ORANGE COUNTY VOICES IMMIGRATION : Reform Law Was Doomed, Denounced From the Start

In Orange County, we care a great deal whether the Immigration Reform Act of 1986 succeeds or fails. It affects us to the core no matter which side of the fence we’re on. Those of us who feel privileged to be Anglo gentry also feel overrun by people who don’t speak our language, don’t understand our ways, subvert our welfare system, crowd us out of neighborhoods and force our children into private schools.

Or we feel the Latino and Asian presence enriches our culture, furnishes needed labor at bargain prices, and that the Lamp of Liberty still shines in all directions. These motives, high-flown or low-flown, make us care deeply whether immigrants coming from their current directions are let in or kept out. What we forget is that there are 170 million other Americans who don’t care at all.

That is why the Immigration Reform Act was badly drawn and carelessly passed. It only affects five states to any serious degree: California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois. Only portions of those states at that: Southern California, coastal Texas, Miami, New York City and Chicago. Other states are affected, but their populations are minor. Other localities may feel set upon, but they are often places where the sight of any foreigner occasions gossip.

When Congress passes a law 45 states don’t care about and applies it to all 50, you may reasonably expect the law to have crippling defects. The way the Immigration Reform Act was put together guaranteed this.

The body of the bill was assembled by a congressman from Kentucky, which has practically no immigration experience, and by a senator from Wyoming, which has even less. Both landed on immigration subcommittees because they were junior at the time and not very well thought of. (Remoteness from the problem seems to be a qualification for architects of immigration law; the McCarran Act was named for a senator from Nevada.) The Simpson-Mazzoli bill failed to pass several sessions, then was smoothed over for final acceptance by Rep. Peter Rodino of New York. He merely put icing on a moldy cake.

The act opened an amnesty window to aliens who had successfully avoided deportation for at least six years. Any applicant who had been legal any part of that time was disqualified. In penalizing legality and rewarding illegality, the act became a novelty in the annals of law.

The act blandly ordered every employer in the United States to monitor his workers’ nationalities and to open his books to the government to prove that he had. This made it the most intrusive legislation since the income tax enabling act. It would have caused a march on Washington if it affected employers nationally, which it doesn’t, or if it were evenly enforced, which it isn’t.

Congress assured destruction of the act by dropping it in he lap of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS is good at defending the act but has neither the capacity nor training to administer it. INS was given two months to create regulations governing amnesty, to be applied in six months. They weren’t ready in two months, or six months, were being revised through all of the amnesty year--either by INS or the courts--and they are still being changed.

So the million-odd amnesty applicants have not been treated equally, and the million-odd aliens who didn’t apply can hardly be blamed for distrusting an agency that had always been their sworn enemy. Nor was the system fair to INS; it made no sense to ask a bunch of border cops to run the Welcome Wagon for a year and slam it shut again.

More ridiculous was to expect INS to superintend the schooling of immigrants in the second stage of the amnesty process, forcing it to devise standards in history, language and civics, and to conduct final examinations that affect the life and liberty of the taker.

What “outreach” efforts took place, either by INS or community assistance groups, missed the Asian population almost entirely. The importance of this to Orange County could only be missed by someone who drives along Bolsa Avenue with his eyes closed.

People with eyes open may perceive that the 1986 act, known formally as the Immigration Reform and Control Act, satisfies no one in favor of reform or control.

Those concerned with civil rights point to the splitting of immigrant families, the gathering of Central American refugees into concentration camps along the border, foreign-looking job seekers being discriminated against or cheated of wages, and a shadow population of Orange County workers forbidden to work who must skirt the law or starve.

Those who hoped the act would cause unwanted neighbors to vanish are disappointed worst of all. That the act has discouraged the inflow of aliens is a matter of serious doubt. The tens of thousands of aliens denied amnesty in the county have not gone back where they came from; they were afraid to, or couldn’t afford to, or have set down roots and have borne children who are now American citizens. The persistence of day laborers has led such places as Orange and Costa Mesa to adopt cattle-prodding immigration policies of their own.

Westminster, which conceived itself as an English cathedral town, is now a prosperous Asian city. So is much of Garden Grove, and as the nations of the Pacific Rim loosen their emigration policies, the 1st Supervisorial District is already magnetizing a fresh wave of newcomers, mostly illegal.

Even if counting is spotty, the 1990 Census will show Santa Ana with a population that is 54% Latino, and the city still being governed like a prairie town now has a population-density equal to that of Pittsburgh.

So controllers have no more reason than reformers to be pleased with the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Is no one happy with it? Oh, yeah, the little man who sells counterfeit green cards outside the Bristol Street post office.