Immigrants Line Up for Chance to Cross Border--but This Time Back to Mexico

People began arriving at the Mexican Consulate at 3 a.m.--a few even spent the night under the historic building’s front archway. By the time the consulate opened its doors for business, the line outside stretched across Olvera Street and wound into the nearby plaza.

The crowds have become a familiar sight over the last few months as newly legalized immigrants anxious to visit Mexico--in many cases for the first time in more than a decade--line up daily for a consular permit to travel to their native country. The desire to go back is so strong that the number of permits issued has skyrocketed.

Action in the Line

Many are taking grown children to meet grandparents for the first time. Some are looking forward to getting reacquainted with the country they left as teen-agers. And all are relieved that, this time, they will be allowed to return to the United States without having to face the added expense and danger of hiring a smuggler.

The boredom of the hours-long wait outside the consulate is broken occasionally by the formation of new friendships in line or by angry shouting at latecomers trying to cut into line and at the lone consular official at the head of the line trying, but not always succeeding, to maintain order.

But they put up with this final bureaucratic hurdle for the right to travel freely between the two countries. They have already spent a year qualifying for legal status under the amnesty program that ended in May and legalized more than 2 million immigrants who arrived in the United States before 1982.

The cost of building a life in the United States--as an illegal alien--has been a near severing of ties to their old homeland.

“Imagine what it’s like to have all of your family in Mexico and not be able to go see them nor the land where you were born,” said Guillermo Orozco, 40, who has not been back to Mexico since arriving here 12 years ago. Orozco, who values his job as a truck driver, has been unwilling to risk capture by U.S. immigration authorities at the border and the problems that might cause him at work, he said.

When Orozco and his two brothers received word a few years ago that their father was sick in Mexico, they pooled their resources and picked one of the three to make the trip.

“We kept a vigil by the phone until our brother called and told us our father was going to be all right,” Orozco recalled.

Orozco’s wife, Yolanda, has returned to Mexico only once--three years ago when her father became ill. A major expense was the $800 she paid a “coyote” to smuggle her and her two children back into the United States. Her father died two years later and Orozco was unable to attend the funeral.

The opportunity to return to Mexico at will has unleashed an avalanche of requests for “consulate registry” cards, which serve as nationality identity cards for travel inside Mexico. So far this year, the consulate and two field offices in Santa Ana and Oxnard have issued about 80,000 of the cards, already more than twice those issued in all of 1987. The bulk of them have been issued since April, said Vice Consul Eduardo de-Ibarrola. The sudden surge has overwhelmed the consulate staff and plans are under way to hire additional personnel, he said.

He added that a similar flood of requests for travel documents has swamped Central American consulates as well. At the Guatemalan Consulate downtown, Vice Consul Cristian Castillo said they are also considering adding personnel to handle the more than 300 people a day--about five times the usual number--who line up for passports. Unable to handle all of the applications in one day, officials sometimes ask applicants who have waited in line for hours to return the next day, he said.

Having grown accustomed to the relative efficiency of American bureaucracy, some of the newly legalized American residents were quick to criticize the more relaxed but less efficient system they encountered at the consulate.

“This is horrible. It’s so disorganized,” said Micaela Cortez, 30, standing in the sun and recalling the indoor, air-conditioned waiting areas at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s amnesty offices. “We got better treatment from U.S. immigration.”

Stringent Requirements

Cortez, a garment factory worker who has not been back to Mexico in 10 years, said that she and her family planned to catch a plane for Guadalajara the next morning. “I want my children to meet their grandparents and to see for themselves that Mexico is a beautiful country, contrary to all the negative things they’ve heard,” she said.

One man complained that the last time he visited the consulate to try to get a passport the requirements were so stringent that he finally gave up. One of the documents required was proof of legal entry into the United States. Unfortunately, he quipped, “Coyotes don’t issue receipts.”

“I’d almost rather pay mordida (a bribe) in Mexico than go through this,” Dagoberto Garcia said angrily, shouting at the consular official trying to regain order at the front of the line.

Garcia, 25, and others said they sought the registry cards hoping to avoid having to pay bribes to Mexican immigration officials who would hassle them otherwise.

But it’s no guarantee. “If you have a registry card, they ask for your passport. If you have a passport, they demand to see a registry card. Either way they make you pay,” Garcia said.

Ibarrola of the consulate dismissed the complaints of corruption as rumors that over time have become myths. He said that under Mexico’s “moralization campaign” there has been much progress in the fight against institutional corruption. He added that specific complaints filed with the consulate--and there have been few--are turned over to the Mexican Department of Exterior Relations.

Differing Attachments

Immigrants expressed a range of attachments to their native country. Many said they had grown comfortable here and only wanted to return for a visit.

Some of the younger ones, like Adriana Ruiz, 19, and her husband, said they plan to vacation mostly in Mexican resorts. They have few relatives left in Mexico and hardly remember their birthplaces. “We were so young when we came that we are really more from here than there,” she said.

Others, however, like Flora Lopez, 32, have never gotten over their homesickness.

“I’d prefer to live back there. There’s more poverty but life is more peaceful. There’s not the pressure of living by the clock like here,” said Lopez, who left her hometown in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca 12 years ago and works as a housekeeper. “We stay for the children’s sake, for their future.”

She can hardly contain her excitement, she said. “My parents, brothers and sisters are impatient to see me. I dream about them all the time now.” Lopez is also curious to see how her hometown has changed in her absence, she said.

While the ability to visit Mexico and then return legally to their homes in the United States is a liberating change for most, for Lopez’s 9-year-old son, Isaac, it spells the end a childhood adventure.

The boy accompanied his parents five years ago on the trip to his mother’s hometown. But what sticks in his mind are not the new sights, but the heightened tension of the illegal nighttime border crossing across the hills north of Tijuana.

“That was fun,” they boy said, excitedly recalling how several people in his group scrambled through holes in the wire fence at the border. He remembered the trek in the rain through muddy fields, the “pregnant lady” who struggled to keep up with the rest and the flashlights that guided them to the safety of a San Ysidro hotel.

Isaac’s father, noting that his son was born in the United States, shook his head and said: “Imagine that. A U.S. citizen having to cross back into his own country through the hills!

“We’ll never have to go through that again,” he said.