Deadline Looms May 4 : Millions Bypassed by Amnesty Fear Future

When Marta Garcia heard a rumor that immigration agents would be pulling children out of classrooms, she packed up her six youngest children and returned with them to Mexico.

A few months later, when the mass deportations she feared did not materialize, Garcia left the children with her mother in Guadalajara and rejoined her husband and three older children in East Los Angeles. Over the last year, Garcia has emptied her savings and drained her strength, traveling between the two countries to be a mother to her divided family.

“My heart is broken every time I leave for Mexico, and it’s broken every time I come back,” lamented Garcia, generally a good-humored woman who laughs easily. “I see no solution to my problem.”

Only Garcia’s husband is eligible for amnesty under the 1986 immigration law.

Like illegal immigrants throughout the country, the Garcia family is caught in the tightening vise of a law that grants amnesty to some while squeezing others who don’t qualify by imposing sanctions against employers who knowingly hire them.

With the amnesty deadline looming next month, millions who will be left out are wondering what’s to become of them. No one in the government expects a mass exodus, but up to now there has been little attention to the predicament of these people.

While immigration officials and the law’s proponents count on employer sanctions to eventually drive illegal immigrants out of the country and dissuade others from coming in, immigrant advocates say the law is merely driving immigrants who don’t qualify for legalization further underground and making them easier targets of exploitation.

Unscrupulous Employers

Community workers say they are seeing higher unemployment in immigrant communities and hearing more reports of unscrupulous employers paying below the minimum wage. More immigrants now frequent street corners where day laborers gather to seek work from drive-by employers. Deepening poverty is forcing more families to double up in crowded apartments. And service groups report an increasing demand for a whole range of social services.

For the last year, the immigration spotlight has been focused on getting as many applicants as possible through the one-year amnesty program. Full enforcement of employer sanctions is not scheduled to begin until June, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Even immigrant-rights groups, their resources depleted by participation in the amnesty program, are only now beginning to look at how to help those who will be bypassed by amnesty.

The Garcias, like many others in the same situation, are trying to figure out their next move. For the moment, the family’s only plan is to hold on to their jobs for as long as possible.

“All we can do is wait and see,” said Garcia (not her real name. Like other immigrants interviewed for this story, she asked that her identity not be revealed.)

No one knows for sure how many immigrants will be excluded, but experts agree that they will far outnumber the more than 1.3 million expected to qualify.

Terming this “a fundamental defect in the law,” Rep. Howard Berman (D-Los Angeles), a member of the House immigration subcommittee, said he supports various proposals for amending the law to allow more categories of immigrants to gain legal status.

Last week, the subcommittee sent a bill to the House floor extending by six month’s the law’s deadline for applying for amnesty. Advocates argued that the program should be extended because it had attracted far fewer applicants than expected. The House is expected to consider the amnesty-extension proposal after the Easter recess. A similar measure is pending in the Senate.

Extension Sought

The measure is part of a pitched battle developing in Congress and the courts over efforts to extend the May 4 amnesty deadline and, equally important, broaden the law--efforts generally opposed by the Reagan Administration and its allies in Congress.

Former acting INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, estimates that as the law now stands, at least 3.5-million immigrants will be left out of the program, including at least 500,000 who are eligible but have not applied.

“If Congress, or any of the rest of us involved in this issue, thought the problems were solved by the law, they were wrong,” she said. “This is an issue that’s going to require continual attention.” Proponents of the law maintain that it already offers a generous amnesty and that employer sanctions should control additional illegal immigration.

“Our hope would be that people would go home voluntarily,” said Mary Kay Hill, a spokeswoman for Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), one of the law’s authors. “As soon as the message sinks in that there are no jobs . . . then people will either not come here or consider returning to their country of origin.”

No Mass Ousters Planned

INS officials do not expect a huge exodus nor do they plan mass deportations, INS spokesman Richard Kenney said. “Immigrants come into the country one at a time and we expect them to leave the same way,” he said.

“We will continue to enforce the law as we always have,” he said, adding that the agency will concentrate its enforcement efforts in the workplace through employer sanctions.

Berman and other immigrant advocates, however, say the sanctions will not work.

“Leaving millions of people who will never realistically be deported and will constitute the same universe of exploitable people as before is, for them and the community, an intolerable situation,” Berman added.

Broader Interpretation

Last week, a federal judge ordered the Immigration and Naturalization Service to broaden its interpretation of the law to grant amnesty to those--primarily Asians and immigrants from other distant countries--who overstayed or otherwise violated the terms of their visas.

Other pending bills call for granting legal status to the immediate family of a person who qualifies for amnesty, as well as to Central Americans, most of whom arrived after Jan. 1, 1982, the qualifying date for amnesty.

Community and church groups are also starting to explore ways to circumvent the law’s employer sanctions through alternatives such as job cooperatives that allow immigrants to be self-employed.

Some religious groups are turning to civil disobedience--publicly refusing to comply with employer sanctions on moral grounds--in an attempt to gain public support for the worsening plight of illegal immigrants.

These efforts, however, remain the exception.

“People still have their hands full with amnesty. Most groups are exhausted and out of resources and are having a hard time thinking about what comes next,” said Mary Lou Goeke, director of Catholic Charities for the San Francisco Archdiocese, which is among groups at the forefront of service to immigrants who do not qualify for amnesty. “It’s going to be a real shame when the next stage comes and we’re not ready for it.”

Some who left the United States, like Marta Garcia, have returned, and others continue to come. After more than a year of declining INS apprehensions at the Southern border, the numbers are up again. The Border Patrol apprehended more than 100,000 people in February, a 17% increase over the same month last year.

Artemio Rios, 24, has noticed the difference. He recently arrived from Mexico and daily looks for work at the corner of Sawtelle and Olympic boulevards in West Los Angeles, a gathering spot for day laborers.

More workers than last year gather each morning in small groups scattered along the boulevard, and there is less work to go around, he said. They keep congregating here despite recent INS raids at some Southern California labor pick-up spots.

But employers who pick up workers at the corners generally do not demand to see work permits, and the $200 he can earn during a good week--more than four times what he can earn back home--is still worth the trouble, he said.

‘Nothing to Lose’

“We’d heard of the new law back home,” said Rios. “People were saying, ‘Why come if they’re going to kick everybody out?’ But I decided to come anyway. There’s nothing to lose.”

Some men from Rios’ small hometown in the state of Michoacan stopped traveling north for a while, he said. “But when they saw that they weren’t kicking people out, they started coming again.”

Manuel Navarro, 21, has lived in the United States about two years. He returned to the street corner recently after losing his regular construction job because he had no work permit, he said.

“I think people will keep coming,” said Navarro, who said he shares an apartment in Los Angeles with 16 friends, sometimes 20. He goes home depressed most afternoons, unable to find work.

Life ‘Hard in Both Places’

“Life is hard in both places, but the difference is that back home you don’t even earn enough to get by,” he said.

Among illegal immigrants like Marta Garcia’s husband and their grown children, who have been in the country long enough to learn English, establish community ties and get full-time work, many have been able to hold onto their jobs despite the law’s prohibitions.

The manager at the bank where the Garcias’ 20-year-old daughter works as a teller has apparently chosen to ignore the law. He told her not to worry, since the INS doesn’t make a practice of raiding banks, she said.

Her 19-year-old brother, who has worked for a construction firm for more than a year, has also been allowed to keep his job. Because he is a “grandfathered” employee hired before the 1986 immigration law was enacted, the young man’s employer is exempted from requiring proof of his legal status.

Others have not been as fortunate. Some are being fired by firms requiring proof of legal status.

Some workers are using false documents, and some say employers encourage them to do so, hoping to avoid penalties. Some employers who continue hiring the undocumented pay them less than minimum wages, arguing that a greater risk is involved.

Dead-End Jobs

Some grandfathered employees complain about having to stay in low-paying, dead-end jobs.

“I feel trapped, but I can’t change jobs because they’ll ask me for a work permit, and I don’t have one,” said Ana Maria Mendoza, 34. She said she earns about $80 per week at a downtown garment shop where wages are well below the minimum.

“It’s depressing to work all day for so little, but there’s not much I can do about it.”

Mendoza said wages were higher when she first went to work for the firm two years ago. Most workers--except for a handful who have no work permits--left when wages started falling, she said. Newer immigrants have taken their place.

Fortunately for her family, her husband earns $4.75 an hour as a carpenter and has not been asked for documentation at his job.

Groups serving immigrants report that demand for emergency food, clothing and shelter has risen sharply.

Trying to Increase Services

“Catholic Charities groups across the nation are trying to figure out how they can increase services just to help people survive until we figure out what else to do,” said Goeke of the San Francisco Archdiocese.

The San Francisco agency and other Bay Area groups are among the first to set up sewing, knitting and other handicraft collectives, run and operated by Salvadoran immigrants. They have also developed a job cooperative for domestic workers, based on an exception in the law that exempts employers of part-time domestics from requiring documentation, said Patrice Perillie of Catholic Charities.

In Washington, several immigrants have responded to newspaper ads by a lawyer offering to help them set up partnerships. By going into business for themselves as independent contractors, they are neither employees nor employers, and therefore unaffected by the law’s employer sanctions, according to the attorney.

“This problem is larger than anything we, or any private or public sector groups, can address alone,” said Gilbert Carrasco of the U.S. Catholic Conference Migration and Refugee Services. “It would be far more cost effective in the long run to legalize these people and allow them to work and contribute.”

Economic Motivation

For Central Americans, the economic motivation to remain in the United States is coupled with a fear of returning to countries wracked by violence.

“They would rather be homeless on the streets of the United States than homeless or shot at on the streets of their home countries,” said Peter Schey, of the National Center for Immigrants Rights in Los Angeles Inc.

Desperate to gain legal-worker status, Salvadorans are rushing to file political-asylum applications, although fewer than 3% are approved. Applications in Los Angeles have increased tenfold, to 13,000, in the last year, according to INS officials.

Some who think they are applying for work permits, however, have been surprised to learn that some lawyers and immigration counselors actually submitted application for political asylum unbeknown to them. While work permits are routinely issued to asylum applicants, the applications, in effect, identify those immigrants for deportation, INS officials say.

Got Notice in Mail

“One woman didn’t now she was applying for asylum until she got an INS notice in the mail asking her whether she could show why she shouldn’t be deported,” said Kenney of the INS.

Antonio Contreras, 42, of El Salvador is among those Central Americans who plan to stay in the United States “until they physically deport me.” Contreras, who has lived in South-Central Los Angeles for a year, says he earns about $10 a day selling frozen juice bars on the streets. Back home, he saw his sister, a brother-in-law and a nephew die of malnutrition and other ailments for which they received no medical attention.

“I saw a lot of people die. I saw the misery,” he said.

Unable to control his anger at the injustices he saw, Contreras said he began to speak out to his co-workers and neighbors against the conditions on the coffee plantation where he worked. It wasn’t long, he said, before he received word that government authorities were looking for him.

He headed north.