Worried Applicants : Amnesty--Pioneering First Wave

They spoke about laws and tragedy and skeletons found in the desert. The old-timers speak a good deal about such things these days.

When they remembered the 18 men who died in July in the locked boxcar near El Paso, they wondered.

“Why do they come, seeing the way things are now?” one of the men asked. They all agreed that the new immigration law is making it harder to find work.

But Antonio Carrillo knew why. “When you’re over there and see yourself corralled, when you see your children go hungry, you look all around for a way out and there is none,” Carrillo said. “Then, you remember the United States.”

Reminiscences and Visions

Carrillo, 57, of Pomona, has lived and worked in the United States most of his adult life as an illegal alien, and in recent months has earned a living by scavenging for cardboard. He and a group of friends were spending a relaxed Sunday in Azusa recently remembering their own hazardous trips and contemplating their future under the new law.

Carrillo, whose father and uncles began traveling northward from their hometown in the Mexican state of Zacatecas before he was born, recalled his father’s stories about men’s skeletons he discovered on his treks across the desert.

Now they’re dying in locked boxcars.

The men debated whether the law will stop people from coming. And they wondered how many of those already here will be allowed to stay under the law’s amnesty. For Carrillo, this is an immediate and pressing concern.

Carrillo’s San Gabriel Valley family is part of the first small wave of immigrants to take the risk of applying for amnesty. After months of worry and preparations, Carrillo, two of his children and a few other relatives have received six-month work permits while awaiting final decisions on their amnesty petitions.

Some in the family are guardedly optimistic about their chances, but most remain uncertain. And they are still worried about family members with more problematic cases who have yet to file applications.

While the law provides the only hope the family has of attaining legal U.S. residency, the unprecedented opportunity has not come cheaply.

The law offers U.S. residency to aliens who can prove they have lived in the United States continuously since Jan. 1, 1982, and who meet other requirements.

Despite public assurances from immigration officials that only about 2% of the amnesty applications filed so far have been recommended for denial, the Carrillos are not celebrating yet.

Since the law was enacted last November, the Carrillos, like other immigrants unfamiliar with the English language and American bureaucracy, have struggled to find their way through the red tape created by the law.

Most in the family have sought help from what has become a mushrooming amnesty industry: immigration lawyers, legalization assistance centers, physicians and small photographic shops offering services to help meet application requirements.

Some have spent days tracking down old employers for letters verifying when they worked, old tax accountants for copies of their returns. They’ve missed precious days from their jobs to keep appointments with lawyers and immigration officials.

They have also had to scrimp from already tight budgets to pay up to $1,700 per family in legal fees. This is in addition to the $420 per family in government fees and the cost of required medical exams, photographs and fingerprints.

And there have been sleepless nights spent worrying:

Would the few welfare checks Carrillo’s daughter received during a brief marital separation disqualify her from amnesty?

Would Carrillo’s wife, Estefana, who has seldom paid a bill in her own name, be able to document her years in the United States?

Will a 10-year medical disability, a mental illness or an emergency trip to Mexico disqualify other relatives? What if some family members are allowed to stay and others are forced to leave?

Those questions arise from ambiguities in the complex law and what critics regard as overly restrictive regulations implementing it. While the law disqualifies anyone considered a “public charge,” it is not clear, for instance, whether that automatically applies to anyone who has ever received welfare benefits, disability payments or treatment for a mental disorder.

Critics blame the restrictions and confusion for the slow start of the program. So far, only 300,000 applications have been filed in the Western region. Immigration officials initially predicted that the one-year program would draw 2.1 million applicants in the West, more than half of the total expected across the country.

“It’s been very stressful,” said Carrillo’s daughter, Maria Toscano, 24, who has played a leading role in helping the family through the legalization maze. Early on, she led her family to the office of a notary public to retrieve documents that they had deposited with him years earlier, in the false hope that he would help them gain legal status. The documents they needed to file for amnesty were returned, but the notary refused to return money that Toscano had advanced him. Toscano took him to Small Claims Court and won.

“What’s kept me going is the hope of gaining some stability and of enjoying a better future in this country,” she said.

Often when Toscano has compared herself to “legal” friends and relatives, she has thought: “If only I had the opportunities of those with papeles (papers, or legal residency documents), I wouldn’t settle for minimum wage. I’d go back to school. I’d buy a house. I’d do many things.”

Toscano dropped out of high school to marry shortly after she arrived in the United States about eight years ago. But she returned to school earlier this summer, earned a high school equivalence certificate, completed a nursing assistant program and plans to begin studying toward a nursing degree in the fall.

Still, the house that she dreams of buying will have to wait. She and her husband, Armando, made an offer on a three-bedroom home in Duarte recently but withdrew it at the last minute when she became apprehensive about the couple’s still uncertain future.

They, too, have work permits, but they want a final decision on their residency applications before taking on a mortgage.

“It’s not over,” a sister-in-law said. “It just means we are legal for six months.”

Even if she and her husband are granted temporary residence, the sister-in-law noted, the law requires that they maintain that status for 18 months and then reapply for permanent residency within the following year.

“It’s going to be one continuing hassle for the next couple of years,” she said. “The pressure’s not going to let up.”

The sister-in-law, Lourdes, and her husband, Alonso, 22, (not their real names), were the first in their extended families to face officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the East Los Angeles legalization office in July. (Some family members, not yet certain of the outcome and worried about their jobs, have asked that their real names not be used.)

The couple received their work permits but they did not celebrate the occasion. After a nerve-racking five-hour wait and a grueling half-hour interview, the young couple went home exhausted.

“All I wanted to do was sleep,” said Lourdes, getting angry as she recalled what she described as rude treatment from the immigration examiner who interviewed them.

The woman official “was angry and said that if it wasn’t for us, she wouldn’t have to be there working overtime,” Lourdes recalled.

The couple were asked to document--month by month--their life in the United States over the last six years, Lourdes said. “It was rough.”

Alonso, who makes a comfortable living as an ironworker, chides his wife and sister, Maria, for “panicking” over the law. Alonso and his wife have grown up in the United States. They are fluent in both English and Spanish. They have adapted to life here so well that neither friends nor employers have ever suspected they are in the country illegally.

“If we don’t get amnesty, nobody will,” Alonso reassures his wife.

Alonso went to the interview with no more misgivings than he would have had in keeping a doctor’s appointment, he said. “Then we ran into that lady and all that waiting. . . .”

By the time he left the center, he recalled, he was “furious.”

Other family members’ encounters with INS officials have been less trying. For the most part, officials have been firm but courteous, they say. In one instance, they were unexpectedly sympathetic. Carrillo’s nephew, Aurelio, 39, (not his real name), who has been receiving disability payments since undergoing a kidney transplant 10 years ago, was issued a work permit and his lawyer is optimistic that he may be granted amnesty.

The night after Lourdes and Alonso’s interview, Alonso called his sister to warn her to be well prepared. But there was no need. Maria Toscano had done her homework.

The day after President Reagan signed the long-debated immigration reform bill into law, she went to the store, bought a dozen brown manila envelopes and began sorting through boxfuls of old paycheck stubs, rent receipts, car payment slips, school records and other pieces of paper that documented her family’s life in the United States.

Toscano led her parents and brothers to several community orientation meetings on the law. The family eventually signed up with the nonprofit East Los Angeles Legalization Project. Toscano had heard the project’s director, a vocal immigrant rights advocate, on a television news program and “liked what he had to say,” she recalled.

Even so, at times frustrated with the seemingly slow progress of her family’s cases, Toscano called or made the 40-mile round trip--from her home in West Covina to the project office--several times a week. Sometimes she cajoled, sometimes she demanded, sometimes she offered to do some of the work herself.

The family has paid about $650 per couple for the center’s services. Carrillo’s nephew, Aurelio, said he paid a private law firm $1,700 to handle his case and those of his wife and two of their children. Surprised by the fees, some family members have agreed to pay in installments; others worry about whether they will be able to afford the services at all.

About 70% of those who have applied for amnesty in the Western region have filed their applications without help from attorneys or volunteer agencies, according to immigration officials.

Sought to Save Time

The Carrillos opted for the added security of a lawyer’s backing in the hope that it would also save them some time. Toscano is busy with school and her husband works 12-hour shifts at a tire shop. Antonio Carrillo is finding it difficult at his age to get a job since the factory where he worked closed last winter. He works longer hours now, selling cardboard that he collects to recycling plants.

Earlier last month when Maria and Armando Toscano went to the East Los Angeles INS office, she wore a new white summer dress and high-laced silver sandals. Sitting across from her husband in the crowded waiting area, Maria tapped her foot nervously but smiled reassuringly at him.

There was an attorney with the Toscanos and they had more than enough documentation to meet the examiner’s stiff standards. Maria became flustered only once, as she furiously searched amid scores of envelopes and folders she had with her for the misplaced immunization records of her two U.S.-born children. The examiner wanted to see them.

After the interview, the official rated the case’s preparation “average”--as good as those prepared by aliens without help from a lawyer.

The couple’s lawyer, Kathy Alfred, rated the examiner as “stricter than most.”

“What’s hard is that we never know what kind of an officer we’re going to get and what kind of documentation they’re going to require,” Alfred said. Such unpredictability and lack of uniformity are persistent criticisms from immigration lawyers and advocates.

Maria Toscano contends that INS “is making it very difficult by demanding so much proof.”

Toscano’s mother and three of her brothers have yet to file their applications. Her father, who worked many years in the United States before the rest of the family joined him, has filed for legal status under a separate provision of the law for those who have lived in the United States prior to 1972.

Alfred said she is holding the family’s more problematic cases for the last--a common strategy among immigrants and their lawyers. If the rest of the family is granted amnesty, Alfred said, she will then argue that the Carrillo’s youngest son--an 18-year-old who has received psychiatric care--be allowed to remain with his family based on humanitarian grounds.

Others in the family who have not yet filed for amnesty are rushing to do so. Starting today, anyone hired since the law was enacted will be required to provide proof of legal status or work permits.

“I fell asleep,” said Lourdes’ mother, Esperanza. She and her husband and two of their daughters are hurriedly preparing applications, trying to make up for lost time.

The delay was not entirely their fault. They were among about 300,000 aliens who have registered with the Catholic Church in the Los Angeles area for help. But the church’s amnesty program has gotten off to a slow start. After hearing nothing from the church for several months, Lourdes’ relatives recently turned to the nonprofit center handling the Carrillos’ cases.

One of the family’s major concerns is a trip that Esperanza made to Mexico two years ago to visit her ailing mother. It was her first trip out of the country since arriving here in 1976. Her unwitting mistake was crossing back into the United States legally, with a passport and tourist visa. The INS has maintained that legal reentry into the United States breaks the law’s “continuous” illegal residency requirement.

The irony is one that advocates for immigrants say threatens denial in tens of thousands of cases. In July, a federal lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles challenging the INS interpretation, which even some agency officials agree should be relaxed.

A critical concern of the extended family remains the possibility that some family members may qualify while others do not.

“If I qualify and my wife doesn’t, am I supposed to stay here and is she supposed to leave, or what?” asked a befuddled Antonio Carrillo. “Our grandchildren were born here. How is it possible that husbands will be separated from wives; parents from their children?”

The question has been asked with growing insistence. Legislation has been proposed and immigrants’ advocates, including the U.S. Catholic Conference, have lobbied immigration officials to address the issue administratively. So far, however, like in the issue of the visas, no clear answer has been forthcoming.

For the Carrillos, uncertainties over the law and the future persist. But with each new work authorization card that is issued, some of the initial fear begins to give way to guarded optimism.

“I’m still in doubt, but I feel a little better,” Carrillo’s nephew, Aurelio, said. “I don’t lay awake nights worrying anymore.”

Researcher Nona Yates assisted in preparing this report.