran, has lived in the United States since 1975, but left for two months, a potential disqualification.

Justino Arevallo, who came across the border in 1970, has a past criminal misdemeanor conviction, which his lawyer has assured him will not harm his case, despite his nagging pessimism that it will.

Still hopeful that they will qualify, the couple registered for amnesty with Catholic Charities in February. Since then, they have heard so much conflicting information about the law and its ramifications--from friends, relatives, lawyers, co-workers and religious leaders--that they have no sense of where they stand.

“We hear so many things,” Eugenia Arevallo said. “You don’t know who to believe.”

Much of the flood of information that accompanied the opening of the amnesty program in May was orchestrated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to convince illegal aliens of the benefits of the new law. Since then, the INS has bought full-page newspaper advertisements, run several radio spots and sent its top officials on a whirlwind of press conferences and photo opportunities.

Sporting a “We serve with courtesy and pride” button on his lapel, INS Regional Director Harold Ezell has become a nightly fixture on Spanish-language television, button-holing perplexed immigrants at legalization centers and cavorting with their children.

“We’re talking about the fear problem constantly,” INS Immigration Reform Director King said. “It’s always coming up at our weekly meetings. We’re hoping that with a solid information campaign and the word-of-mouth advertising that comes from people who get their red cards, those fears will dissolve.”

Despite criticism from some immigrant advocates that publicity about the amnesty program has not been extensive or clear enough, there is more to come. Fernando Oaxaca, an advertising executive who is working with the INS, talks of plans to depict amnesty success stories in illustrated mini-novellas similar to the adult-oriented comic book romances that are popular in Mexico. Another idea being discussed is a plan to to print amnesty facts on popular commercial products, in a style reminiscent of missing children labels on milk cartons.

“Sometimes I wonder if there is too much information out there,” Oaxaca said.

In the end, many may not be convinced without direct visible evidence. Cira Carballo, a 60-year-old Salvadoran immigrant, has lived in Los Angeles since December, 1972, eking out a steady income sewing dresses in the garment district. No obvious obstacles seem to thwart her eligibility, yet she lies awake in her bed for hours each night, trying to imagine how she would survive if deported to her war-torn homeland.

Lulled to sleep only by herbal teas prepared by her daughter, she said she will only feel secure in applying for amnesty if a relative or neighbor comes back with proof in the form of a red card.

“If someone I knew had that card that you hear about, it would be different,” she said. “But you only hear about it, you never see it. Until then, how could I apply? I would rather live with my fears than see them come true.”