Business Falls at Amnesty Agencies : Orange County Unit Reaching Out for More Applicants

While federal officials announced Friday that the 500,000th person had applied for immigration amnesty in Southern California, business at some of the volunteer agencies helping with the program is dwindling--so much so that the Catholic Church, the largest such agency, is planning to scale back its operation.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese’s Catholic Charities announced Friday that it plans to close six of its 18 amnesty processing centers. Services will be consolidated at the remaining 12 centers, which will keep longer hours, said spokeswoman Linnea Dahlstrom.

“Business is dropping and we are hoping it will pick up,” said a spokeswoman for Catholic Charities of Orange County who asked not to be identified.

To date, the Orange County office has referred 2,750 applications to the INS, the official said.

“We’re doing outreach and hope it will rise. We’re going out to talk to people in community centers,” she said.

Agency officials denied that financial losses were the reason for the closure. Dahlstrom admitted, however, that “from a practical standpoint it doesn’t make much business sense to keep offices open if there are no clients.”

‘Totally Puzzled’

Also, the agency’s clientele has diminished drastically in the last few months--from 2,500 applicants a week to 500. “We are totally puzzled,” Dahlstrom said.

Catholic Charities runs the largest program among volunteer agencies helping immigrants prepare amnesty applications for filing with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. To be eligible for amnesty, applicants must prove they have lived continuously in the United States since at least Jan. 1, 1982.

Early on in the one-year amnesty application period, the church agency pre-registered more than 320,000 potential applicants. So far it has filed about 14,500 applications with INS on behalf of clients.

Some observers maintain that the agency waited too long after the pre-registering to contact clients. Growing impatient with the delays, immigrants went elsewhere for help or filed their applications directly with INS, these observers maintain. Others, however, contend that volunteer agencies were not given the funds or the advance time needed to prepare for the massive amnesty program.

In announcing that applications in the INS Western Region have reached the half-million mark, federal officials noted that the figure represents nearly 60% of applications nationwide.

Officials said the daily intake of applications is holding steady and added that they expect to process about 1 million applications in the region by May, when the program ends. Although the federal agency initially geared up to process about 2 million applications in the region, officials now say they never expected to reach that number and are “right on target.”

Officials expressed no surprise over the closure of the church-run centers.

“They just haven’t produced the volume they expected,” said Los Angeles INS District Director Ernest Gustafson, adding that most immigrants appear to be filing their applications directly with INS.

Only about 15% of applications filed with INS have come through the volunteer agencies, Gustafson noted. Initially, it was anticipated that most applicants would seek help from the volunteer agencies, which were to act as buffers between immigrants and the INS.

Gustafson contends that as the number of applicants has increased, immigrants have lost their initial fear of approaching INS offices directly.

Times staff writer Mark I. Pinsky contributed to this story in Orange County.