Fraud Charged as Disputed Amnesty Program Closes

Registration for a controversial amnesty program for farm workers living illegally in the United States ended Thursday amid charges of widespread fraud and bureaucratic mismanagement.

An estimated 450,000 farm workers--about half in California--mailed registration forms under the replenishment agricultural workers (RAW) program, a component of the landmark Immigration Reform Act of 1986. But critics and some officials say it is so easy to obtain fake documentation that as many as one-fifth to one-third of the applications may be fraudulent.

Moreover, the program has been mired in delay, and it is now unclear whether any of the applicants--fraudulent or not--will be granted amnesty within the next year.

Applicants under this section of the law only become eligible for amnesty if federal officials declare a shortage of agricultural workers. A decision by the U.S. Labor and Agriculture departments on the shortage issue was due Oct. 1 but has been delayed.

The delay has prompted complaints from immigrant rights advocates.

“It’s so flawed that it’s ridiculous,” complained attorney Bruce Goldstein, of the Washington-based Farmworkers Justice Fund.

“The people out there are just plain confused,” added Armando Garcia, a staffer with El Concilio del Condado de Ventura in Oxnard.

RAW and a companion agricultural amnesty plan, the special agricultural workers (SAW) program, were last-minute additions to the amnesty legislation at the insistence of agribusiness interests in California and Texas. They were aimed at protecting illegal aliens already working in the fields and to ensure against labor shortages.

The agriculture programs differ significantly from the general amnesty program, in which aliens who can prove at least five years of illegal U.S. residence can apply for U.S. citizenship.

An estimated 1.7 million signed up for the general amnesty program’s initial phase, with an estimated 60% of the aliens living in California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii and the Pacific island of Guam. The Immigration and Naturalization Service said about 63% of those who originally signed up have completed the second-phase requirements of courses in U.S. history and English.

Under the SAW program, applicants had to show that they had done 90 days of farm work between May 1, 1985, and May 1, 1986, in order to be eligible for amnesty. RAW applicants only have to prove that they had done 20 days of farm work in a consecutive 12-month period between May 1, 1985, and Nov. 30, 1988.

An estimated 1.3 million people registered for the SAW program, prompting William S. King Jr., head of the INS amnesty program in the West, to issue statements of satisfaction at the agency’s efforts to encourage registrants.

Critics, however, have charged that both agriculture programs are susceptible to fraud. There have been scattered arrests of labor contractors who allegedly supplied phony documents to illegal immigrants.

In one case in the Imperial Valley, an El Centro farm labor contractor was sentenced earlier this year to 18 months in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to supplying about 1,000 false amnesty affidavits to aliens for as much as $1,300 each in 1988 and 1989.

Immigration experts said both agricultural amnesty programs are susceptible to fraud because of the few number of farm workdays required and the availability of phony documents, such as Social Security cards and the so-called “green cards” authorizing legal U.S. residence.

“I can produce some pretty nice stuff (fake documents) on my laser printer,” said UC Berkeley professor Howard R. Rosenberg, a specialist in agricultural labor management who has closely monitored the agricultural amnesty programs.

“We have suspected fraud for some time, but saying more than half of the SAW applications are fraudulent is a bit high,” Rosenberg said. “I’d say the upper limit is more like 400,000.”

In the now-ending RAW program, Rosenberg suggested that fraud may only affect 15% to 20% of the 450,000 applications.

INS officials talked openly in the past about widespread fraud tainting a majority of applications in RAW and the companion SAW program, suggesting that as many as one-third of the applications might be tainted. But due to a lack of personnel, INS officials say they have no hard data to back up previous fears and now back away from such predictions.

“There’s always going to be some people who won’t play by the rules,” said Ben Davidian, INS western regional commissioner. “But how much fraud is there? I just don’t have the research on that.”

King, the INS point man on amnesty in the West, pointed out that the current approval rate of 95% of the applicants under the general amnesty and SAW programs should fall about 10 percentage points.

“I think the approval rate will drop to about 85% as we reject applications for various reasons,” King said. “What I’m really happy about is the number of folks who have come forward and applied under all phases of amnesty.”

Meanwhile, Labor Department and Agriculture Department officials blame the delay in determining whether there is a labor shortage on legal technicalities of the procedure for selecting eligible candidates for amnesty.

When they finally make the declaration--expected by Christmas--most experts in the immigration field and even within the INS expect them to declare no shortage.

“I don’t know how they can say anything else, particularly since they have never agreed with us that there is a shortage,” said Harry Kubo, president of the 1,400-member Nisei Farmers League in Fresno.

The sentiments expressed by Kubo, who farms about 100 acres in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley, typify the feelings of many of the nation’s growers, who insist that chronic shortages of labor do exist, despite findings to the contrary by public agencies such as the state Employment Development Department.

“Unfortunately, most of the bureaucrat economists charged with surveying the labor situation are not fully aware of what actually exists in the fields,” said Kubo, who contends that frequent shortages require as many as 7,000 workers be assigned to help out short-handed raisin growers in Fresno and strawberry farmers near Santa Maria.

“The shortage may be only for 30 days for harvesting, but that’s an entire season to a raisin grower,” Kubo said.

UC Berkeley’s Rosenberg and other experts acknowledge the existence of temporary labor shortages but point out that state officials declared no shortage in California’s $16-billion-a-year agricultural industry this year. The findings were based on monthly reports from each of the state’s 58 counties and other statistical studies.

“There was also no shortage found for 1988,” said Rosenberg, who estimates that 400,000 farm workers are employed during late-summer harvests in California, the busiest time in the agricultural calendar.

In the event no labor shortage is declared for 1989, INS officials said RAW applicants would remain in the agency’s files in case a shortage is declared next year. Immigration agents are prevented from moving against the applicants as deportable aliens because of confidentiality provisions written into the Immigration Reform Act.

That does not, however, preclude an applicant from being deported for unrelated reasons, INS officials said.

For one farm worker, however, the problems linked to the RAW program were simply defined after he visited an immigrants rights office in Oxnard about two weeks ago to determine his eligibility.

Although he worked for extended periods of time in the fields throughout Southern California between 1985 and 1988, the man, a native of the Mexican state of Michoacan, had no paper work to prove it.

He thought over his dilemma: Should he forgo the program or use fraudulent documents to apply?

“What are you worried about?” a group of friends told him later in a nearby bar. “We all got fake papers. Everybody’s doing it. Is everybody going to get caught? No way.”

His decision, after some more thought, was easy enough:

“If they (federal authorities) were so stupid to make it so easy to cheat, then I guess I’m stupid enough to take advantage of it. And if nobody gets amnesty from it, well then, what’s the hurt. . . ?”