New Law Could End Long Wait for Immigrants

Felipe Gomez, a native of Mexico who has lived in Fullerton and worked for the same nursery 11 years, became a legal resident of this country last year. His three children were born here, so they are U.S. citizens.

But Felipe’s wife did not qualify for amnesty. So she has placed her name on the long list of foreigners seeking legal residency in this country. Because the number of applicants for visas far outpaces the legal ceiling imposed by Congress, Rosalva Gomez had faced a 10-year wait for that piece of paper saying she can stay here permanently.

But the most comprehensive reform of U.S. immigration laws in 25 years, passed by Congress Saturday night by a vote of 264 to 118, could dramatically reduce the long wait for Rosalva Gomez and thousands of others like her waiting to become legal residents or citizens.

The landmark measure would expand the number of people allowed to enter the United States by an estimated 40% and change the mix of skills and ethnic backgrounds.

When the law goes into effect in 1992, it will more than double the number of immigrants allowed entry because of their job skills, grant temporary “safe haven” to Salvadoran refugees and open the borders to tens of thousands of immigrants from Ireland and other nations who have been largely excluded under current laws.

It also wipes from the statute books decades-old restrictions barring entry to people on the basis of their beliefs or homosexuality. President Bush has indicated he will sign the bill.

For California, which has about 54% of the nation’s immigrants in the amnesty program, it would mean the legalization of many people who are already here illegally, and it could mean a chance for employers who have trouble attracting workers to import more people from overseas.

“This is a very smart bill,” said Maria Hsiu, a co-chair of the Pacific Leadership Council, a Los Angeles-based national lobbying group of Asian business leaders and professionals. “Everybody is very happy.”

For two years, she said, a number of groups representing immigrants and business leaders have been in Washington buttonholing congressional representatives to hammer out a compromise on the complex issue.

“We worked real, real hard,” Hsiu said. “We went back to Washington once a month and walked from office to office to lobby this bill.”

About 500 members of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a Latino civil rights group, traveled from California, Illinois, Texas and New York to Washington this summer, said Nativo Lopez, executive director of the Orange County chapter.

“We’ve watched this very carefully for two years,” she said. “And we’re now watching very closely the negotiations in the conference committee.”

The new law would remove prohibitions on some immigrants and would open the nation to many new immigrants who are skilled workers and managers. It would permit a total of 700,000 immigrants annually in 1992, 1993 and 1994, up from the current 500,000, and 675,000 a year thereafter.

While it is difficult to quantify what that would mean for Orange County, which had the second highest number of amnesty applicants in California after Los Angeles, immigrant rights experts and lawyers who specialize in the field say the changes would be significant.

The new mix of immigrants allowed to enter the country would include more skilled workers such as scientists and engineers, who are expected to be in short supply in the next decade.

Jim David Acoba, an immigration lawyer in Buena Park, said that Orange County, with its ever-expanding economy, would gain because employers would face a more streamlined process for importing much-needed technical workers such as those in the medical field, computer engineering and aircraft industries.

He also said that as more companies that do business abroad locate here, there is a need for foreign professionals, such as lawyers, who could help the parent company understand the ways of doing business in a country with different laws and culture.

“There are a lot of businesses here that are extremely concerned about what is going to happen because, frankly, there are a lot of skills that we need here that we don’t have workers for,” said Acoba, who is also chairman of the immigration section of the Orange County Bar Assn.

Of the 700,000 people allowed to enter in the first year, 465,000 would be relatives of American citizens and permanent resident aliens; 140,000 would be skilled workers or their close family members--up 80,000 from the current levels; 40,000 would be residents of nations that have been allowed relatively few immigrants in recent years; and 55,000 would be spouses and children of aliens who gained legal status under the last major immigration reform law--the amnesty bill--in 1986.

The bill provides more generous quotas for immigrants from most countries, but it especially would open the nation’s doors wider to Europeans, some Africans and other foreigners.

The proposed change in the law would benefit a Filipino-born client of Acoba, who married her childhood sweetheart just before she became a U.S. citizen. She and her husband, who did not yet have his U.S. citizenship, adopted a daughter in the Philippines. But because the daughter had not lived with the mother the two years required by current immigration law for adopted children and the father’s citizenship was also pending, they could not bring the daughter to Orange County.

Her application for a visa was placed on a waiting list that is seven years long, Acoba said.

“If we now classify her as the child of a U.S. citizen under the proposed law, they should be able to apply and bring her over within about three months,” he said. “The effect is drastic.”

The new law would also benefit Claro and Tayde Rojas of Santa Ana, natives of Mexico. The husband came to Orange County in 1980 and works at a company that builds irrigation systems. His wife and two children joined him four years later.

He has obtained legal residency through the amnesty program, and two of their children born here since they arrived are also U.S. citizens. But Tayde Rojas and the other two children are not.

If the new law passes, they too would be able to gain legal residency in a matter of months, something that would enable her to travel back and forth to Mexico to visit her parents, who have never met her two youngest children, she said.

Claro Rojas, newly legalized himself, was among the group of delegates from the Orange County chapter of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional who traveled to Washington to lobby for the bill.

“We went from building to building to speak with senators and congressmen,” he said. “I thought it was very beautiful. We went to work for all the Latinos. I am very happy.

“I would say to myself, ‘Well, we are Mexican so they won’t want to listen to us,’ but they did. We would go once, and if they could not see us, we would ask what time we should come back. We would wake up at 5 in the morning to prepare for the meetings. Nativo told us, ‘Tomorrow when you see on television that they passed this bill, it will be because of you.”’

Lawyer Kathryn E. Terry, a board member of the Orange County Coalition for Immigrant Rights, said she is pleased that this proposal would clear the way for more employer-sanctioned immigration--something she said the 1986 amnesty bill discouraged. But the part of the proposed new law she likes the best, she said, is that it emphasizes unity of citizens and legal residents with their immediate family members.

“The reality is that in Orange County we still have a tremendous influx of illegal aliens, and not just Mexicans--that’s a misnomer,” she said.

“This kind of law deals more with the reality that they are already here, so let’s let them into our system and let them and us benefit from it,” she said. “This kind of immigration policy also announces to the world what our national values and goals are, that we have a commitment to family unity and a commitment to pluralism.”