Fraud Rife in Farm Worker Amnesty Papers, INS Says

As thousands of illegal immigrants rush to meet a midnight amnesty deadline for farm workers tonight, officials say that many applicants have resorted to fraud in desperate attempts to remain in this country.

Over the last 18 months, more than 1 million immigrants have applied for the farm-worker amnesty--more than twice as many as expected. Under a special provision of the 1986 immigration law, aliens who can show they worked at least 90 days in agriculture during the 12 months prior to May 1, 1986, are eligible.

In recent weeks, an alarming 70% of applications filed in the Western states have been recommended for denial. Although it appears that many will ultimately be approved, immigration officials say that the final denial rate may be as high as 50%.

The immigration law was aimed at controlling illegal immigration by providing amnesty to aliens already here and establishing penalties against employers who hire illegal workers. About 1.7 million immigrants applied for the general amnesty program that ended in May--less than had been forecast.

For many illegal immigrants, such as Marcia Vasquez, 28, the amnesty program for farm workers is the last hope for keeping their jobs and gaining legal U.S. residence. Vasquez, stylishly dressed in a black and white suit, nervously tapped her fingers as she waited recently at the East Los Angeles immigration office to apply.

When Vasquez and her husband first crossed illegally into the United States more than three years ago, they joined relatives in Stanislaus County and picked peaches, almonds and grapes, Vazquez recalled. But they did not stay long.

“We were urban people,” said Vasquez, a native of Mexico City who had begun studying for a degree in accounting before she left Mexico. “The fields were hard to get used to.”

Indeed, the law does not require that applicants do agricultural work in the future, and many say they now live in the city and have no intention of returning to the fields.

More than half of the applications filed in what is formally called the Special Agricultural Workers Program have come from California, followed by Florida with about 10% and Texas with about 8%. Significant numbers have also been filed in the Northwest, Arizona and New York.

Immigration officials fault the program’s relaxed eligibility standards, set by Congress, for what they say has been widespread fraud almost from its inception. A brisk sale in fraudulent documents has generated applications from immigrants who never worked in agriculture. Unscrupulous immigration consultants, farmers and labor contractors have exploited a desperate situation by selling bogus employment letters and affidavits, authorities said.

While acknowledging that some fraud exists, immigrants advocates charge, on the other hand, that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has overreacted and made it unfairly difficult for legitimate applicants to qualify. Several lawsuits have been filed across the country challenging the agency’s implemention of the law, particularly the amount of proof it demands from applicants.

Growers, meanwhile, have one overriding concern: will the program produce enough legal workers to ensure an adequate supply of labor? As an insurance policy against a labor shortage, growers lobbied for a “replenishment” feature in the new law, allowing them to import temporary workers if the government should determine that amnesty fell short.

Although encouraged by the large number of amnesty applicants, farmers are nevertheless uncertain about how many of them have left agriculture and how many more may also leave once they gain legal residency.

‘Wait and See’

“We’ll have to wait and see,” said Roy Gabriel, manager of the Alien Legalization for Agriculture program financed by several growers organizations, including the California Farm Bureau Federation and the Western Growers Assn.

The growers are also watching to see how the government enforces the law’s sanctions against those farm employers who hire illegal aliens. The INS will begin full enforcement Dec. 1.

The United Farm Workers union and immigrants advocates oppose the replenishment program, charging that it is a ruse by powerful agricultural interests to keep farm wages down by maintaining an oversupply of labor.

“The grower community doesn’t want a free work force able to stand up for its rights . . . and (demand) decent wages and living conditions,” said Mary Lopez, director of the United Farm Workers’ social service centers program. The statewide centers have helped several thousand farm workers file their amnesty applications.

The main concern of immigrants’ advocates is that the amnesty provision be applied generously, so that all who are eligible can qualify. They say that the INS, which opposed the agricultural amnesty provisions from the start, has been more concerned with curbing fraud than with helping legitimate applicants through the process.

A lawsuit filed in Florida last summer challenged the denial of thousands of amnesty applications there. Many applicants were denied because they had nothing other than their own statements and an employer’s affidavit to substantiate their claims, said William Sanchez, an attorney with the Haitian Refugee Center, which filed the suit.

A federal judge in Miami, however, ruled that such bare documentation is sufficient to meet the law’s required standard of proof. And, once that is met, the burden then shifts to the government to prove the applicant wrong.

“The judge ruled we had to review every application we had denied and give specific reasons for the denial,” added INS spokesman Duke Austin. As a result, many of the denials have been reversed.

Similar suits are pending in Texas and California.

“There may be some fraud in the program, but the way to deal with it is to single out the (perpetrators), not to apply a stricter standard of proof than was intended by Congress,” Sanchez said.

The Rojas brothers--Nicano, 21, and Florencio, 20--do not understand what all the fuss is about. The young men, who said they pick lemons, oranges and avocados near Camarillo, and spend the off-season working in construction in Los Angeles for the same employer, filed their applications recently in East Los Angeles.

“If people are cheating on their applications, it’s not because they’re expecting a gift . . , “ Florencio Rojas said. “People come (to the United States) to work, not for pleasure.”

Besides, Nicano Rojas said, “it’s the people who are taking the biggest risk by putting their own money on the line.” The basic fee for filing an application is $185.

Advocates argue that Congress knew that it was inviting fraud when it imposed the easier standards, aware of the difficulty that migrant farm workers would have in producing proof of employment.

“A lot of workers are picked up by the side of a road, paid in cash and dropped off at the end of the day. If you ask them, all they can tell you is that they worked for a foreman by the name of Raul or Jose,” said Lopez of the UFW.

Buy Fraudulent Papers

Some legitimate applicants, unable to meet even the laws’s minimal standards, have resorted to buying fraudulent employment letters to submit with their applications, advocates and immigration authorities agree.

But INS officials said they more commonly encounter applicants who are suspected because they cannot recall the geographic location of towns they claim to have worked in, the seasons they harvested certain crops, or the distances they commuted to work. Others’ applications are suspected because they contain affidavits from contractors or crew leaders suspected of illegally selling documents. Sometimes suspicion is aroused when an inordinate number of applications come in to a legalization office from immigrants not ordinarily associated with farm work, such as people from India and Pakistan, officials said.

Earlier this month, INS officials arrested three members of an alleged smuggling ring that used bogus passports to import illegal immigrants from the Philippines and then helped them file fraudulent amnesty applications here.

Training in the Field

“They even took the illegal aliens into the fields and showed them how to work the crops so they would sound knowledgeable at their INS interview for amnesty,” said INS Western Regional Commissioner Harold Ezell.

More than 100 indictments have been handed down against sellers of allegedly fraudulent document across the country, Austin said. And more are expected. In the Western Region alone, where investigators have netted about a dozen fraud convictions, an additional 168 cases are under investigation, said Peter Gordon, chief of examinations at the region’s central application processing center.

Fraud is further complicated when employers sell affidavits not only to their workers, but to immigrants who have never worked for them as well.

This worries Vasquez. “For all I know, my old boss went into the documents business,” she said.

Daughter’s Future

“My fear is that the INS is generalizing the accusation of fraud and that all of us will end up losing,” she added.

For Vasquez, amnesty means being able to keep her job as a restaurant cashier and enroll at a public college to resume work on her accounting degree. “It’s not just my own future that’s at stake, but my daughter’s future too,” said Vasquez, who is now divorced and raising a 5-year-old daughter on her own.

Fortunately, she said, she has the necessary documents to back up her application. But if she did not, she added, she would go out and buy some.