Outreach Finally Makes Contact With Asians

When Steve Oh’s boss chose him to represent their Los Angeles insurance firm at a conference in Canada last summer, Oh lied and said he was “too busy” to go.

Although eager to take the trip, the 35-year-old sales manager from Fullerton feared that he wouldn’t be allowed to return to the United States--and that his secret would be revealed.

The Korean native is among an estimated 12,000 Asians living illegally in the county, according to the Orange County Coalition for Immigrant Rights.

Many have lived with the secret for years, hiding it from their employers, their friends, avoiding situations that might expose them. For them, the truth has been a subject of shame and embarrassment. For many, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Law--amnesty--offered a tough choice.

“A lot of times, they’re settled now with family, have good jobs . . . and think they have (plenty) to lose” if their applications for amnesty are rejected, said Susan Kim, a coordinator for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

They fear deportation, she said, because once Asians return to their native countries, their chances of ever returning are slim.

For five months, Kim coordinated an amnesty outreach program targeting Asians in seven Southland counties, including Orange. Only recently, as this week’s amnesty deadline neared, did the program penetrate the communications network of the diverse Asian groups.

Before the outreach program began Dec. 1, the agency was receiving 2,500 applications from Asians per month. Recently, that figure has been about 4,200 a month, said John Tu, another coordinator of the program.

As of a week ago, 28,000 Asians had applied for amnesty in Western states, Tu said, out of about 200,000 who may be eligible in the region.

Most Asians slip into illegal status after allowing tourist, student or work permits to lapse, said Harold Ezell, INS Western regional commissioner.

“The main problem is (Asians) not understanding that if their visa expires, it’s as (serious as) if they illegally walked across the border,” he said.

Oh held a valid visa when he arrived in the United States in 1978 as an electronics engineering trainee in San Jose. Soon after, his wife, Hye Sook, joined him with their infant daughter.

Educational Opportunities

The family wanted to stay, mainly because of the educational opportunities their children would have, Hye Sook said.

Oh’s training period and his visa expired in 1980, but the company wasn’t hiring, so he was out of a job. An electronic engineering graduate of Hangyang University in Seoul, Oh worked for minimum wages as a technician while the INS considered and finally approved his request for a renewed work permit in 1981. But then the company he was working for let him go, rendering his work permit invalid.

They were, said Hye Sook, 34, “very disgusted, disappointed, sad and angry at everything.”

The Ohs packed up and flew from San Jose to Los Angeles for a goodby visit with relatives before returning to Korea. But the relatives persuaded the Ohs to move down and hang on.

“Someday the government will give you the chance to stay,” Oh said they told him, particularly because he was skilled.

Meanwhile he found work as a custodian, at photo developing stores and car stereo repair shops, sometimes juggling four jobs a day.

Hye Sook said: “I was not a criminal, but I had a guilty feeling. . . . We were a little nervous every day. It was unfair. I was not doing bad for America.

“We never told the children. We didn’t want them to worry.”

Their second child, Emerson, 8, was born in America.

Watching Others

As details of the amnesty program began appearing in Korean newspapers, the Ohs, who neither read newspapers in English nor watched English-language TV, held back to see whether others would succeed.

Tu said Asian applicants want to be “100% guaranteed” of qualifying for amnesty before they even apply and “come in with boxes and shopping bags of documents. After the interview, they’re surprised when we only pick a few.”

Tu said that while the INS has provided amnesty information in Asian languages since June, it was never adequately disseminated until the special outreach program began.

Under that program, coordinators have conducted weekly workshops in several ethnic communities and advertised them in the Asian press. They have made radio and TV broadcasts in Chinese and Korean and have distributed amnesty calendars in Asian languages.

Now application instructions are available in even the relatively obscure Filipino dialects of Elokano and Pangansisan. A videotape explaining the amnesty program became available in Spanish by mid-January and was translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean, to be available in April.

To communicate their problems, illegal aliens would “rather talk to you in their language,” Tu said.

“Chinese people from other regions (from Chicago to New Jersey) come to me to apply,” said Tu, a Chinese-American. “Korean people only talk to Susan.”

But Nampet Panichpant-M, coordinator of immigrant assistance for the county’s Health Care Agency, said the diverse languages and backgrounds of those targeted adds to the difficulty in reaching them.

29 Asian Groups

There are at least 29 cultural groups within the Asian community in Southern California, some without newspapers in their native language, she said.

Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, a group actively working to encourage Asian applications, echoed the complaint: “(The INS) hired a Chinese and a Korean but not a Pacific Islander. Communicating to each community requires a different person, a different approach.”

For Oh, amnesty has been “salvation,” he said. Until the Ohs made the decision to surface under the amnesty shelter, only the congregation at the Placentia church they attended was privy to their “top secret.”

Their pastor, the Rev. Joon-Young Lee, said: “We prayed every Sunday morning for three years” that they would not be arrested.

“Everybody was watching their mouths,” the Ohs said.